An Invitation: Listen to the Call of Liminal Spaces

I’ve always been drawn to in between places, spaces where you are neither here nor there, coming or going. In the yard of my childhood home, for example, at the intersection of two tiptoe-tall hedges, there was a magical space just small enough for my 8-year-old self to squeeze through. Invisible from the outside world, cocooned but strangely boundary-less, I could escape from the day-to-day and immerse myself in make-believe. In that space, I could be anyone and anything. 

As an adult, I seek the mystery of marshes and inlets, spaces between land and sea. I am called by the beckoning possibilities of doors and old wooden gates. I love the light just before dawn, where in that reflective space between dream and awakening, I can hear the questions and the prayers of my shy soul. With the world quiet, my horizons open wide. My mind both sharpens and relaxes. My sense of self, usually so seductively solid, disassembles, reforms, transforms, dreams. 

Limen means “threshold,” and for many, the coming break is a liminal space–the resting breath between fall and spring terms, between one calendar year and the next. Even the sun and our beautiful planet model this transition—the winter solstice, sacred for many, marks the end of six months of darkening days and the beginning of the slow climb to summer sun. At this moment, we stand, drawing breath with all creation, at the threshold of new beginnings and new becomings. 

My colleague and friend Antonio Viva shared these provocative photos of liminal spaces from his travels. We invite you at this threshold moment to pause, be curious, and just listen to the conversations between your old self and the new. Come closer. What do you hear? What do you feel? As poet Mary Oliver says, “love the mystery.”

“Exploring the relationship between night and day, inside and outside, allows us to sit in the discomfort of transition and transformation.” Photographer Antonio Viva

“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between are doors.” Poet William Blake

“We are in a space without a map…In Tibetan Buddhism, such a space or gap between known worlds is called a bardo. It is frightening. It is also a place of potential transformation.” Buddhist scholar and ecological activist Joanna Macy

“Now, looking through

the slanting light

of the morning

window toward

the mountain

presence

of everything

that can be,

what urgency

calls you to your

one love? What shape

waits in the seed

of you to grow

and spread

its branches

against a future sky?”

Excerpt from “What to Remember While Waking” by Poet David Whyte

“Those of us called to the thresholds - the edges between - live in this thin space and recognize one another when we meet. The edges between biosystems are called ecotones. These thresholds usually contain the most biodiversity and therefore are the most resilient.” Victoria Loorz in Church of the Wild

So many of us live most of our lives seeking the answerable and somehow demeaning or bypassing those things that can’t be answered and therefore denuding one’s life of the acceptance of mystery and the pleasure of mystery and the willingness to live with mystery is greatly what I think about. And if I could do something for people I would say, don’t forget the mystery. Love the mystery.” Poet Mary Oliver

“Between worlds is a place of balance and often unknown for the sake of humankind’s persistence to possess it. A place without light and dark, connected to eternal continuity in a place of mystery.” Lakota elder Tiokasin Ghosthorse