Dwelling at the Threshold
We have a tendency to step over thresholds in our eagerness to get to the next place. How often do you take a pause to study doorways, to appreciate the door, it’s frame, the opening it creates in the wall and how you feel on one side compared to the other side? Our focus is usually getting the door open and traveling to the other side as quickly and easily as possible. The space that separates one thing from the next exists simply as a means to an end, a way to the next destination.
What might happen if we slowed it down? Relaxed the focus on the next destination and paid attention to the threshold - the transition zone between where we are and whatever is next?
Pausing at life’s thresholds is an ancient way of stepping out of time, dropping into the depth of the timeless, and reconnecting with Source, so we can step back into the flow, renewed.
In the Celtic world, and many other traditional cultures, threshold times of the day (dawn and dusk) and of the year (solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days) are times to pause, offer prayer, meditate and contemplate. Thresholds between life stages are honored through rites of passage ceremonies from birth to death.
It is this pausing to dwell in the threshold space that is the essence of the modern Vision Quest ceremony for me. We carve time out of the frenzy of life to step into a threshold space. We leave behind what has been, surrendering to not knowing what might be next, willing to exist in the place between.
As we deepen into this place, we realize it is a place in its own right, not merely a marker between life stages. It is a place that asks us to deepen into more of who we are rather than continue to run the same old social roles and mind routines. Previously unacknowledged parts of us show up, parts that carry intelligences beyond the rational, that know in ways we didn’t know we could know.
We sink into living a rhythm set by the sun, moon, wind, rain and tide rather than the mechanics of clock time. Through this we pulse ourselves awake into our ancient selves, our selves that move in sync with the beyond-human world, that stretch with the tide, laugh with the moon and howl with the earth.
Without the need to wear our social masks and armor we soften, become porous, melt into the rock, grass and sky, oozing into openings in reality we hadn’t known existed. Our eyes and hearts widen in a futile attempt to take it all in, the magnificence of it all, the wonder of life in the ants, pebbles, raindrops and our own dirt-filled fingernails.
We become feral, untamed, unabashed by our awe as we unravel the knots of thinking we know who we are.
If we can allow ourselves to be utterly beaten by the wind, rain and sun, by the morning chorus and gnawing hunger, we may dissolve into the air, into Spirit, into something much bigger, much more loving, much more powerful than any human will ever be.
And there we dwell until the drumbeat of life calls us back, demanding we bring this medicine to the world, requiring us to relinquish the journey to Source for now, so that we can be an intimate part of the ever evolving field of humanity, breathing the next world into being alongside everyone else.
So with weary legs we step over another threshold into the human world of food, time, roofs and social roles, but we are changed. We have been so ravaged by beauty that we can no longer ignore the deep parts of ourselves calling us forward, insisting we bring all of ourselves back to this imperfect, messy world.
Spending multiple days and nights out in the wilderness, alone, without eating is one way us humans have found to dwell in the threshold. There are many other ways.
I invite you next time you open the door to your house to linger at the threshold between indoors and outdoor, to savor the space between the two and notice what calls to you from each side. Try it at dawn or dusk, or as the moon is rising or setting. What’s different? What parts of you wake up?
More information on Vision Quests and ancestral connection journeys to Scotland
Beautifully written Kat. <3
Love this, as far as inside the door I simply see shelter from storms that require such, outside the door although I don't care for the colonized life I'm currently leading I see the natural world.