Write Across the Threshold
DA CAPO
Jane Hirshfield
Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.
Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.
Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water and herbs.
Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.
“There are thresholds on our paths: doorways, gates, bridges, and borders. They have names like: marriage, divorce, journey, birth, death, relocation, twilight, dawn, the space between the blow and the pain, the ringing phone and the answered phone, the misstep and fall. It’s difficult to be grateful for change, yet Change = growth.”
Smart words from Barbara Kingsolver from Hide Tide in Tucson.
Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life.
A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home. . .
In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.
Jane Hirshfield examines the “liminal” life in her book, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Other poets, Bill Holm, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Whitman, Lorde, Kunitz, Kooser, and others revel in the “betwixt and between,” bittersweet times from which poems and stories pour.
Emily “dwells in Possibility”, Kunitz “lives in the layers,” T. S. admonishes, “the end is where we start from”, and Bill Holm wrote, “Let everything sing together inside you, lose nothing.”
Liminality is a great lively marsh. Sea otters dive and emerge, crabs scamper, clams disappear, sea gulls feast on the day’s deliciousness.
To Esther de Waal, who lives in Herefordshire, close to the border between England and Wales, place has been important. She has returned to her home after world travels.
She writes, “A threshold is a sacred thing. All our lives are inevitably made of a succession of borders and thresholds, which open into the new promise of excitement — or fear. If I were to find one word that catches the sense of threshold, it would the transformation — always a little scary. It means letting go of control, giving risk a chance.
Jane Hirshfield refers to the liminal state as permeable, and an awakening.
She writes, “To speak and to write is to assert who we are, what we think. To stand humbled and stunned and silent before the wild and inexplicable beauties and mysteries of being.
It is the task of the writer to become, in the words of Henry James, a person on whom nothing is lost.”
Before Thoreau went to Walden, he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. . . . and to see if I could learn what it had to teach. I do not want to come to die and discover I had not lived.”
Enjoy these liminal moments.
Daybreak
by Galway Kinnell
On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.
“Bless those who challenge us to grow, to stretch, to move beyond the knowable, to come back home to our elemental and essential nature. Bless those who challenge us for they remind us of doors we have closed and doors we have yet to open. They are big medicine teachers for us.” ~ Navajo saying
The Real Work
by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
“The Real Work” by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words. (c) 1983
Liminaly yours, Carol
Resources: Esther de Waal, To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections of Living on the Border, Harrisburg, Morehouse Publishing, 2001.
