The coffee ritual

Spirituality, for many people today, is commonly reduced to belief in a God, an energy, or a form of transcendence understood as an ultimate principle to which the subject adheres. But from a historical point of view, spirituality in Antiquity had a much broader scope. Confining it to a private and individual inner experience impoverishes a reality that for centuries took radically different forms.

Before being faith, the spiritual was rhythm. The Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, the Hebrew ruaj name breath, respiration, air in cyclical movement. They do not refer to a substance or a belief, but to a dynamism.

The Greeks spoke of the spirit of the universe by referring to the movement of the stars. In Neoplatonism, in fact, the soul (psyche), situated below the One and the Nous, was understood as the principle of autonomous movement in the cosmos. It is the soul that animates, sets things in circulation, and introduces time.

These conceptions did not refer to a mental content, but to a living circulation, something that passed through the body and bodies, and that organized time and times into recognizable sequences. That rhythm was not thought, it was performed. It took shape in repeated gestures, in divisions of the day, in actions that marked a before and an after. It is there that the spiritual found one of its most concrete forms: ritual.

The fact that the spiritual has become something strictly personal was not an abrupt process. With the arrival of modernity, from the Cartesian cogito and the centrality of the thinking self, through Pietism and its emphasis on individual experience, to Kant and the autonomy of moral consciousness, and later Romanticism with the primacy of immediate feeling, the spiritual progressively withdrew into psychological interiority, and ritual was displaced toward the magical or the merely religious.

Believing eclipsed doing, feeling eclipsed form. In that shift, an essential capacity was lost: in its ancient conception, the spiritual interrupted linear time without appealing to an external belief.

Today, that loss is lived as a concrete consequence. Both religious people and atheists inhabit a time saturated with doubt, uncertainty, performance, and forecasts. Life becomes a permanent management of the self in relation to an often aggressive environment. In this context, the spiritual and ritual, understood in their ancient sense, do not appear as elevation or consolation, but as an interruption of the everyday. A brief cut that explains nothing, but suspends the tyranny of usefulness.

As Mircea Eliade analyzed, ritual does not primarily serve to express beliefs, but to remove us from worldly time, that ordinary and linear flow in which everything is spent and nothing truly accumulates. Ancient ritual interrupted the everyday and made another temporal regime appear. It did not progress. It repeated itself cyclically. And in that repetition, time ceased to be an accumulation of tasks and became inhabitable.

What is it that ritual repeats? 

For Eliade, what is at stake is not an idea or a doctrine, but an original event narrated by a myth. The myth does not explain the world; it recounts how something was done for the first time. Ritual, then, does not represent that story or comment on it. It re-enacts it in the present.

That is why literal belief is secondary. What is decisive is that, when performing the rite, the subject does not remember the origin, but makes it present again. In doing so, the subject exits linear time and enters a qualitatively different time.

This function of ritual, however, has been obscured in our culture, where it is often confused with its interiorized version: prayer understood as obligation, sacrifice, or empty repetition. In common usage, these practices are transactional: a request addressed to a recipient while expecting something in return. Their structure remains instrumental.

Ritual, properly understood, works differently. It does not ask. It does not promise. It is not addressed to anyone. It is performed. Its power does not lie in what it means, but in what it does to time. It does not explain the world. It suspends it between two times.

It is from that suspension that this text emerges. Because there are things we do every day that are already movement, rhythm, repetition inscribed in the everyday. And that everyday, if lived with conscious attention, can become the architecture of a different time. A sequence that introduces a cut in the ordinary flow of the day: a recognizable threshold, a sustained gesture, and a clear closure. Its efficacy does not depend on faith, but on fidelity to form.

That cut does not occur in the head. It occurs in the body.

The ritualized everyday gesture activates bodily attention. It appears in the weight of the cup before drinking, in the heat migrating to the hands, in the aroma that precedes taste, in the sound of water when it reaches a boil, in the rhythm of brushing teeth. It is a simple materiality, banal but decisive. The body registers that moment as different because it is not subordinated to anything. The gesture does not accompany a task. It is the task.

With repetition, that gesture leaves a trace. Not a narrative memory or a remembered idea, but a bodily, rhythmic, sensory memory. The body learns that cut before it can be explained. The everyday turned into ritual thus sculpts an inhabitable time also in the memory of the body, a time that is not measured or evaluated, but recognized.

However, this attention to the body has a radically different purpose from that of many contemporary practices associated with the New Age. At this point, ritual distances itself from mindfulness. While the latter seeks to regulate experience, calm the mind, or manage discomfort, ritual does not aim at any psychological state. It may even feel strange or uncomfortable at first.

But that discomfort does not come from the persistence of everyday noise, but from the fact that ritual excludes it. By drawing a clear boundary, the rite separates. Within that space and that time, problems do not exist. Not because they have been solved, but because they have no place there. Ritual does not coexist with anxiety, haste, or debt. It leaves them outside.

Gestures build boundaries. By making a simple and repeated act the only task, the body touches the edge of its own finitude and of the time that passes through it. It does not take control over the flow of time. It separates from it. During the rite, time is not managed or optimized. It is left outside. It is there that the gesture opens onto a symbolic dimension.

But this is not a symbol in the classical sense, shared or codified. There is no universal sign here, no belief to interpret. The symbol emerges through repetition and attention. The cup of coffee or tea represents nothing external. It becomes charged with the meaning of the pause itself. It symbolizes itself as interruption. It becomes a physical anchor of that cut in the day.

