I started a weekly feature following in the steps of Sharon Astyk’s now-completed “Independence Days” project (June-Aug 2022), which offered a flexible weekly framework for recognising and sharing actions related to building resiliency, community, and accountability (in and out of the garden), things that can make our lives better now and in the future. Over time, I modified some of her categories, but I knew I eventually wanted to create a different framework to match my own experience of life. That time is now.
Some explanation, quite long, which will sound philosophical but which when I’m writing it is physically and emotionally experiential.
My whole life, I’ve been aware of living in a liminal space (before I knew the term), in a long doorway between the boundaries of birth, which is now about 60 years ago, and death, who knows when. I’ve been born and I haven’t yet died. I’m located in between those two boundaries (if in fact they are boundaries and not the illusion of boundaries). So are you.
I’m also aware, all the time, of fully inhabiting not only the doorway between birth and death but also the actual land of the living — even as I’m also aware that I’m aging and dying, on my way to leaving this living land, because all living things do.
So I find myself not only loitering in a doorway, in a place and time between the start of Life (capital L) and the end of it, but I’m also part of the group at the party, or sleepover, or classroom – choose your own metaphor for life (i.e., I’m living life) and I’m also part of the group at the wake (mine) as the body deteriorates, time ticks, chance operates (i.e., I’m leaving life, dying). I’m straddling the doorway and I’m in the rooms on either side of the doorway. We all are. I don’t know how much other people are aware of it, though some certainly live with the constant knowledge as I do.
(I think of the lines the Virginia Woolf character speaks in “The Hours,” the film version of Michael Cunningham’s novel, when she’s talking with her husband about her suicidal tendencies: “You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.” We all live with the threat of our own extinction. It’s a given for mortals, no matter how or when it occurs. But some people, perhaps because there’s nothing at all that we can do to disarm this threat, ignore the reality of it. Some of us can’t, or won’t. And some of us are curious about death, as we’re curious about life, because curiosity is in our DNA.)
What it comes down to for me is that my life feels (has always felt) transitional and I have always felt nomadic. I’m not absent from here. I’m very much here, in this place and time, and I feel that keenly. I’m here, and I love this place fiercely, with all my being. And I can’t help but notice and know that every moment I experience is both real and ephemeral.
Each present moment is more rich and deep than I believe I can imagine, and probably much bigger and less confined than it feels: maybe, it’s possible, one moment dissolves into and emerges from another, not linearly but outside of time. And each moment, each place, is its own singular entity, containing everything, all possibility. And each place + moment is also a way-station, a landing and launching pad, not an end point or a finality, but not not an end point, either, since every moment is born and every moment also dies.
To put it another way, as many have, nothing lasts and everything changes, no matter what we wish. We never step into the same river twice. Each in-breath is a birth, each out-breath a death, something we all unconsciously practice.
I once quoted Sarah McLaen, who wrote that “liminal spaces, such as waiting rooms, parking lots, stairwells and rest stops, make you feel weird if you spend too much time in them because these spaces exist for the things that come before or after them. Their ‘existence’ is not about themselves. … Your brain tells you that something’s wrong because you’re supposed to continue moving on in life, but you’re not, so it feels like reality is altered.”
The weird thing for me is that I don’t feel at all weird or uneasy in these kinds of places, whose ‘existence’ she implies is not quite real by adding quote marks around the word. I feel at home in these places that are seen perhaps as more placeholder than place. I feel content, somehow whole?, even exhilarated in liminal spaces — in places of waiting; in places of uncertainty and confusing context; in places of transition, realignment, reassimilation; in places, in short, of dissolving, nebulous, shifting identity — because they remind me forcefully, powerfully, and viscerally of how being alive every moment feels, of how, as someone else (Luca Davis, but it’s behind a paywall) put it, the beautiful, magical “ritual of existence” feels.
