Living in the Liminal
After nearly 9 months of being uprooted from our home in Brooklyn (we’d jumped ship when we’d discovered toxic mold had impacted our health and ruined nearly all our belongings), a landing is finally on the horizon.
We’re still learning, but here’s what we’ve discovered so far on our recent quest for a new place to call home and how to live our best Liminal lives…
Living between stories requires a new definition of what one might call home.
When you combine a search for home, an adventure and a need to heal, one might call that a Quest.
Routines aren’t just good for kids.
Gratitude and Levity are key.
Faith is a direct enemy of the intellect.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Into the Now is the only place to arrive.
The dream is hard work, find support in the seen and Unseen.
Belonging can grow from shared devotion.
Movement requires deep stillness.
Read on below for further reflections on these ten points….
Living between stories (and homes) requires a new definition of what one might call home.
Maybe you’re one of those people who was born in a place and lived there for your formative years, or at least long enough to say you’re from a place. Ryan and I aren’t those people. Neither geographically, nor ethnically have either of us been able to give a straight and easy answer to the “where are you from?” question. When you grow up a “third culture kid”, you always feel like you’re at home everywhere and nowhere. We hadn’t realized it until having to relinquish both our home and almost all of our physical belongings after the whole mold saga, but our space, our physical home had become a huge part of our story, our identity, our sense of self, grounding and belonging. Leaving those things behind, left us to stretch our sense of feeling at home. We have been on a deep dive of looking within to find the stripped back version of ourselves and who we are in a changing landscape without a buffer from this rapidly changing world.
Home has come to mean that stillpoint we can find within, the sense of quiet we can sense even if we can’t hear it over the crying of our overtired toddler, the warmth of a cup of tea in our palms, the nighttime routine of saying “love you family” when the lights go out. We are home to each other. Our home is a inner warmth that emanates from our hearths and hearts and is most easily found when we are rested, fed and in an environment that inspires us — but, more importantly, can be relied upon when we’ve lost touch with the conditions that allow us to feel grounded or nourished.
Home isn’t an anchor, it’s a peace that one must tend to if it’s to be relied upon.When you combine a search for home, an adventure and a need to heal, one might call that a Quest.
I was conversing with someone on a particular hard leg of our trip where we had ended up in a five moldy airbnbs in a row and I was feeling defeated and like I had nowhere safe to go. I felt like Moana from the Disney movie (we just rewatched that last night, I cry every time) when she was out at sea and Maui had just left. I wanted to drop to my knees and weep to the Universe to choose someone else for this adventure. I wanted to give up and go back (to where I don’t know).
But then I remembered, I wasn’t just looking to escape, be safe, or keep things status quo. I was looking for a change, and change is hard sometimes.
Sometimes, change even requires heroic efforts.
I decided that the new story I was writing was one of both seeking change and adventure, I decided to reframe that and call it a Quest. Not only did this pivot change my perception of the type of journey we’ve been on, but it became an invitation to become my own hero, for all of us to dig deep and keep going, to answer the call the Universe was putting forth even if listening felt hard or even impossible at times. Quests require faith and faith is everything in life.Routines aren’t just good for kids.
If you know me, you know of my rebellious nature, my willingness to push the envelope and go beyond norms. I’m well comfortable with the fact that rebelling against the status quo can sometimes look chaotic. Fuck a forty hour work week in a cubicle (how is that even a thing anymore - and trust me, I know the cubicle well as I spent a solid decade in that purgatory). I swing from “No, watch me work eighty plus hours and thrive because I'm doing something I believe in. Or, heck no, there’s no way I’m working more than twenty hours because life is short and why would I sit behind a screen when I could be hiking a mountain side with my loved ones?”
I gave up the 9-5 lifestyle eons ago and with that, alarm clocks, planned meals, answering too much of anything except Spirit and showing up for my community. I far preferred unstructured time and the freedom it gave me to stay in the flow of where Life was calling.
HOWEVER, after becoming all too familiar with the word “hangry” and the un-napped toddler tantrum, I began to see that some regularity, some structure (despite my love affair with chaos) was actually beneficial to our whole family of Questers, not just our kiddos. In fact, the structure created more freedom for us to show up for the things we were being called to with more of ourselves, in better moods and without the dysregulation that comes with empty bellies and too little sleep.
My ayurveda friend would say that travel pushes Vata, or evokes too much of the wind element. Earth element can balance this and be found in regularity - meals at regular hours, familiar foods, hygiene routines, daily practice. Our siesta/naps have become so important, our home cooked meals, our planned snack time and our like-clockwork bedtime routines have been such an anchor for our nervous systems and physical bodies through all of the movement. And so, I begrudgingly admit, routines are good!Gratitude and Levity are key.
