I’ve titled this painting Childhood Dreams. From my perspective today, it reads as having more to do with approaching a threshold. It’s appropriate to me, that it is a painting of a child. This is of my daughter as a young girl, but as I look at it, it could be me, as a young girl, approaching the first of many thresholds in my life.
John O’Donohue, in his book entitled, To Bless the Space Between Us, says, “It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds; to take your time, to feel all the varieties of presence that accrued there…”. I think this is a beautiful thought, and perhaps a practice that we can engage in. Then, we become aware of ourselves inhabiting liminal space and when we might be approaching a threshold. It’s all ground we’ve covered before and as such, perhaps we can approach that daunting threshold with slightly less trepidation and slightly more hope!
Most of our lives are lived in liminal space, but we mark time by those threshold crossing moments. We know the dates of being born, graduating high school, our first important relationships outside of a family system, weddings, childbirths, major life events. We often refer to a threshold as life before and life after. These are dynamic, fixed events in our mind and our time line. Most days have a fixed rhythm because of the thresholds that created them. Our routines for liminality get their attributes from crossing these thresholds.
Why are thresholds fraught with perplexity? They have this dark, ominous feel to them. Perhaps it’s because, often, we are forced into them. The death of a loved one, the pain of divorce, loss of a job, a required move; these are all thresholds often dreaded, anticipated, and, we even expend energy on a massive, sophisticated work around, where we don’t have to feel the pain of that kind of shift. We extend our time in liminal space to avoid that crossing. And our brain is trained to believe that unpleasant, grievous times await us on the other side of that new frontier.
As I look at this painting, I am reminded of the many times in my life I have approached a threshold with fear and trembling and other times where I have eagerly and hungrily ran for the open door toward a new atmosphere. I find myself lurking around a threshold yet again, during a threshold year.
This year has been huge, after probably 6 years of being in liminal space. I have made several big decisions as I’ve looked at a threshold from a distance. With each good decision made, the threshold gets closer. I sense it moving closer, or perhaps, I am moving closer to it.
I am seeing that good decisions beget good decisions in a way I never have before. I am seeing close up that when I make a decision that is the right one for me with wild trust and iridescent faith, the universe comes in to fill the empty form, or at least, brings elements to a partially filled form. Beautiful things begin to materialize. It’s not something out of nothing. It’s something more breathtaking and abundant with the materials that are already there and that have been nurtured during the very liminality that I’m talking about. The seemingly dormant liminal space gives way to genesis moments that are breathing and living in a new atmosphere and are cadencing new rhythms. This is the potential power of crossing the threshold.
I often get impeded by the worry that I’ll make the wrong decision. Yep! I sure have made some bad ones! And poetry has been the thing that has helped me reframe and recover from my own perceived wrong choices. I think this is what Wendell Berry is talking about in his line about the fox from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. He says, “Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.” And I know I’ve shared the following poem before, but it is a salve for those of us who have had bad decision hangovers, where we second guess every choice we’ve made, making approaching those thresholds seem untenable. If we can hold space for all of it, knowing that every piece of the puzzle fits somewhere. And every piece is indeed, Holy.
