Freedom

Looking back, maybe that's as free as things get, Doris said, in between the clicks of the oxygen being pushed in syncopated puffs, into her lungs.  She looked out the window, perhaps remembering the feel of being behind the wheel of her convertible Oldsmobile, as she cruised south on Lake Shore Drive from Hyde Park, past the Museum of Science and Industry, past the South Shore Country Club, past Calumet City, past anything resembling the expectations of post war women.

She was born ahead of her time, choosing career and the single life over the silently dictated destiny of wife and mother.  With her brother at war, forcing her mother to help Father in the shoe repair shop on 57th and Woodlawn, her three sisters stayed home to do the cooking and cleaning.

This allowed Doris, who was always eager to amass large sums of money, to learn bookkeeping skills that led to her handling the finances of the shoe repair shop and then to the private finances of her parents, much to the dismay of her leery sisters.

Once she mastered her skills on her family, she headed to the banks, where Wally Mead became her banking guru and most likely, her first paramour.  With her earned monies, she bought a shiny black Schwinn bicycle and in her fearless, carefree and venturesome way, rode over a large curb one afternoon, with little sister in tow, and crashed head first into a brick wall half a block from her home.

Two weeks later, she awoke after doctors tapped her spine to drain the fluid that was swelling her head to the size of a small watermelon.  Her reflexes now slower, her joie de vie reigned in by family and doctors, her fears tapped, she resigned herself to the life she most dreaded, married the first man who asked and fifty-five years, four children and one miscarriage later, her beloved coupe de ville sold, living within the confines of five floors of a retirement home, she sits up in bed, a chronic lung disease slowly taking her breath away, and looks out the window at her freedom driving away, seventy-five miles per hour.  

Liminality All Over Again and Again...

I wanted to post this again for a couple of reasons.  First, the word liminality, came up in a conversation today and a light bulb went off.  I went to a meeting about reinvention, where I find myself yet again.  And in explaining the place I am in, how I feel, after closing my business last fall, and wondering what I was going to do when I grow up....again....  I called it the space of nothingness between the old and the new that has not showed itself yet but is busy crafting itself within me.  

My friend was told that this place is called liminality.  Of course!  The space in-between!  I have been here before.  I said that to her.  It was a Duh! moment.  This is the place where your old life has crashed and burned and your new life isn't apparent yet.  It is in this place that we must keep walking.  You may not recognize yourself at this point. It is a volatile feeling, this unknowing.


I have come to the conclusion that in this lifetime of mine, this is where my soul is growing and changing at the speed of light.  I don't know how many liminal periods we are allowed in one lifetime.  I can't count them anymore.  It actually feels like I am dying all of my past lives all in one lifetime!  It is exciting, scary, exhausting, emotional.  You cry.  You laugh.  You're loud.  You're quiet.  You're up.  You're down.  You want this.  No, you want that instead.  I say, just hang on.  That's really all one can do in these turbulent times.  Of course, this is all inner work.  I can only imagine what I look like on the outside with all this chaos happening within!


These aha moments have a calming effect, though.  At least I can name the demon in my head that is running amok!  Okay, not a demon.  Growth, change, rebirth.  I just wish with each rebirth I could delete a few years off my age.  Become a younger version of myself at this ripe old age!

There is gold within these Shadows.  Embrace the gold and release what is not.
Just keep walking...

posted 10/20/2010

Reality is the place between the sea and the foam. Irish Proverb

Dictionary.com defines it as:

the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks social status or rank, remains anonymous,shows obedience and humility, and follows prescribed forms of conduct, dress, etc.

It is defined as the space in-between. It is emptiness and nowhere. It is a place of dying and rebirth, the space between death and rebirth, something that cannot be seen. Liminality is where transformation occurs. It is when we are betwixt and between, and by definition, not in control. An uncomfortable place to be if you ask me, but a place of impending change, which to me is exciting.

In the book, Crossing to Avalon - it is described as passing through a gateway, a threshold - an in between zone where we are neither who we used to be nor who we are becoming. We are standing in a doorway between two phases of our own life.

