Crossing Thresholds

The time between Christmas and New Year’s can feel a bit strange. After the bustle and rush of preparations and socializing, there’s a lull, a week where some of our normal activities are slowed down, if not suspended. Of course, lots of folks are back at work. But many manage to take the whole week off, so business as usual is not generally resumed at full speed until after the new year dawns.

This week, the week before we start a new year, is a liminal time, a time in-between what was and what is to come. The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. My Oxford English Dictionary published in 1995 does not include liminal, and I laughed out loud when my spell check kept automatically changing the word to luminal. How perfect! Our culture has little tolerance for the in-between times, wants to rush ahead with an eye on the hoped for or imagined future light (productivity, accomplishments, spiritual evolution, increased awareness- whatever version of progress you value.)

Life includes a variety of liminal times: after I submit a finished manuscript but before it is published; after a death and before the funeral; when a divorce is decided upon but is not yet finalized; after engagement but before the marriage; when the sun is below the horizon at dawn or dusk but the sky is light. Of course many of these times are experienced individually, not collectively, and those we have in common in our geographical area- dusk and dawn- are generally filled with sleep or the frantic activity of beginning or ending the day. The days between Christmas and New Years, even for those who do not celebrate Christmas, is probably the closest we come to a shared liminal time.

In many shamanic traditions these liminal times are seen as times when the “crack between the worlds,” between the seen and unseen levels of reality (dreams and everyday reality; our conscious and unconscious awareness) is open. In these times we can access a prespective that is greater than our own. But this requires a willingness to go to a place of not-knowing, and for most of us not-knowing raises anxiety. It’s hard not to fill the spaces in-between with distractions, plans, and resolutions that quell our anxiety.

But what if we didn’t fill the space? What if individually and collectively we let ourselves be in-between what was and what is to come, without trying to control the outcome? What if we started to value this time as one of waiting and dreaming- not just now, but at the start and end of every day, allowing ourselves to come back to some kind of stillness, alone or with others?

I know what I am asking, because the outcome of being fully with the liminal times is unpredictable. And if there is one thing I know, it’s how hard unpredictability can be. I have had a chronic illness for twenty-six years (CF/ME.) While I know some of the things that can forseeably make it worse (staying up late, doing too much etc.) the truth is, even when I do all the things I know should help, I can find myself flat on my back with exhaustion and pain for a day, or two, or four. The hardest part of this is not the physical disability- it’s the unpredictability that repeatedly challenges my ego’s illusion of control. This is not to say that the choices I make do no not matter, do not shape the events of my life and how I respond to them. They do, but unpredictability remains.

When we are present in liminal times, when we take advantage of the pause after the exhale before the next inhale begins, we don't know what will happen, what will be asked of us. Sometimes we can see how unpredictability and our lack of absolute control have brought and can continue to bring blessings, gifts, challenges and heart ache. And maybe, sometimes, for a moment we can let something deeper than our discomfort with not-knowing, our fear of the unpredictable guide us over the threshold.