My thought for the day connects to the following Capek’s Ten Advices:
4) Live through the present. True life is what you are experiencing right now. Don’t fear the future – trust in it. (Don’t think about old age, and don’t dwell too much on the past.)
5) Be creative. Don’t be idle and always keep yourself occupied with something. Stay curious; always learn and educate yourself.
And to Imaoka Shinichiro’s principle:
Find strength in community — our local gathering can be a microcosm of the co-operative society we seek to build. Here, we support one another in our journeys, sharing our joys and sorrows as we work together towards a better world.
Image from 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days: An Almanac of Birds, created by Maria Popova
Hello everyone, and firstly what a joy it is to have reached the last Sunday in March when the clocks went forward at 1am this morning and we now have more light in our evenings! I feel particularly in need of this milestone in my life as so much is in flux, uncertainty abounds not just in mine and my family’s life but of course all around us. Lighter evenings create opportunity to adapt my habitual evening routine and let it stretch out into something a bit more spacious for which I am grateful.
Change, (both structural and psychological) is at the heart of this thought for the day and the need to both acknowledge and accept a state of liminality as change swirls around me. As William Bridges describes it, change is not just a structural thing – moving from school to college, moving from one home to another home, shifting a work pattern and/or the work itself (all of which are happening in my life currently); it is the psychological transition that accompanies these upheavals that needs attending to as well. And if I just widen my view of the field even a little then of course there is change for other family members going on that is impacting on me too, and beyond that for the people in all the communities I am part of…and beyond that…I could go on.
Liminality is the state of being “betwixt and between,” representing a transitional phase, threshold, or in-between period in life, space, or time. Originating from the Latin limen (threshold), it describes the disorienting, uncertain, yet transformative stage between leaving a previous role or phase and entering a new one.
So in my case for example this means knowing my youngest daughter (with special needs) is on the cusp of having to leave the school she has attended for the last eight years, where she is loved and supported, but not yet with a confirmed place at another college; it means having accepted an offer on our current home, and at the same time being in that space of looking for another, but as yet not knowing where that might be; and personally it means finding myself betwixt and between professional identities. The most familiar of those falling away, yet what is emerging is only in a half-light, a vague outline…I am both emptying out and not yet filling up.
I will not be the only person here today in this transitional phase. We will be experiencing it in our own lives, within our families and communities including this one, and we can see it on the world stage, politically, socially, economically, environmentally, spiritually.
What to do? How to live in this in-betweenness, given I can’t just hold my breath, or bury my head in the sand and hope it resolves, neither is it possible to force answers or make binary choices. I know because I have tried some of that.
I am finding solace and hope linked to the statements I highlighted at the beginning. Firstly, “find strength in community” – one of our adapted principles for living. I am deeply grateful for two communities that I am part of right now. The first is a poetry group I have been in for almost three years of resilient, loving, strong women, all with their own version of facing this liminal space, and the role that poetry plays in helping each of us face into our uncertainties and liminal spaces – after all poetry as David Whyte says “is the language against which we have no defences”. It gives us a space to be vulnerable and held simultaneously.
Secondly, number 5 of Capek’s Ten Advices, to do something creative, stay curious, keep learning. I am currently taking part in the 100 Day Project – a worldwide creative endeavour where all those taking part choose to do a creative project every day for 100 days. This is helping me in a least two different ways –1) the rhythm of showing up consistently for this every day regardless of what else is going on (it is day 35 today), in my case taking two photos one always of the cherry tree in our garden and one of something else within 100 paces of that tree, and then creating a diptych of the two… 2)- this gives me another community to be part of – 10 of us mostly new to each other, all with different creative projects, but supporting each other in the ups and downs, the excitement, the boredom, the newness and the mundanity, the successes and the failures, the curiosity and the anxiety – is the best anchor I have right now.
Thirdly – linked to both – Capek’s 4th Advice Live through the present practising being in the present moment, taking the photograph for example, or in mindful meditation bringing an intentional attention to the present moment – not getting stuck in the past, or trying to guess or organise the future, but rather feeling intrigued even somewhat excited by its potential.
This led me to the wonderful resource that is https://www.themarginalian.org/
curated by Maria Popova, herself a writer and poet, seeing liminality through the thoughts of Jayne Hirshfield, a poet, writer and ordained Buddhist. In a piece on Writing and the Threshold Life (from her essays Nine Gates), Hirshfield examines the liminal through the lens of a fourteenth century Japanese play about initiation rituals in Buddhist philosophy, celebrating this threshold space as hallowed ground for dissolving and transcending the self. She says:
“The liminal is not opposite to, but the necessary companion of, identity and particularity — a person who steps outside her usual position falls away from any singular relationship to others and into oneness with the community as a whole. Within the separateness of liminality, connectedness itself is remade.”
In considering what this means for being a writer she says:
“To speak, and to write, is to assert who we are, what we think. The necessary other side is to surrender these things – to stand humbled and stunned and silent before the wild and inexplicable beauties and mysteries of being”.
I am neither a Buddhist, nor a writer, however there is much for me to take from her words. Little by little I am learning not just to survive in the in-between but also if not quite thrive, certainly find some learning, some useful challenge to my habitual ways of being, and even therefore some joy amid the uncertainty. To know it is ok to be both lost and have people and places to return to. To be in a place of transformation with all its necessary shedding and reassembling.
What I might want to do next and who I am becoming through these experiences is, in tiny glimpses, starting to reveal itself. I could say I am receiving fragments of holiness, and brief moments of insight. Maybe I will be able to gather them up, these precious gifts, and renewed by their grace walk a path that is safer than the known way – this place of liminality is slowly helping me understand more about what this really means.
I hope this has some resonance for others here. Thank you for listening.