WILDLY FREE ELDER
The Artistry of Aging
Liminal Spaces
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
Blaise Pascal
It breaks my heart to see the fog of smoke covering our pristine mountain landscape with fires raging all over my home state of California. Yet as my gaze goes skyward I see the dragonflies and hummingbirds soaring above carrying on their lives as usual. Like natures reminder that life will return and renew after the burning times.
It feels as if we are all in a chrysalis these days, being churned up until we no longer recognize the identities we have carved out for ourselves, so very carefully adhering to cultural standards and expectations.
We are all at thresholds of some sort waiting for the air to clear enough that we can see and become what is emerging within. Someone recently even said to me that one of the criteria for saying yes to something is when he feels a sense of discomfort, thus bypassing old ways of being and leaping into the unknown.
We are in the middle stage of a rite of passage we are sharing together, yet are singularly alone in the alchemical transition to something or somewhere that is uniquely our own and yet to be formed.
“The word “liminal” comes from the Latin root, limen, which means “threshold.” The liminal space is the “crossing over” space – a space where you have left something behind, yet you are not yet fully in something else. It’s a transition space.”
As the caterpillar’s genetic code, long ago formed, insists on the dissolving of one known form into formless, and then into a living being quite unrecognizable from what it has known before, so are we being asked to surrender in these liminal spaces where we experience freedom from rigid boundaries, but don’t quite know where we are, what is real and what rests in our imagination.
The realization that we cannot control this space, nor can we hurry the process with any certainty, can bring periods of impatience or a feeling of being captured in unknown territory where there is no ground to stand on or identity to cling to. It can be frightening and most definitely disorienting.
“The liminal space is an invitation to surrender – an invitation to give over to something larger than self and trust that we will be held and supported with whatever we need in order to navigate the uncertainty. The degree to which we are comfortable or uncomfortable has to do with how we choose to be with what is happening. We can choose to fight against the liminal space and struggle, or to flow with it by listening, sensing, and responding.”
Alan Seale
Life is always evolving and transforming. As we age we seem to sense that even more acutely. Nothing ever stays the same – an impermanence that is coded in the unfolding of each moment of our embodied lives.
Can we perceive these liminal spaces as a great adventure and curiously await the unveiling?
YES! I am.
On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 5:37 PM WILDLY FREE ELDER wrote:
> Gaye Abbott posted: ” “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be > known.” Blaise Pascal It breaks my heart to see the fog of smoke covering > our pristine mountain landscape with fires raging all over my home state of > California. Yet as my gaze goes skyward I see the d” >