Observing animals over the course of my lifetime had made me deeply respectful of the practice of ritual and ceremony — even those of the smallest sort like that enacted by my early morning crow. In the lives of animals, I saw daily and seasonal rituals that evoked in me a deep sense of the sacred and of mystery. This is what ritual is: an invitation into the sacred, a bridge constructed between the landscapes of mystery and our everyday world.
— Susan Chernak McElroy, Heart in the Wild