Here’s a fact that stopped us in our tracks recently: the oldest ceremonial structure ever found, a 12,000-year-old site in Turkey called Göbekli Tepe, predates farming, writing, even permanent settlement. Hunter-gatherers built it before they built homes.
That’s a slightly strange detail when you think about it.
The story we usually tell about civilisation is fairly straightforward. First came farming. Then people settled down. Then they built communities, developed rituals, religion, monuments and all the other things that come with staying in one place.
Göbekli Tepe complicates that story.
Some archaeologists think it may have happened the other way round. That gathering together for ritual may actually have been part of what encouraged people to settle down in the first place.
In other words, perhaps we didn’t build permanent homes and then start creating rituals.
Perhaps the rituals came first.
We read a great piece on the psychology of ritual this week by anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, and it explained something we’d been circling for a while without quite naming it.
A few of the bits that stuck with us:
Our brains hate uncertainty. Structure and repetition, a ritual we know the shape of genuinely calms the nervous system, no matter how “silly” the ritual looks from the outside.
There’s something reassuring about knowing what comes next. Light the candle, say the words, cut the cake, blow out the candles, throw the coin.
The action itself doesn’t necessarily have to make logical sense. What seems to matter is that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. A small piece of order in a world that often feels anything but orderly.
And rituals seem to work particularly well when we do them together.
When people perform rituals together, their heart rates can start to synchronise. That’s not a metaphor, it’s been measured. There’s something about moving through the same deliberate sequence at the same time that makes us feel connected.
It’s part of why a wedding or a shared meal feels different from simply standing in the same room as someone.
Ritual is also how we mark the moments that matter.
Weddings. Graduations. Birthdays. Funerals. Sunday roasts.
Strip away the ceremony and the important thing may still technically have happened, but somehow the moment can feel strangely hollow.
The ritual signals, this matters, be present.
None of this is really about incense or chanting, or whether you consider yourself a particularly ritualistic person.
It’s about doing something deliberate, together, that your brain recognises as meaningful.
Perhaps that’s why we find ourselves drawn to little rituals when we step away from everyday life, when we’re somewhere quiet, removed from the usual noise.
That desire for quiet order is at the heart of what we’ve been building at Lilypod.
The Wishing Bowl
Beside the bed in each pod there’s a small carved wooden bowl. Inside, three polished stones and a little card:
These are your wishing stones. Pick one up, make a wish, throw it into the lake.
People have been doing some version of this forever. Wells, fountains, coins in water, stones thrown into rivers.
And perhaps it’s not really about whether the wish comes true.
There’s something in us that seems to need a physical way to hold a thought, a hope, an intention and then let it go.
The stone gives you something to actually hold onto before you release it.
The act of throwing and release matters.
The Fire Journal
This one goes a little deeper.
You’re invited to sit for a moment and just notice what’s happening in your body. Then you write down whatever surfaces. It doesn’t have to be heavy. It doesn’t have to be anything in particular.
There is something surprisingly powerful about putting a feeling into words.
Something that has been circling around in your head can feel different once you see it written down in front of you. It becomes something you can look at, rather than something you are simply carrying.
You don’t have to solve it. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t even have to keep it.
Once it’s down on paper, you tear the page out and burn it, either in the fire pit or the wood burner.
And that’s the part we really like.
The thought that was invisible becomes physical. You have given it a shape, put it somewhere outside yourself, and then watched it disappear.
It’s a small ceremony for letting something go.
Maybe that’s why rituals can matter.
They give shape to things that are otherwise difficult to express. They create a little pause between feeling something and moving on from it.
We didn’t invent any of this. Long before we built homes to live in, we built rituals to remind ourselves of who we are.
So we made you a quiet corner of the world. A fire to burn what you need to leave behind, water to hold your wishes, and space to simply be.
Hope to see you at the Lake, with warmth,
Kyle & Jenny
Lilypod, Devon