Liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. Threshold, among other things, means the level or point at which you start to experience something, or at which something starts to happen or change.
It’s like this: You are water. Blue and blameless. Ebbing and flowing in a tide pool. Heat begins to build, and you, beautiful humble droplet, start to quiver. The sky is tugging at you now more than ever. And you want to go. Up and up and up into the vast and beckoning blue. On the threshold of becoming vapor. Blue and blameless, quivering tender droplet.
And that is all. There is no next. You are a droplet caught in a freeze frame of almost-could-be-motion.
Liminal: something starts to happen
A liminal space is a narrow slit between existences. It is a sense of stagnation always on the cusp of becoming. It is a pause. A reckoning with existence. What am I doing here? What does any of this mean?
To exist in a liminal space means to exist untethered, unbound by future. It is to be stripped of work and obligations and normalcy, to be naked of every value society has dressed you in, to be adrift in your own ocean mind. It is to look at your hands and wonder what they are for.
Liminal spaces exude a particular sort of frustration. They are all of the build-up with none of the climax. You can hope and plan and daydream all you want, but you are still stuck in your house, and the future is still estranged. Everything is thought bubbles and finger pads. All motion is arrested.
Sometimes other people can write my own feelings better than I can. (Is that why we consume art? To be understood? To see our internal labyrinths laid out in visceral form?) And when I think of liminal spaces, I want to envision an actual space. Jonathan Safran Foer did that with love in Everything is Illuminated: “If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.” (What an excellent passage, right?)
Here’s what my liminal space looks like: It is sunny but not quite warm enough to do what I want, which is to lay outside and roast in the sun long enough that my skin sprouts wildflowers. Everything smells of lavender. The walls are here, but you can’t see them, which is true of most things in life. I am free and tethered, wild and caged. The Monterey pine out back finally toppled and our peregrine falcon died, and yet it is still sunny and my skin is still soft, and nothing smells as good as the slowly ripening tomato plant. Everyone around me is chiseled from the same stone—blue schist and chert and pillow lava, the Franciscan melange. And me? I don’t know. I keep thinking of that one flower in Big Sur and how I’ll never remember its name, its smell.
Liminal: of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold
What does your liminal space look like?
People in Parks 