Liminal Spinning

Notes from the peculiar week between Christmas and New Years', and from the juncture between the end of a journey and the start of a new one

I’ve arrived home after a long time away. Suddenly I’m back in the suburbs, celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah with my little brother and ancient childhood dog. Slow mornings in my grandfather’s old sweatshirt, sipping microwaved coffee on the couch.

It’s also started to hit me rather hard: I have absolutely no idea what’s coming next.

In many ways I chose this life for myself. I am immensely grateful to have this choice and this great expanse of freedom.

And yet the future yawns open like a gigantic portal and sometimes, on these cold nights, I’ve felt like it might swallow me up. I feel haunted by all the lives I am not living, which wither and drop away like the figs on Plath’s proverbial tree.

I know even they are hallucinations. I am living a life, after all. It is this one. Yet still the fear comes in waves. Fear of not doing enough, of not being enough. Fear of disappointing people. Fear of making a decision. Fear of choosing wrong.

It’s that liminal time of year between Christmas and New Years’ when the whole world doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with itself. Thin sheets of snow pattern the grass. My mother’s frozen poinsettias hang reflected in the windows, sheathed in sun.

I was laid off from my last job over a year ago, and the fickle winds of fortune allowed me to take a wilder road. With money I had from a lawsuit that followed an accident I was in when I was four, I was able to venture far across the sea. To trip on beaches in far-off islands and to ride motorbikes through foggy hills. To bounce from city to city, from hotel room to hotel room. To slip through various apartments and homes and towns and loves like some ghost or some sunbeam.

And now here I am again. I’ve returned, and yet back in this place where I started, it feels strangely like I never left.

Did it really happen? I ask the wind. Was it enough?

I really tried to look deep within myself and to heal internally as I journeyed externally. It didn’t get rid of the sadness that has always been with me, as I knew it wouldn’t, but it did teach me to have faith that this ache — the thin song of it — serves a deeper purpose, connecting me to something I cannot quite understand but know on a deeper level than thought. It taught me nothing lasts forever.

Over and over again I was reminded that love is the only thing that has ever mattered: love for oneself, love for one’s emotions, love for and from others, and love for this whole world.

I can sense traces of where I’ve been still with me, can hear the faint the song of cicadas ringing in my ears as the sea crashed in the distance, can sense the ghost-pale memory of a lantern rising high up into the sky on a dark night amid the palm trees.

I did choose this life. Except I also didn’t. The editorial field I went into after college — because it was where I found my first internships, and it allowed me to do a semblance of what I love, which is writing — has never been more unstable. I don’t know if I can still have a viable career in this field. I want to believe I can, and yet at the same time, I don’t want to get stuck in a soul-devouring job again. I know so many are in similar positions in their lives. I know in so many infinite ways, I am still so lucky to be here.

Life is always a series of junctures, questions, and openings. No matter how carefully we try to knit order onto the messy, starry sea of reality, there are always splits and tears, moments that ask us to rewire our understanding of the world around us and that ask us to tap into something deeper than external signifiers of order and security.

We lose relationships, we lose people, we lose jobs, we lose pets. We lose faith in religions, in old mindsets, in old homes. Rot and mold fill up houses we used to live in. Old shells are torn off; we build new walls that are then again devoured by vines.

The world spins on its axis, revolving through seasons and storms and seismic shifts. So do we.

I want to believe that there is a guiding force bringing us to where we are meant to be. All the spiritual work I’ve been doing has shown me that there is definitely a greater web of energy that twines through all of us. I believe we do come from an infinite field of intention, and our inner world does create our reality, and our thoughts are nothing, and there is a force of benevolence and radiance that lives in each one of us, beneath all the projections and illusions we superimpose upon it.

Sometimes, though — and very often, to be honest — I lose connection with that guiding force. My faith and inner strength seem to be seasonal, too. I felt so connected to that force on the road, that holy rhythm.

