the wisdom of the threshold
the emergent dance of the in-between and coming-into-being
This weekend marked the equinox, the sweet balancing point of light and dark before we begin to spill over into the slow, steady, drawn breath of winter’s approach. I return to this piece, one in which I’ve been trying to weave together a complex assemblage of threads that I’ve been carrying in my mind for a while, but which, stubbornly and despite my best efforts, didn’t seem to want to take shape on the page. This is often the case when I try to force something. The initial wave of inspiration, that which moves me but remains elusive until I’ve found the right way to approach it, gives way to an interrogative enquiry. Sometimes in this process of sense-making and trying to draw the blurred into focus, the mystery and wonder of the original movement — the glimpse we caught and couldn’t savour but which rearranged us entirely — is lost.
This reminds me of a lecture by Lorca in which he describes “poetic inspiration” as something that cannot be courted by the mind but must be received by the soul in blind and vulnerable faith. “Poetry doesn't need skilled practitioners, she needs lovers,” he writes1. I wonder if this is true of the creative process in general. Often, caught in the wilds of this process that we are attempting to tame, it is simply a question of returning to that initial enchanted stirring, as mysterious as it may remain, to honour it fully. So today I reoriented, dropped my gaze down to the ground beneath my feet and to this body as home, and decided to approach this offering a bit differently.
It’s late September, and it feels as though we’ve been dancing in the borderlands between late summer and early autumn for several weeks already, the air cool and crisp one moment but heavy and sun-baked another. As the tides of time pull us onward into the cooler months I grapple with my own internal shifting as mirror, having moved between homes and places and ecosystems in the past weeks, struggling with the strange sense of dislocation that comes with a complete realignment of my outer world and my relationship to it. And so, I turn toward the sources of wisdom that remind me how to be in the threshold; not to strive to cross it, to reach a clear destination as our solution-oriented culture might demand of us, but to be in the unfolding and move with the unfolding, the richness of the in-between. This is the constant change that we’re asked to be in relationship with, regardless of where we are in our lives and whether the threshold invites a subtle shift or a violent initiation into a new way of being. The dusky leaves on the cherry tree visible from my bedroom window call me back to this truth. Can I land there, somehow? Can I see what emerges, right there in that difficult but fertile space?
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
Even in the necessary chaos of life realigning itself, the shift of the seasons grounds us in eternal, unwavering truths. The earth as mother to us all. Our bodies as the earth, ripening with each year. The dark stench of decay written across all of our lives, sweetened with the honeyed promise of endless new growth to follow, even if it is not our own. Autumn has always been a time of morbid fascination for me. The turn of the wheel and the cyclical inevitability of death feels so much closer as we descend into the dark womb of winter, ready to be held, to rest, to retreat, to return, spiralling back to the centre of ourselves. The thresholds of the living world hold us accountable to time as such, but also offer unparalleled solace amidst the chaos of our lives, if we can surrender to their natural passage through. The Irish poet, philosopher and priest John O’Donohue writes, “The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival.”2
The rhythm of emergence thrums steadily and graciously on, pulsating around and through us as the eros of life reproducing life in its many magnificent gestures. We emerge as much within the threshold as from it, a liminal space that demands our fluid adaptation, and we arrive here only because something has been necessarily drawn to a close, but in that deft movement the seeds of an opening are sown, one wildly unimaginable but laden with potential. The promise of the threshold, if we know how to move with it rather than let it harden around us, is change. And therefore the promise of the threshold is emergence: the creative potential of life spiralling out in endlessly vast and complex formations, the great mystery whose source both science and religion have attempted to assign language and meaning to for centuries.
In the discourse of ecology, an ecotone is a transitional area between two biological communities or ecosystems, often with a greater diversity and unique assemblage of species that thrive in the narrow bounds or overlap of the in-between. Ecotones are generative spaces in which radical adaptations are made, and boundaries are transgressed, dissolved or reassembled over time according to the relations of the inhabitants. The origin of the word lies in the Greek roots ‘oikos’ (home), from which we derive both ecology and economy, and ‘tonus’ (tension). The home or habitat in question is something constantly in tension with its surroundings, a reminder of the dynamism and complexity inherent in living systems, and how our scientific language has developed as a way of intending to impose some kind of structure and sense-making onto this. “In scientific terms, one might say that the world is composed of gradients with relative discontinuities,” writer and conservationist William deBuys describes; “Put simply: things change nearly everywhere, and so nearly every place is the edge of something and shares the qualities of an ecotone.”3
We exist always in the transient in-betweens. Ecotones within ecotones, thresholds within thresholds, borders shifting constantly. To inhabit a threshold is to dwell in this tension, sometimes uncomfortably, sensing the fragility of a life we’ve assembled with shaky hands that in a fleeting fractal of a moment could be changed irreversibly. No wonder we walk cautiously, gathering in our edges so we cannot possibly flow out into the terrifying wilderness of new territories. But despite this, the ecotone is emergent with the possibility of entirely new ways of relating and being. We are invited to shed our old skin and stroll assuredly into the waves, unsure of which version of ourselves will rise up to meet us once we surface. We are asked to “risk the danger of difference” that comes with a break from well-worn patterns, as John O’Donohue describes.