In moments that feel hard, finding gratitude changes one’s mood and outlook like nothing else. It reveals deeper, more important truths and widens perspective beyond our narrow lenses. It softens and brings in new possibility. It is a friend of faith and a balm to the heart.
We’ve made gratitude both a practice and a tool we use to remind each other to get back on track when we’ve lost faith. With the kids, we play a game called “Rose-Thorn-Bud” where we speak aloud our “rose” - what we’re grateful for, our “thorn” - something that bothered us, and our “bud” - what we’re looking forward to. I can’t remember how that practice came to us (maybe through my daughter’s school) but it works to bring us all into a place of positive perspective, helps us feel see and heard, and creates a quality of a shared prayer for what we’re trying to bring into being in our lives.
Levity is much the same in its influence on mood and perspective. Our two year old is a master of taking us from the woe-is-me state to the wow-I-just-laughed-milk-out-my-nose state. We’ve been in awe of how his antics come at such crucial points. Kids know the right medicine and the right timing. Their instincts keep them far from the notion of what’s “appropriate” in the moment, they’re not afraid to veer from whatever storyline is happening in any given moment and go into the heart of what’s actually true and important in the moment.
It always comes back to joy and sharing that joy. Kids love play and play brings movement, imagination, possibility and surprise. Humans are also just naturally drawn to laughter as the very act elicits a great deal of physical, spiritual and mental benefits. My acupuncture Sensei even taught me to “prescribe” watching comedy when I came across a patient with heart qi deficiencies. A good joke and a belly laugh can be one of the most grounding things, it can brighten the spirit and bring ease to just about any difficult situation. Plus, finding levity loosens the grip of the ego (important during times of great change) and just helps us not take ourselves so fucking seriously all the time!Faith is a direct enemy of the intellect.
How many times did my linear mind try to tell the quester in me that what our family was doing was totally insane? Too many to count. Now, instead of going head to head with my own intellect, I call in my trusty friend Faith to help me find that deeper part of myself that is being called toward a more beautiful reality.
The intellect hangs onto what it knows, it’s there to keep us safe and it does a great job at that, but it also can keep us stuck. It can keep us stuck in our own story, wanting a predictable, sensical next step. It can keep us looped in who we “think” we are or were told we are. It can keep us tethered to the systems that we live in and rely upon, but that have also given us enough toxic messaging to send us, all our more than human friends, and the Earth herself spiraling towards our own demise.
If we want off that train, we have to be willing to make choices that seem a little bat shit crazy at times. Because if we just stick with what’s “normal”, that’s not change. And change is absolutely what we need in these wildly backwards time.
World changing requires Faith. Heaps of it. So, please, Intellect, we’ll gladly take your assistance when the time is right, but for now, we’re inviting Radical Imagination, Faith and Possibility to take the lead.Wherever you go, there you are
We knew this one when we left Vermont for Brooklyn and when we left Brooklyn for Europe. But it’s worth mentioning again. Big moves (as lovely and adventurous as they may seem to the world of social media and quick texts to friends) are fucking hard. They require heaps of Faith (see above), massive amounts of courage, deep vulnerability and so much willingness to do the real work required to show up for the ever revealing void space that exists when one unplugs from one story and has not picked up the formed, intellectually-comfortable thread of another.
Being in the liminal space between leaving one story with only a vague sense of the next can feel like an abyss sometimes. It can open up old wounds and quickly let you know what baggage you’re still holding onto no matter how light you intend to travel. When you’re out of the loop of your own story, stripped down to the bones of who you are, patterns of self and ego wounds begin to speak loud and clear and there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nothing to busy yourself with.
The space-between is a silent echochamber for personal demons - the kind that love to come to a party and bring an invite for huge personal growth, but only if you’re willing to hang in the shadow lands. This liminal life has been a huge rewrite for so many relationships, but within and without. I’m still parsing through what I call my “remediation days” - both in dealing with the physical aftermath of mold and all the things that have been hiding in the cracks. When you’re entering the liminal, you enter the cracks, and deal with whatever hides in the cracks. It’s a reckoning through every nook and cranny of the soul. Not for the faint of heart.Into the Now is the only place to arrive.
“Into the Now” sounds a bit like a top selling self help book, but this one sounds cliché for a reason. Afterall, this is the only perpetual lesson in life that requires ceaseless practice.
When you’re questing, or finding yourself in a groundless place between stories, it’s a bit like walking on a tightrope. Keeping your eye on the horizon is mega important. Knowing you can rely on yourself and anchoring into who you’ve been and yet, staying keenly aware of each step of what’s becoming along the way. The tightrope walker both needs strength, stamina, balance and the fluidity to embody change that comes with all of the micro adjustments required to find balance and forward movement. The tightrope walker needs both faith and confidence in what anchors them.
