Michael: What if the most meaningful traditions in your life aren't the ones you inherit, but the ones you invent in your own backyard? What if celebrating a flower blooming on a tree could feel more sacred than a thousand-year-old holiday? That's the provocative idea we're exploring today. Kevin: That feels a little rebellious, like you're saying we can just make up our own holidays. I'm intrigued. It sounds both liberating and maybe a little… empty? Like, does it have the same weight? Michael: That’s the exact tension at the heart of the book we're diving into: For Small Creatures Such as We by Sasha Sagan. And you can't talk about this book without mentioning her background. Sasha Sagan is the daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan and writer-producer Ann Druyan. Kevin: Wow. So she grew up in a home that was essentially a temple to science and skepticism. The high priest and priestess of "show me the evidence." Michael: Precisely. So for her to write a book about the power of ritual is fascinating. It’s not a rejection of her upbringing, but an extension of it. The book has been widely acclaimed, really seen as a balm for a growing number of people who feel spiritually homeless—they don't subscribe to a religion, but still crave that sense of wonder and community. Kevin: I get that. You leave the structure of organized religion, but you still have to mark births, and weddings, and deaths. You still see the seasons change. What do you do with all that? Michael: Exactly. And her journey to answer that starts with this deep, personal paradox, rooted in her own family's history of questioning.

Michael: The book is filled with these beautiful, multi-generational stories. One of the most powerful is about her grandfather, Harry. He was the first in his devout Orthodox Jewish family to go to college in the 1930s. He's studying, he's learning, and he starts to feel his faith slipping away. Kevin: Oh, that's a classic, painful story. The son who breaks the chain. I can just imagine the confrontation with his father. Michael: Right. And he's dreading it. He takes the train home to Queens, rehearsing the speech in his head. He walks in and finds his father, Benjamin, wrapped in his prayer shawl, davening—deep in prayer. The most intimidating moment possible. Kevin: My stomach is in knots just thinking about it. Michael: Harry takes a deep breath and just says it. He tells his father he no longer believes in God. He won't keep kosher, he won't pray, he won't go to shul anymore. He's breaking with generations of tradition. And he waits for the explosion. Kevin: And? Michael: His father, Benjamin, looks up from his prayers, not with anger, but with a smile. And he says the line that becomes a cornerstone of the whole book: "The only sin would be to pretend." Kevin: Whoa. That is… not what I expected at all. That’s an incredible act of love. Michael: It's everything. It reframes the entire project of the book. This isn't about a rebellious rejection of the past. It's about a deep, inherited commitment to authenticity. Her family’s highest value wasn't tradition for tradition's sake; it was truth. Kevin: Okay, I see. So the book isn't arguing against religion, it's arguing for whatever is genuinely true for you. And for her, what's true is science, but that doesn't mean you have to live in a cold, sterile world devoid of celebration. Michael: Exactly. She talks about this longing she had, this feeling that her religious friends had this built-in scaffolding for life. They had rituals for grief, for joy, for community. And she felt this absence. She quotes her father, who used to say, "It’s dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true." But she flips it, asking, what do you do when you want the comfort of those things, but can't accept the dogma? Kevin: That’s a question a lot of people are asking. They miss the Christmas carols but don't believe in the virgin birth. They love the idea of a Seder but are atheists. So where do you find that 'sacred' feeling if not from a divine source? Michael: Well, that's where it gets really creative. She argues you find it in the provable. In the magnificent, awe-inspiring truths of the natural world and in the deep, personal truths of your own life. You don't have to look up to the heavens; you can look at a tree, or at your family's history. Kevin: It’s like she’s trying to build a new kind of spirituality from the ground up, using science and personal history as the bricks. Michael: That’s a perfect way to put it. She tells another story about her great-grandparents, Tillie and Benjamin—the same Benjamin from the prayer story. They were starving immigrants, and their daily ritual was to share a single, day-old loaf of bread. Each would offer it to the other, insisting they weren't hungry, a tiny, repeated act of selfless love. For her, that story, that memory, is as sacred as any scripture. Kevin: Because it’s a true story of love and sacrifice. It’s a family myth, in the best sense of the word. It provides a moral compass. Michael: Yes! And that’s the foundation. Once you realize you can find the sacred in your own life and in the world around you, you get this permission slip to start building.

