Crossing the Threshold
Dear ones,
The concept of thresholds is one that can be helpful on journeys of healing and transformation, especially in times of transitions/endings/new beginnings and spaces where the familiar is gone and the future is unknown. The turning of a new year can feel like crossing a threshold, which is why this post feels timely this week!.
In its most common use, the word “threshold” brings up an image of a doorway. Or more specifically, a strip of wood, metal, or stone forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room.
But threshold can also mean the following: Any place or point of entering or beginning; the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce a [physiological or psychological] effect; a point of departure or transition; also called limen.
Words related to threshold: brink, verge, origin, entrance, door, point, outset, start, edge, vestibule, inception, gate, dawn, doorway, sill, doorstep, limit or boundary, being in limbo
We may be experiencing thresholds in a lot of areas of life right now. Some of us may be discovering or identifying our thresholds for stress or chaos or uncertainty; some of us may be facing a time of endings like graduation, or uncertain new beginnings, in the midst of a world that is no longer familiar; some of us may be experiencing this season in politics, climate concerns, international conflict and unseen futures as an indefinite in-between, a transition away from something known, but not yet toward anything we can clearly see or even imagine.
This is a threshold season – or, as Richard Rohr points out in this recent reflection, a liminal space – where we are “living in between two worlds.”
Liminal space can be scary and disorienting, and few of us go there willingly, voluntarily or on purpose. Being “betwixt and between” can pose significant challenges that require new ways of attending. And, if we can hold the space and live into that unknown, as Rainer Maria Rilke invites, liminal space also has the potential to be creative, transformative and healing, and to become an opening and opportunity for meaningful change.
This is a time for special attention to self-care. Strength, resilience and recovery require extra doses of nurture and compassion and deep breaths and connection and nuanced ways of affirming ourselves and each other. Even though we may feel like we have made it through the pandemic “doorway” of COVID-19, we may still be trying to balance grief and fear and courage and hope; being alone and isolated, but also together in a challenging global experience; holding ourselves and one another gently as our edges and limits are revealed and tested and stretched; saying goodbye to what has been, and waiting to see what may be – and what we may co-create – on the other side. May the new year be rich in beauty and compassion, even in the liminal spaces, for all members of this Cammino community and beyond.
Peace,
Glynn