When in this in-between place, there is the abyss, the focus point, the anchors and the Present Moment, the Now, which is the nexus of where all this comes together and requires constant attention to the arrival of each next step.
(P.S. This one was inspired by a beautiful tightrope-related embodiment practice that my teachers Naomi Lewis and Deborah Willimott gifted to a group of us a few years ago. It’s been a personal go-to these days and one I’m finding very useful when shared with clients and students as a balm for these times.)The Dream is hard work, find support in the seen and Unseen. Nourish and be nourished by this regularly.
Like the anchor points of the tightrope, when one is in the betwixt and between, with their eye on the horizon of the Dream they are living into, one must know what and whom they can rely on. The Self and one’s own presence and also knowing the hands of ancestors that have your back, the friend you can call when the going gets rough, the comfort food that nourishes, the landscape that helps you remember God, the animal ally on your couch, the kiddo that reminds you to laugh even as tears stream down your face.
No matter how much “self work” we do, the truth is, humans are social animals, we are feeling beings. We need each other. We need to know that we are safe, that we belong, that we are part of something bigger than us, that we are connected. Sometimes when human friends are hard to come by or inaccessible in the busy, big wide world we live in, a reliance on our more-than-human friends can step forward as part of the bigger web of support to help ground us into a sense of belonging and therefore safety.
To feel held, even if by a single thread across a vast abyss, this is a gift and a knowing that needs to be constantly rearticulated. I’ve been holding and teaching a meditation practice that helps one find themselves in the web of support that is there for each and every one of us (yes, even if things feel lonely at times). It’s become a regular practice the deeper into the Unknown that I’ve gone.
There is a whole world beyond the veil that requires a shift in worldview to see and acknowledge. A practice of gratitude can help to reaffirm and grow connection with these unseen forces. Work with both the seen and Unseen is relational work that requires feeling into the spaces around and within and all that’s alive beyond what our five senses know. And also, knowing that human support is invaluable too. A therapist, a neighbor, the florist at the market, a friend you’ve known since you were five… wherever you can nourish and be nourished by connection - do it, seek it out, and hold it as the divine gift that it is.Belonging can grow from shared devotion.
Until we ended up in France, through our travels in Portugal, Spain and Morocco, Ryan and I felt most at home in Morocco (my mother’s homeland, but a place Ryan had no affiliation with before we went). We were trying to parse out what exactly it was about Morocco that had quenched a thirst in us so deep we didn’t even know was there. We realized after some time, it was about being in the midst of a culture of devotion. The call to prayer five times a day. The pauses that allowed for God to enter the mind and heart, again and again. The upholding of a shared worldview that there is something bigger than all of us. A shared devotion. The ritual to continually reaffirm this faith, devotion, and worldview.
The level of belonging in our humanbeingness was palpable. When we left to go back to Spain, (and we did almost stay!) there was a distinct empty feeling on the other side of being there. We pushed on to France, a bit saddened by this loss, but felt that feeling of fullness again almost instantaneously, or at least as soon as we first gasped at the immeasurable beauty we’ve found here.
We have come to understand that France upholds a culture of devotion in its own right. That devotion is to beauty. The rituals that uphold and affirm this are found in the art, architecture, food, and practice of daily life. The regard for land and natural beauty is wildly celebrated here and there is so much care in both agricultural practices and in the wild parks and lands that are much celebrated anywhere you go.
We are a family of land lovers and lovers of visual beauty. We feel a sense of immediate kinship here in this culture that has existed with this thread of devotion to beauty for many years. We feel a sense of belonging in this shared devotion. I have many more thoughts on this and on our responsibility of shifting culture within the groups we find ourselves in - our relationships at home, at work, with strangers - we can offer perspective on worldviews that incorporate devotion to beauty and the Unseen and begin to shift the world culture in these small but powerful ways. Through communicating our knowing and bringing in new rituals, our relationships can become sanctuaries for these ways of being and seeing, for a new culture as it emerges.Movement requires deep stillness.
I sat under the full moon the other night and just breathed with the olive trees in the grove where we’re living. The stillness landed in my body like rain on parched land. I soaked up the moving clouds, the soft and fragrant Earth, the silent shadows. It was just what I needed after a long day of buses, and hikes and chasing kids.
The stillness is what has fed me the most in this Quest. It’s the place of listening and dreaming. And the place where old stories can die and be honored as they decay back into unbeing.
Stillness is the rich compost for all that emerges from the Liminal. And fields of Stillness grow larger and more profoundly full of possibility, the more we make space for the gifts of these spaces between.