And yet the real test of it happens now, back home with my parents at 27, having no real idea where to go next, caught in a web of indecision, my old friends fatigue and depression holding my hands and whispering their favorite mantras, give in, it’s all pointless.

Our world also stands at various junctures. We near various climate tipping points and fall over them again and again. Storms rise on my beloved city coastlines, fires lick the hills of the desert where I was born. Technology leers, AI threatening to consume us.

Yet in many ways it has always been this way. This world, this life, has always been completely unstable. Life has always been a series of collapses and shifts, distortions and becomings. Phoenix-suns sinking. Magnificent journeys and terrible cataclysms that end where they began again, in the stillness of the morning, flower-light reflecting on the glass.

I am reminded again and again that we do get to decide how we see this great mystery, this web of changes, this constant flickering sideshow. We can see it as a plague upon our spirits, all these constant shifts, or part of a great journey our souls are taking upon this earth.

So, with all that on my mind, which is so much and so little at the same time, I ask the great night to show me where to go next. To show me how to make a life out of all these infinite dreams and longings, these songs and stories swirling around in the ether of my mind.

I am realizing that I am grieving my journey in my own small way. Grief is too strong of a word. But I did spend years fantasizing about going on this great trip, dreaming of it on all dark nights and on long miserable days at work. I’d figure it all out, I thought naively, out there on the road. I’d burn out my old self, come out someone new.

Now it’s over. Now I find myself at a new precipice. I am the same person I’ve always been, still looking over the great mystery of the rest of my life.

I look for constellations in the pale blue sky, for maps in the lines of my own hands.

I ask the silence for revelations, insights, and signs, as people always have, looking to the great wide silence and half-seeing themselves reflected in every sigh of the wind, every twist of the tree roots, every half-afraid and half-curious smile of every beautiful stranger.

May we recognize each other in our lostness. In our fear. In our constant evolutions and cyclicality. In the great pain we each carry within us, as well as the deeper jewel of great love tangled up in the pain, glowing at the core of us all.

Here’s to whatever is coming next. Here’s to the journeys of the past that brought us here and made us who we are.

But most importantly, here’s to this moment. To this sliver of time when you are reading what I am writing. To the alchemy of breath coming up from your lungs and into the world around you and back down again. To the symphony of blood spinning from your heart to your fingers. To this insistent aliveness, to all these trees growing, to this great world beaming and burning under the light of our generous sun.

If you are also feeling lost, be it during this liminal week or in a more existential sense, know I see you. May we trust in the musical knowing of our deeper selves, in the underground rivers of our truth.

I am daring, I am trying to remind myself when the overwhelming fear of the unknown comes, to move off the path. To follow some kind of deeper call. And I am so lucky to be able to do so. This was the dream of so many generations of women, to run this wild and free.

The fear I feel now is not something to get rid of or to tune out. It’s a call to move into these strange woods. It is a fire burning in the distance, reminding me that while I am alive I must run forward, I must not lie fallow always but rather I must follow this hum, this knowing, this music, which shimmers like the sun on the naked tree branches, which contain the seeds of their own rebirth.

And through it all, as always, words are the thread that ties it all together. So that’s why I write this to you today, reaching through the mist of the silence between us to share a small piece of of story.

I don’t know what’s coming next or what to do or how I am going to make it all work. I don’t know where the world is going to go or what’s going to happen. And that is part of the miracle in and of itself.

I also know even if I did suddenly “figure it out,” or magically was offered a publishing or a record deal tomorrow, or suddenly got married and got an office job and had kids, or went on another year-long trip, or did ayahuasca and toad venom, or dedicated myself to running a marathon, it’s not like any of that would truly keep me safe or make me whole.

Even then the work would continue. There is no finish line. There is just the ongoing, everyday practice of waking up, journeying, becoming, connecting, and doing the best we can with our short time on earth, on our little breathing speck of time and trees.

Onwards into the woods!

your liminal wintry moodboard - or, how i'm feeling now