Every ritual tells a story of how we relate to the world. It connects us to a sense of order, structuring our days, imparting fortune, marking our place in society. Australian photographer Tamara Dean remembers devising rituals using stones and feathers when she moved as a teenager to a place at “the end of a dirt road out in the bush.” When the artist spoke with me via Zoom from her current home in Cambewarra, located between a mountain range and the Shoalhaven coast south of Sydney, she recounted another experience, in Israel, that had helped her overcome her fear of spending the night alone in the wilderness: “I made a circle of rocks under this tree, and challenged myself to stay there. It was a ritual to show that I was strong and brave enough to be by myself out in the world, and that was important to me—to know I had that kind of resilience.”