It’s so easy to become fixated on the beyond, in the process: to reach desperately for the clarity and resolution, fixing a gaze on the horizon in the distance and attempting to swim toward it, but never quite reaching it. Can I let the tides carry me where I need to go? Can I watch the horizon move toward me? More and more I question the notion that I am the sole arbitrator of my own life, directing its course. The wisdom of the threshold asks us to surrender to this, to bear witness to ourselves as the vulnerable beings that we really are, fumbling our way through the world, never really knowing, but carried regardless.
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”
— Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, ‘The Breeze at Dawn’
And there, in the discomfort of the ecotone, where the very notion of a stable oikos, a stable home, is undermined, life unpredictably and uncontrollably spills out along the margins. The borders between the old growth woodland and the forestry plantation become a territory rich with the dynamic interplay of species, diverse and unlikely cohabitants negotiating their relationship and interdependent being. The feverfew blossoms from the cracks of the dry stone wall where field gives way to road, insisting on bridging the divide between the green and the concrete, leaking out in an unruly resistance to our efforts to contain it.
As this transgression reveals, choosing safety is not always an option. This is something I’ve been reminded of countless times over the past two weeks, as I was released, with equal parts reluctance and readiness, from a period of cocooning to fully embrace a complete realignment of path, and with it the struggle of adversity. The struggle of risking new shapes, as author Sophie Strand so beautifully names. The struggle of having the certainty of your edges dissolve, your container wholly rearranged. If I cannot choose for safety, can I choose for staying awake, staying curious, and feeling it all? Can I choose courage where movement is needed, be that letting go or reaching out blindly, and yielding in trust to the unknown?
“A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold a great complexity of emotions comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual.”
— John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us
Here, in this strange intersection of a moment passing, in the distinctly amber hues of late September, I inhabit both the outer threshold of the equinox, which pulls the rhythms of my inner world into realignment with the sway toward darkness, but I also inhabit the elusive inner threshold from which I observe a new life beginning to take form outwardly, gradually evolving limb by limb. The quality of everything feels mysteriously altered: the weight of the air I breathe, the softness of the light that falls across my face as I step outside, the buoyancy of the ground underfoot as I walk, the warmth as I brush a hand along my skin. Deeper, and stranger, and more beautiful than before. As I tread carefully along the ground “where the two worlds touch”, the potency of this meeting place reveals itself in the textures of my own body, the ecotone where I sense my way into conversation with the lands whose folds I now dwell within. The old and new sing through me both, as do the dark and light of the seasons. That which had to die in order to shore me up here, alive, as much as the promise of the soon-to-be realised composition of life taking shape before me.
According to the Celtic spiritual traditions, certain thresholds — in-between and liminal places or times, evoked by the luminescence of mist or twilight, both of which imply a tension between two elemental forces, warmth and cold or dark and light — are numinous; they are often “thin places” as Frank MacEowen conveys, offering a doorway within the sacred world to a greater intimacy with the divine4. Along the threshold, the worlds of the seen and the unseen, the embodied and the spirit, the living and the ancestral, commune. The great thresholds in our lives seem to possess a similar ephemeral quality, their wisdom born from the tension and release from what is known, calling us to reach out in faith toward the ever-changing with capacious hearts and clarity of vision. Thin places hold the many, and the all. Thin places hold the eternal. We cannot stay there too long, and so we are always faithfully returned, with the passing of time, to those more mundane and familiar structures of our lives, our days, our seasons. We regain balance. We decide where to move and where to find stillness.
The most famous and widely recorded Celtic creation myth, Oran Mór (‘The Great Melody’), tells of a melody that spiralled out across the dark abyss of primordial sea waters, gathering sound and momentum and building to a great crescendo until, where the sea met the land, a mare named Eiocha was born of white sea-foam: the first of the mythic beings of creation, symbolising the divine and the material interwoven in the birth of physical life. Oran Mór reveals a cosmology shaped by the tension and dynamic interaction of the powerful ancestors of sea and land, the very space between their duality a site of creative emergence and synergy.
Oran Mór, the melody sung through all creation, is that same life bleeding out at the edges, the in-betweens, part of a great web spiralling outwards and onwards and back in turn, each encounter braided into the tapestry of the whole, the orchestral weaving of greater song. In honouring the wisdom of the threshold, the mythic symbol of the spiral so central to ancient cultures calls us back to the constant dance of change and emergence informing the intricate patterning and repatterning of life, one which is never linear nor teleological, despite our dominant cultural perceptions. One which invites us to live within the seasons and earth’s thresholds, not beyond them. We are here, in the equinox, spiralling back toward slowness, toward pause, grateful for the harvest that we have gathered and the harvest still to come. We’ve been here before and we’ll be here again, and we might not understand why. “Each life is a mystery that is never finally available to the mind’s light or questions. That we are here is a huge affirmation; somehow life needed us and wanted us to be,” writes John O’Donohue. “No threshold need be a threat, but rather an invitation and a promise… We merely need to trust.”
Watching
the geese
go south
I find
that even
in silence
and even
in stillness
and even
in my home
alone
without a thought
or a movement
I am forever part
of a great migration
that will take me
to another place.
— David Whyte, ‘What I Must Tell Myself’
Federico Garcia Lorca (2004) ‘The Irresistible Beauty of All Things’, “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion” Harper’s Magazine https://poetshouse.blogspot.com/2006/03/lorca-irresistible-beauty-of-all.html
John O’Donohue (2008) To Bless the Space Between Us
William deBuys (2013) ed. Barry Holstun Lopez and Debra Gwartney Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape
Frank MacEowen (2002) The Mist-Filled Path