Liminal

A person travels alone from then, through now, into the future; that is always the case for all people – whether we think about it or not. Change the word person to woman and the interpretation of the situation opens up through a limitation.

Opening through limitation. Expanding through detail. Well, “yes” you say. But it isn’t obvious unless we stop and examine this very carefully. Detail is not expansive. I look at the green blob on the floor across the room. The options of what it might be are limitless until we define it. It could be an alien, a dog toy, a potted plant. Living, warm, furry, budding? We need the details, as well as the context, to make sense of things.

When we transition, new features and processes can emerge, or old features and processes can disappear or stop.

Mostly, we don’t think about these simple aspects of life. Shamans and monks are the only people who give this perspective much brain space. Those folks, and little old ladies with an ethnographic bent, driving through places that they defined decades ago, but that may now be something else entirely. It was definitional for me to travel. And here I thought I was already defined.

Last summer I was the little old lady driving around places from my past. The liminality factor was high. The first place I was, my 50th high school reunion, was heavy with liminal vibes. The rooms were filled with, as anthropologist would say, people who were in my cohort as we came of age together, and who now pay homage to who we were even as we now display attributes of the roles of elders, wise ones, and leaders into which we have grown.

We remembered those who did not survive our induction into the world at large, the ones who connect to our youthful souls in that they entered the ritual spaces with us but did not emerge from them with us. They are forever in the liminal space that was real, but is no more. First loves that offered sparks and promise but could not navigate the between space of the liminal.

For me there is my status as the matriarch of my family of birth. It seemed a long liminal status to navigate as my brothers died one by one. I lost my role of sister bit by bit and existed in a transitional space but could not move completely into a more mature role as long as my mother lived. My last two living brothers only lived 7 years longer than my mother who passed at age 92.

It would have been helpful to me to have some sort of structure or kin group to teach me the processes of aging into a wisdom role. My feeling of being lost, or at least adrift between family roles, felt like where I was until I took last year’s tour of the land where my people lived for the last several generations. That provided closure and transition to some degree. I emerged after the trip and the reorganization of my brain as matriarch of a lineage, but not really a family group. Mainly, I learned to accept that the most defining relationships I have at this point in my life are those of my dispersed cohort.

Of course I noted how I am still a student in my major professor’s eyes. Too many of the cohort of my college anthropology class have moved on. The companion of my twenties who drifted through that time and space in my twenties with me died some time ago.

The liminal is the between. What no longer really is, but not yet fully something else. It is after the the old no longer fits, but before the new has been comfortably fitted. The transition can not always be defined, but it can be felt. It is multidimensional in that it can be space, place, person, or status. Most often it is marked by ritual and a status change; a redefinition emerges. And when you are in the between state you can become unmoored in a myriad of ways – it can transition into a time of danger in an instant.