Reflections on the Liminal Space

Originally published on BitterSweetMonthly.com

Everything is moving: seasons through the trees, time on our skin, water in the earth, and air. No one can escape it. Tax season and the grand finale pass over us all without consent, and everything, everywhere, all at once, goes.

What is moving now? It is May—winter, spring, and summer play chicken, holding hands, teasing each other as to who will balk first. It is 2022—windows unshutter trepidatiously, shy and excited as the age of 13. We are mortals on a finite planet, hurling through space and time—nothing, nothing stays still. Grass, babies, and spider webs grow. What is moving now?

On purpose or by accident, we change. Many of us have softened. Many of us have cried. We have decluttered, we have thrown lots out. We have misplaced and lost loved things. Over and over, we bend, break, and build, either with focus, force, and fire or with no other choice.

There is inherent grief in transition. To move from one state of being to another is to lose whatever was before. Even when we progress into beauty, fullness, health, happiness, and abundance, other things, some of which we may have clasped tightly, fall behind. Still, the flowers fade to gray and spring back in purple. The belly swells and the child is born. The spiders toil and toil again, tossed and caught by the same gust of wind, starting over from somewhere new.

This month, dear reader, you are invited into undulation. Explore our lives, days, and minutes through the lens of shifting. Consider what is challenged between projects, professions, and spiritual spaces, and wonder, on the journey from one to another, what we might choose to keep or leave behind.