Yes, a rest stop on the highway isn’t usually our goal — nor the parking lot, waiting room, or stairwell — but why not? Why is one place, or time, more the goal than any other, if life is our source and our essence? One’s home may feel safer, more restful, more complete in some way, and certainly more able to be controlled by us than a parking lot or an airport — it may well be a better place to be in our estimation — but liminal space has this going for it: it calls attention to what life itself always offers us: possibility, changeability, birth and death in any moment. (And maybe that’s the source of its disorientation and unease for us.)
McLaen says that our brains tell us “that something’s wrong” in a liminal space, “because you’re supposed to continue moving on in life, but you’re not.” She says that in such a place we feel like “reality is altered.” My soul, for whatever reason, knows that no matter where I am or what I do, I am always “moving on in life,” because life itself moves us along. We may stand stock still, but time moves, or we move through time, or something happens, and we change, even if imperceptibly. I wake up every morning changed by my sleeping dreams; you could say I’m a different person every morning, that we all are. I have not been successful in fooling myself to think that a rest stop or a stairwell is in any existential way different from my home. My reality is continually altered or shaped in the way McLaen describes, because my sense of the liminality of my (our) existence is inescapable.
I’ve realised that my affinity for liminal spaces and heterotopias — heterotopias: spaces that disrupt the continuity and normality of common everyday places, places removed from ordinary time — is due to their feeling fundamentally real and true to me; they remind and confirm for me how things are, in my experience: way-station after way-station moment by moment, a continual unfolding, and the fundamental uncertainty inherent in being mortal. That reminder is a relief. Not that liminal spaces can’t feel anguishing in other ways, and not that finding confirmation of what I feel is wholly comforting. But there is a certain kind of relief (the kind that comes with not having to keep up a pretense) when inner and outer worlds correspond. Life is liminal.
A few years ago I read Pico Iyer’s Autumn Light (2019) and was struck by this: “The question we all have to live with: “How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.”
In my experience, we can’t really hold onto what we love; we can hold it, we can love it, we can enjoy it, grieve it, see its beauty, notice it. Maybe there is a kind of eternal holding on that exists, I don’t know. But I do think that perhaps we can see the world as it is and yet find light in its truth. We can notice what is, experience living and dying, birth and death, and we can seek the light that’s everywhere in all of life, the luminosity in our delight, in our sadness, among us, in this every moment.
I mentioned earlier Luca Davis’s phrase “the ritual of existence.” Davis says, “The ritual of existence is important, especially when it is mundane. There is something very spiritual to me about the choreography of every day life.” To me, too, though I’m not sure I’d use the word spiritual. But the ritual and dance of everyday mundane life feels like it’s at the core of living for me. What’s ordinary is everything, and how extraordinary it all is. To exist! To exist so briefly! (or forever, or completely outside of time, who knows) To imagine, to wonder, to dream, to discover, to be curious, to learn, to care, to grieve, to fear, to yearn, to feel ambivalent, to pay attention and not look away, to notice, to try to be and to BE. An ordinary day.
That’s what I want to document each week: a liminal life, the ritual of my light-seeking, death-aware, always shifting silly existence. 😄
I’ll be posting my first iteration of the new framework in a day or two, though I expect it will change over time as I see how it serves and doesn’t.
Because much of my life is spent outdoors, gardening, walking, on trails, observing and listening to birds, trying to identify plants, insects, & fungi, learning about permaculture and what we call the natural world, exploring places, and caring for, cultivating, tending, and maintaining all within my sphere, including the garden, I think this will still be a good fit for this Moveable Garden of a blog.
I’ve written about liminal existence previously:
- Dream City Home (Oct 2017)
- Living In Transition (Oct 2012)
- Loveliest of What We Leave (Oct 2011)
featured image: cloudy blue sky and utility wires reflected in pooled rainwater in a school parking lot (Jan 2024)
“What’s ordinary is everything, and how extraordinary it all is. To exist! To exist so briefly! (or forever, or completely outside of time, who knows)”
I think this way, too. Noticing things is important to me and brings me joy. And I hope there is some kind of reality of our existence outside of time. It makes sense to me.