Duncan Clark Menzies

We find ourselves at a threshold between one year and the next or one season to the next. With the approaching spring its a time of renewal, new life, growth, and turning our attention from the inward winter months to the outward connection around us. We see our society changing, our political climate changing, our city largely changing. And with all this newness we get distraction by things that are out of our control. I want to talk about because those are all things out of my control. We may have been in a season of liminality of all last year between one thing and the next. We may have been put on hold in business, career, or relationship. This middle space I am discovering is of the upmost importance. We all have our personal threshold. A liminal space if you will, where we are caught in the middle of what was ‘before’ us and what is ‘next.’ And it is in these spaces where transformation takes place.

liminal spaces are where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That’s a good space where genuine newness can begin. Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible. This is a sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy.

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr

2020 was a time of prolonged liminal spaces for me. It began in January of loosing my housing and living in a liminal space of having a home and not having home; sleeping on friends couches, live in dog sitting, traveling, and trying to travel for work. Next liminal space was exiting a great relationship where I was in-between being single and feeling committed, this painfully lasted many months. The next liminal space was unemployment; in-between jobs but also in-between holding out for hopes of doing artistic opportunities in performance. Now in this space of unknowing lies a lot of pain, turmoil, unknowing, nihilism, existentialism, all of which I won’t spend energy glorifying. Instead I want to frame the focus on forward movement.

These spaces of liminality afford themselves to incredible discoveries, rediscovering self or reinventing self. For me personally living in a liminal space made me rethink stability, rethink career goals, rethink what success means, and rethink what balance looks like.

I finally got stable housing with roommates who are former high school and college friends. I rediscovered myself as a single person and what I value, able to love myself more, and ultimately having much more to give and serve in relationship. And found new ventures to inject creativity into or money making prospects.

This background of liminality culminated and turned in an event. The last full moon of the year in a kaleidoscope of liminality that has shift my framing and freed me from a self imposed cage of unchange.

Picture this a dark December night around 10PM. A fresh coat of snow blankets the ground of a quiet cemetery, tchotchkes peek-a-boo through the whiteness next to tombstones and dead flower pots are lightly scattered there too. A cool gentle mist covers the landscape with three lamp posts lighting the road and the stones surrounding it. The mist neither a liquid nor gas, the cemetery the middle ground between life and after life, a young man in-between so many things, and a masked full moon by the covered sky. A threshold of unknowing, a threshold of present-ness, a threshold of surrender, a threshold of sorts. In these moments of liminality simply, softly, profoundly comes through with fog filmed breathes

In an instant it all can change

In a single breathe it all can change

In a moment Fear, Guilt, Shame eradicated

Replaced with Freedom, Creativity

And with that the deed was done, sealed in gratitude, wrapped in serve, and nothing added to it.

May your 2021 be full of present-ness, may the well being of those around you be vivid in your memory, may freedom and creativity reign supreme and your success and brightness of your future inevitable.

Enjoy this meditation …