Do you ever think of yourself as a bridge?
This is a love letter to all of us who occupy the space between the things believed to be known, to the people who have to, and the people who prefer to, live with a foot in more than one reality at once. Liminality is the space between. Liminal, as a word, comes from the Latin root “limen,” which means “threshold.” It is a dance across boundaries and borders. It is the space in the ritual where one form of our identity begins to dissolve but the new skin we will soon wear has yet to be completely woven. It is the rich territory of dreaming, rebellion, uncertainty, transmutation, growth, reclamation of all we have been and left behind, and the courageous openness to embrace change. It is where magic can and often does happen, especially because our attachment to a fixed identity or a firm definition of reality has already been loosened. It is the fertile darkness, where wishes are planted and new realities are born.
This loosening can be the intentional territory of spiritual disciplines from various cultures, which teach the mind to let go of what it thinks is real and permanent, in order to stretch into new horizons where delta brainwaves can be accessed while awake, and the part of us that dreams merges with the part of us that perceives what is around us in the light of day, co-creating in a lucid manner. This kind of fluidity is an art, is the territory of the Arts, and is certainly at the heart of the Nahualismo dreaming tradition, and yet the state of liminality can come to us in many ways. It takes many forms that we don’t always want to invite or embrace. It can be thrust upon us by trauma, when the rug is pulled out from under the reality we have known. It can happen with age and illness, when the physical reality is in decline, and makes room for something beyond it. It can come with times of significant life changes that require our reconfiguration. It can also be one’s orientation to life from birth, having been born outside of the accepted social definitions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and perhaps even beyond neuro-normative expressions and the commonly accepted limits of psychic sensing.
I like the phrase “liminal walkers,” (a term I encountered on the excellent website queernature.org) because it speaks to a sacred orientation that was acknowledged in the traditions of many Indigenous cultures, and is still evident in practice today, even without the language or sanctification of their roles. There have always been liminal people walking ahead and leading the way towards the neuroplasticity needed to survive in changing times and to expand into larger potentials of what we can become. It has been held as a sacred position, and it has been viewed as a threat to social and spiritual order. There have been the Mad Seers, the Priestesses, the Two Spirits, the Quariwarmis, the Witches, the Healers, the Star Seeds, and perhaps even the borderless and the mixed race people who won’t be fully claimed by either or any of their lineages. All of these people blur the lines, break the ego’s rigidity of identity, decolonize, and challenge by being other and both and all. They step forward towards what is unknown and uncomfortable, breaking the old pathways and paving new ones so everyone can cross the threshold that stands before us.
There are a lot of people who live in the threshold, and perhaps, in a certain sense, we should see each other as one connected force. It should never be underestimated how serious, and how nuanced, the challenges, attacks, and forms of oppression can be for each of these groups occupying liminal spaces, especially for those who can’t or won’t hide it, and for those who are especially feared. The experience of each of these groups, in our times and historically, may be far from equal, but there is something shared between them as well. They are the bridge makers, and it feels like they have been coming in strong in the last few decades. They are deconstructing gender, race, lineage, and reality, both reclaiming ancient memory and creating new forms that challenge, demanding to be seen and met. As the Earth shakes off the outworn skin of the Fifth Sun that brought oppression, colonization, persecution, displacement, forgetting, and the dominance of the Tonal (our belief in the external and ego driven aspects of reality over what is deeply intuitive, more spiritually subtle, and hidden), the souls bold enough to stand within the liminal and create are returning or waking up, or both. The Earth loves the liminal. Just like the dawn, the dusk, the shadowy phases of the moon, the eclipses, and the crossroads, it is where magic is revealed, the hidden ways open, and the imagined becomes possible.
There is a word in Nahuatl, the Indigenous language used by the Mexica (Aztecs), for liminal space. It is Nepantla, and it means “between,” or more specifically “between times,” or more poetically “the land between lands.” This is a very important concept, in general and for our era in particular. The space between is the space of magic and dreaming, the bridge to a reality beyond the illusions of mind. It is between deep sleep and waking, in the early hours of morning (for most of us) that the dreaming body is most active and the mind gives way to the soul’s desire to co-create, using the language of images. If one reality is just next to another, then the passage between is where we can adapt ourselves in order to pass through the barrier and perceive what is outside of our mind’s rigid set of expectations. Without the cultivation of our ability to perceive and withstand this between space, we can easily miss the full spectrum of our consciousness and the magic of our rich and complex world. We need a relationship with the liminal in order to evolve.
And our evolution is at hand. We have arrived at the time of the Sixth Sun, a time of reversal from what we have known. The intuitive, subtle, internal, and dreaming forces are in the lead energetically and the gifts we have had to bury for our survival are perhaps the exact ones we need most to call in this new era, and to thrive within it. We are standing at the threshold, in the years that are like the land between lands, and we are trying to land, to feel the change fully. Before our world can reflect it to us, we need to heal enough to walk confidently on liminal ground, like the bravest among us. We need to honor the people who are bridges. We need to be the bridges. We will need our bridges. Those who are less attached to things as they are may also be able to see what others don’t notice, to dream into new possibilities, and perhaps to stand strong when change is at the door. Bridges have a role to play.
From Gloria E. Anzaldua’s This Bridge We Call Home:
“Bridges are thresholds to other realities, archetypal, primal symbols of shifting consciousness. They are passageways, conduits, and connectors that connote transitioning, crossing borders, and changing perspectives. Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra enter medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement–an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the times it’s become a sort of “home.” Though this state links us to other ideas, people, and worlds, we feel threatened by these new connections and the change they engender.”
Nepantla is between the worlds, and what happens between the worlds changes all the worlds.
It will take courage to claim this threshold and the part within us that can bridge it. It will take love to feed that courage. We need to love our bridges, within and without. We need to stare into the space between, the edges of our changing culture. We can practice by noticing the mystery in the natural world, when we gaze at the edge of a leaf meeting the sky, or the space where two landscapes meet, or the world within the world of a sparkling stone.
If you are a liminal walker, and especially if the world is treating you harshly when you have caused no harm, hold on. You are worthy of respect, and your courage to be yourself is admirable. You may be just the medicine that we need at this major time of threshold.
Sending love, from our liminal walk to yours. May you walk in safety and in beauty.
May we walk together.
the eleventh house
-This blog was written by Melusina Gomez. You can learn more about her work and healing practices at www.metzmecatl.com