Michael: And that leads us to the 'how' of the book, which is this idea of hacking, remixing, and inventing rituals. She points out that most ancient traditions are already remixes. Kevin: What do you mean? Michael: Well, she notes that many Christmas traditions—the tree, the gift-giving, the timing in late December—are borrowed from pagan winter solstice festivals. The early church was smart; it basically "squatted" on existing holidays, knowing it was easier to co-opt a good party than to cancel it. Kevin: Right, it’s like putting new lyrics to a song everyone already knows the tune to. So she's saying, we can do that too? Michael: Exactly. We can do it for ourselves. Her most charming example is a tradition her mother, Ann Druyan, invented when she was a child: "Blossom Day." Kevin: Blossom Day? Okay, you have my attention. Michael: They lived in upstate New York, where winters are long and brutal. Every spring, they would watch this one dogwood tree outside their dining room window. The day the very first blossom opened, that was Blossom Day. It was a holiday. They’d have a tea party, exchange small gifts, and just celebrate the return of life. Kevin: I love that. It’s so simple, but it’s tied to a real, observable event. The equinox is an astronomical fact. The flower opening is a biological fact. It’s a holiday grounded in reality. Michael: It’s grounded in reality, and it’s personal. It’s their special thing. It marks time, it honors nature, and it creates a cherished memory. It checks all the boxes of a meaningful ritual, without any supernatural claims. Kevin: But does that kind of small, personal ritual have the power to, say, build a community? It feels very insular. Michael: That’s a great question, and she answers it with one of the most incredible stories in the book. It takes us to a village in Rajasthan, India, called Piplantri. For a long time, the birth of a daughter was seen as a financial burden. Kevin: A story we've heard from many parts of the world, sadly. Michael: Yes. But then the village leader, whose own young daughter had died, wanted to change things. So he started a new tradition. Every time a girl was born in the village, the community would come together and plant 111 trees in her honor. Kevin: One hundred and eleven trees? That’s a lot of trees. Michael: A huge number. And the community also contributes to a fund for the girl's education, and the parents sign a legal affidavit promising she won't be married off before she's of age and that they'll send her to school. But here’s where the ritual created unexpected magic. Kevin: Go on. Michael: To protect the young saplings from termites, they planted aloe vera all around them. Soon, they had a massive, thriving crop of aloe vera. The women of the village learned to process it, to make juices and gels. It became a business. The village grew prosperous. Kevin: Wait, so this ritual, born from grief and a desire to honor girls, ended up creating an economic engine that empowered the whole community, especially the women? Michael: Exactly. It completely transformed the village's ecology, its economy, and its culture. The birth of a daughter went from being a perceived burden to a celebrated event that brought literal life and prosperity to everyone. Kevin: Okay, that's staggering. That’s not just a navel-gazing, 'let's have a tea party' idea. That is ritual as a tool for profound, real-world, positive change. It’s social engineering through celebration. Michael: And it proves the point. A ritual doesn't need ancient roots to have immense power. It just needs to resonate with a community's values and be tied to something real and meaningful—in this case, the life of a child and the growth of a tree. Kevin: So we have rituals for joy, for community, for marking the seasons. But what about the hard stuff? The grief, the loss. That's where many people feel they need the old, established frameworks of religion. How does a secular approach handle the vastness of death?

Michael: That is the most profound and moving part of the book. Sagan doesn't shy away from it at all. In fact, she leans right into it. The title of the book, For Small Creatures Such as We, comes from a line her parents wrote for the novel Contact: "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love." Kevin: A beautiful line. But how do you make that an action? How do you make it a ritual? Michael: She shows us through another deeply personal story. She takes us to the twenty-first anniversary of her father's death. She, her husband Jon, and their infant daughter, Helena, go to the family cemetery in Ithaca. Kevin: Taking a new baby to a cemetery. That's a powerful image. Michael: It's incredibly poignant. She describes the setting, this hill overlooking the town. She talks about how her family, being secular Jews, has a plot just outside the consecrated ground. And she performs a simple, ancient Jewish ritual: she gathers small stones to place on the graves of her loved ones. One for her father, one for each of her grandparents. Kevin: A repurposed ritual. She's not doing it because of a religious commandment, but because it’s a physical act of remembrance. Michael: Exactly. It's a tangible way to say, "I was here. I remember you." As she's there, her baby daughter Helena starts to cry. And in that moment, Sagan has this profound realization. She writes, "Every loss you withstand in your life reopens all the others. Every goodbye is every goodbye." Helena's cry, this new life's discomfort, connects her back to the pain of losing her father, and all the losses in between. Kevin: That lands so powerfully. The ritual—placing the stone—is the physical act of love that makes the vastness of death... bearable. It’s not about a belief in an afterlife. It’s about memory and connection, right here, right now. Michael: It's about acknowledging the truth of the situation. Death is real. The loss is immense. But so is the love. So is the continuity of life, which she's literally holding in her arms. The ritual doesn't deny the darkness; it allows you to stand within it, hold a small light, and feel connected to the people you love, living and dead. Kevin: It reminds me of the story she tells about visiting the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, the one decorated with the bones of monks. With the sign that says, "What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be." It's terrifying, but it's also a radical acceptance of reality. Michael: A radical acceptance. And her argument is that facing that reality, that terror, is what makes the joyful parts of life so much sweeter. She says, "I don’t believe ignorance is bliss. I think understanding is bliss, but, to get to the joyful part, sometimes you have to face the terror head-on." The rituals are the tools that help us do that.

Michael: Ultimately, Sasha Sagan's book is a powerful permission slip. It gives us permission to seek wonder in the scientific explanation of a rainbow, to find the sacred in the changing of the seasons, and to build our own cathedrals of meaning out of the simple, beautiful materials of our own lives and the natural world. Kevin: It really is. It’s not about throwing everything away. It’s about being a discerning curator of meaning. You can keep the parts of old traditions that still resonate—like placing a stone on a grave—and you can invent new ones that are true to your own life, like a Blossom Day. Michael: It’s a call to be an active participant in the creation of your own culture, rather than just a passive inheritor of it. Kevin: And it makes you look around and ask, 'What are the small, recurring moments in my own life that are already rituals, and how can I make them more intentional?' Maybe it's the weekly challah run she mentions her mom taking her on, or the way she and her husband sing the alphabet song, or just the simple act of making coffee for someone you love every morning. Michael: Those small, repeated acts of love and attention are the building blocks. They are the ways we make the vastness bearable. Kevin: It's a beautiful and deeply hopeful message. And it feels especially necessary right now, for so many people who are trying to figure out how to live a meaningful life on their own terms. Michael: It is. And it’s a question that extends to all of us, regardless of our beliefs. We’d love to hear from our listeners. What are some of the secular rituals you practice? What traditions have you invented for yourself or your family? Share them with us on our social channels. We could all use the inspiration. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.