In this liminal phase we are vulnerable, thin skinned, which means we are open to new growth. T.S. Eliot wrote about a point of intersection of the timeless with time. It is a place where eternal and ordinary perception overlap the spiritual world and visible reality come together. Only in periods of availability will a person respond to a call to adventure or love and the lessons they bring.

Okay, so what does this mean and why even talk about it? I came upon notes I had taken from books and other readings, which are shared above, at the right time in my life.

As I came back from a spectacular trip to the Omega Institute for a Women's Leadership conference, thoughts were screaming in my head, copious notes had been taken the whole weekend, I rewrote my ideas for a retreat center, cleared out some old personal "garbage", and was ready to take on the work of my next incarnation.

And I got home and none of this happened. I couldn't write, my thoughts were unclear, my head foggy. I got sick recently, which put my head in an ever worse fog and I wondered what happened to that energy and spark that was on fire in New York. Even my meetings with people I met on that trip didn't spark anything new or exciting. What was wrong with me?

Then tonight, as I tried to free write in my journal (with no luck), I came across old notes and writings, which included liminality. And I realized where I was at this moment in my life. Funny, once again, if you look for the signs, they are here in front of you.

I guess I, too, am in another state of transition, that place in between. I am letting go of the old and worn out but the new has not presented itself yet. Jung calls the psychological journey to wholeness as individuation, a task of the 2nd half of life.

So, again, I wait, quietly, because I know in the quiet and nothingness, things are happening that are out of my control, out of my realm of thought. It tires me, this non-work. But it also excites me, as I know out of it comes newness, new thought, new direction, new beginnings, new you.

Serendipity or Coincidence?

I dreamt last night I had the ability to think about people and they would then appear. The question was, did they appear because I thought about them or did they know I was thinking about them and then they showed up? I know. Existential. In the dream, the driver was replaced by another person who appeared in my car.  They didn’t have to pay attention to driving because they weren’t really there.  Or were they?

Then I started thinking in the dream that I had this ability to conjure up whomever I wanted.  You know, when you are dreaming, but you are also looking into the dream as an observer?  I found myself thinking about an old friend in the dream and wondered if he would show up.  And he did.  Amazing what I can do in my dream.

Can I do the same thing awake?  Wait a minute.  Now we are talking conscious versus unconscious thought.  After my long lost friend showed up in his truck, I noticed a sign on its door with a business I had not know about.  If I can conjure up people, then why can’t I also have a knowing about a new business they have or even better, WILL have.

So of course, I emailed him to ask.  Haven’t heard back yet.  Ever hear of the phrase, “Watch out what you wish for; you might just get it?”  These synchronicities are much of the time dismissed as coincidences.  Something specific to a certain person (smells, pictures, their favorite song, their area code popping up daily on house address, license plates; you happened to look at the clock at that exact number more often than not) suddenly starts showing itself, making you think about that person a great deal.  And then they show up or call.  Were you both thinking about each other at the same time and that energetic connection was sent out over the “world consciousness wire” forcing you to connect?  The mother that senses when her child has been hurt thousands of miles away.

I believe everyone has had this type of “coincidence” happen to him or her at some point or another. Ask and you shall receive.  Knock and it shall be opened for you.  Close one door and another will open for you. C.J. Jung dubbed synchronicity as a fortuitous intermeshing of events.  Another word for it is serendipity.

The signs of my old friend keep showing themselves.  He is in my dreams of late.  It will be interesting if my dreams of his new business are real.  I have known things about him in the past that I could not have known about.  He says it creeps him out!

Will I see the people that I made appear in my dream?  I would love to except I can’t remember who they were!  But if someone from the past pops in to visit or call out of the blue……  Hmmm, I really don’t believe in coincidence much these days.  It is so much more fun to think about the possibility of making things happen.  Plant a seed of thought and let it go and it will find a way to manifest itself to you.  Turn aside your dream and it will come back to you again.  Follow it.  Open your own doors.  That person in your dream you just can’t get out of your head?  Next time the phone or doorbell rings, it just might be them.