We live analyzing and explaining, trying to grasp a reality that always exceeds us. That demand makes experience heavy, sometimes unbearable. Ritual inserted into the everyday introduces a crack. A minimal void. A margin where the logic of domination is suspended. Not to solve anything or to understand better, but to inhabit, for an instant, that limit.

This is not about formulating a doubt or thinking a slogan while pouring coffee or opening a window. It is about the gesture not closing in on itself. About including an opening.

When opening the window, one does not only ventilate. One acknowledges an outside that is not controlled. The air enters as it wishes. That acceptance is the unknown. It does not ask for an answer. It functions as a silent brake that prevents the act from turning into technique, into a wellness exercise, or into an optimized habit.

That is why ritualizing the everyday does not mean sacralizing it or embellishing it. It means carving out within the day a gesture that is good for nothing. Or more precisely, fully doing one single thing, and letting that thing consist in not doing another. For a few seconds nothing is evaluated, measured, or checked to see if it is working.

Coffee, tea, or brushing one’s teeth work precisely because they already happen every day. Ritual does not invent a new action. It reframes an existing one and removes it from the chain of usefulness. What turns it into a rite is not the drink or the act itself, but the frame of attention that surrounds it: the pause before the first sip, those seconds that suspend practical judgment. That frame is sustained by the senses. The weight of the cup fixes the pause. The heat in the palms slows the gesture. The sound of the first sip marks the threshold.

In ancient rites, the gesture reactivated a myth. Today, when there are no shared myths to recall, ritual does not refer back to a prior origin. It institutes one minimally each time. No narrated myth is needed. Something analogous nonetheless appears: an inaugural scene, a form that repeats, a time that does not progress. A myth in a structural sense, not a narrative one.

There lies the difference between ritual and routine. Routine is unconscious automatism. Ritual is conscious form. Not form as rigid protocol or ceremonial solemnity, but as integrity of the gesture. A minimal design of interruption. Without that deliberate form, there is no cut in time. Only continuity.

With repetition, the gesture becomes charged with history. It does not turn into a universal symbol, but into a private one. The body associates that movement with that cut. The cup, the window, the brief path become physical anchors of a learned interruption. They do not represent something. They sustain it.

For the everyday to become ritual, beyond the gesture itself, that support can hold an unknown: a phrase that opens, a remainder, an edge. Not a doubt to be answered nor a question to be worked through psychologically, but the limit of understanding. It is not reflection. It is openness. Something as simple as what is here?, or the act is me, without seeking an answer.

The unknown is not thought. It is left open to prevent the gesture from closing in on itself as mere habit.

This logic is not limited to the individual. A ritual without faith can also exist among several people. A shared meal without screens. A greeting repeated in the same way. A brief silence before starting a meeting. What binds the group is not thinking the same thing, but moving together. Bodily synchrony introduces a cut in social time. During those moments nothing is produced or decided. A place is occupied.

The same form allows us to think rituals for loss. Not to overcome it, but to delimit it. A repeated gesture to mark a failure, a renunciation, a farewell. Ritual does not close the wound or explain it. It gives it an edge. It prevents pain from spreading without form across all time. It does not heal. It contains.

That is why these gestures work best when they are everyday ones. Not because of moral discipline, but because the time they interrupt is daily time. They introduce a constant modulation, like breathing.

But constancy must not become tyrannical. A healthy ritual allows failure and is never, not even among the most experienced practitioners, performed in exactly the same way. That variation does not impoverish the gesture. It nourishes it. It can shift in time. It can be imperfect. If it does not allow error, it ceases to be a space of freedom and becomes an obsessive armor.

Ritual becomes sick when it no longer sustains an unknown, but tries to cover it up. When not doing it produces guilt, fear, or the feeling that the day is lost. At that point it no longer interrupts linear time. It reinforces it.

A healthy ritual neither demands nor promises protection. It does not fully reassure. It always leaves a remainder unresolved, without mortification. In a life oriented toward uninterrupted production, introducing gestures that are good for nothing is a sober form of resistance. It is neither heroic nor mystical. It is simply a way of recovering time without pretending to dominate it.

---

The coffee ritual

I get up almost always at the same time.
Not because I decided it.
The body knows it before I do.

I go to the bathroom.
Then I stand in front of the stove,
still without words.

I take yesterday’s moka pot.
It is dirty.
I open it slowly, as if it could wake up.
Inside sleeps the grounds from the previous coffee.
I throw them away.
I wash it.
The water runs and carries them off.

I fill the container up to the mark.
I place the already washed filter.
It makes a small metallic sound,
as if saying: here I am.

I look for the coffee.
Two exact spoonfuls.
No more, no less.
I level them carefully.
I close the moka pot.
I put it on the flame.
I turn on the stove.

I say a sentence out loud.
It is not a request.
It is not a promise.
It does not expect an answer.
Today it says: "I sustain the act, not the image".

I listen to the flame.
I look out the window.
The sky never repeats itself.
Today it is gray, white,
with a bit of blue that does not commit.

The moka pot begins to speak.
The coffee rises, boiling.
It calls me.

I turn off the flame.
I pour the coffee.
The steam twists in the air,
the smell of morning coils with it
and rises,
and comes apart,
and disappears.

I sit in the kitchen.
I drink the coffee slowly.
Each sip takes its place.
I do not think.
I do not project.
I do not remember.

A cat arrives.
Then the other one.
They ask for food.
I give them a snack.
I return to my cup.

I drink the last sip.
I add nothing else.
I say, almost without a voice:
"now the day can begin".

:.