... in the liminal.
I have a lot of feelings at the moment, but I don't know how to label them. There are no words to attach to them. This is new to me. I like to use words to make sense. But I'm being directed to simply 'sense'.
I've felt lost for a while. Lost in the familiar, in the static, in the same place. The way has been wayward. My path has been hidden. All the while being surrounded by the familiar – which has been both comforting and confronting.
Who am I?
What do I want?
Where do I go?
What do I do?
Do you ask yourself these things too?
A few years ago I began to hear the wind whispering: "Let me scatter the stagnation. Let me disperse the distraction. Let me blow away the ties that bind." I listened. I waited. I tried to be patient. And a path in the fallen leaves and frequent listlessness began to reveal itself. Finally, one of my many dreams began to find form: a family sabbatical and world schooling adventure.
And as departure-day inches closer, I find that I am experiencing a different loss. I am lost in the limbo, in the liminal. I am neither here nor there. As I stand on this precipice I am able to observe all that lies behind me yet everything that lies ahead is obscured. A threshold of both grief and growth. I am awash with waves of wallowed waiting and whimsical wondering. This curious cusp of before and after. This in-between stage and space is a boundless boundary. It's time to leap and leave it all to the wind. The air element. The divine breath. To surrender to an emotional and energetic shift.
I have this knowing as we enter the unknown. And nature presented me with the perfect analogy yesterday and today.
Yesterday I stumbled across and stared at a caterpillar on my woodland walk. It was suspended from a tall beech tree by an almost invisible, silky thread. Eye level it appeared to free float in the breeze. Its linear locomotion upwards was met and matched by the wind spinning it in spirals. It wasn't going anywhere, but it was going everywhere. A journey into the liminal. A destiny with the imaginal.
Today my daughter came home with an origami-esque butterfly. And as I sipped on pu-erh 'dream' tea and stared at the dancing clouds, it all clicked into place. You might know that since I was a child, the butterfly has been my animal spirit. And you might also know that to become a butterfly, the caterpillar has to completely dissolve; digest itself into a liquid. Formlessness before form. Buried within its DNA are imaginal discs that direct the metamorphosis, to become what it was destined to be. A whimsical wind rider.
I am here. This cocoon cusp. The imaginal liminal. And buried deep within, is a sequence waiting to restructure me. I am changing. I am co-creating with the universe. Everything that I have known is ending ... and the magical unknown awaits. I have come to realise that I don't need to know how I am feeling. I don't need my mind – my body and being is busy. It's brutal and beautiful. I bow to this life. Everything is unfolding as it's destined and designed to. The cycles continue and continue.
It's time for me to exhale ... maybe it's time for you to exhale too.