|
A LESSON IN BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END . . .
came to me recently from a favorite teacher of mine. The lesson was focused around breath having a beginning, middle, and end, but it extended into movement.
As I let my mind wander from breath and movement to other associations with beginning, middle and end, I thought of how, as a Virgo, I love an ending, which is to say, I love completion. Crossing something off the list. The satisfaction of using something up fully. Feeling a sense of clarity around boundaries.
I also thought about how I sometimes avoid beginnings, the frightening unknown. But I also love a beginning when it comes to a clean house, a fresh page, all my ingredients mise en placed to commence a favorite recipe.
Naturally, I got around to the middle (eventually), and it occurred to me that beginnings and endings are often impossible to distinguish from one another. That's true when it comes to breath, parenthood, death, the cycles of the sun and moon, and so many other things. It got me wondering if all this focus on the pros and cons of beginnings and endings was really a way of showing me that just about everything is a middle. That, in fact, the middle is not only where I spend most of my time, but one of the few places where I don't fall into the trap of time pressing on me to determine whether I'm at the beginning or the end of something.
As Toi Smith recently wrote, on the circular nature of time, "We’re always in conversation with what has been and what could be." (see below for a timely offering from her in the Tidbits) The indistinguishability of beginning and end touches on one of my very favorite words and experiences, which is liminality. I have always focused on my love for what the dictionary describes as a 'sensory threshold.' It turns out that synonyms for liminality include 'in-between' and 'transitional' - in other words...in the middle.
Another lesson fell into my lap last week, this time from Jan Elisabeth writing about the history and meaning of Advent, a topic that Kerri ní Dochartaigh has also illuminated. Like many people, I grew up prying open the tiny windows of advent calendars, thinking that the importance of those countdowns were always about the day they ended on: December 25. But advent calendars are a countdown to the beginning of the Advent itself, the twelve day period beginning December 26 and extending to January 6. In Celtic or Druidic traditions, this period of Advent is called the Omen Days, each one corresponding to a month in the upcoming year: December 26 represents January, December 27 represents February, and so on.
I'm accepting Elisabeth's invitation this year to celebrate the Omen days with writing, meditation, attention, and devotion (won't you join me?) In doing so, I'm attending to my love for liminality, and the calling I feel to enter a space of celebration around the winter season, which brings the death days of both of my parents - Dad on January 13, Mom on February 2.
Death days are a tricky form of celebration to navigate. I have deep respect for the broader reverence of Samhain and Día de Los Muertos - I appreciate how they welcome anyone and everyone into the fold of awareness and love for the dead, and for the retreat of warmth, light, and other symbols of living all around us. Yet I find that to celebrate the death day of individuals is not as, shall we say, palatable as a bigger social celebration. While this has a lot to do with a collective social aversion toward death and dying, my own experience with grief has drawn me ever closer to the liminality of our lives and spirits, into the gorgeous mystery of questioning where beginnings and endings really are, and where they blend into sensory thresholds of connection and joy.
In the Anam Cara, John O'Donohue touches again and again on this liminality, the following meditation struck me with particular force:
"Imagine if you could talk to a baby in the womb and explain its unity with the mother. How this cord of belonging gives it life. If you could then tell the baby that this was about to end. It was going to be expelled from the womb, pushed through a very narrow passage finally to be dropped out into vacant, open light. The cord that held it to this mother-womb was going to be cut, and it was going to be on its own forevermore. If the baby could talk back, it would fear that it was going to die. For the baby within the womb, being born would seem like death. Our difficulty with these great questions is that we are only able to see them from one side. In other words, we can only see death from one side."
On each of my parent's death days, I go into the kitchen. I make a celebration cake of some kind, an offering to the child in me for whom they each cooked and baked and provided nourishment. It is a quiet celebration, an inward, liminal one. I talk to my spouse and my child about what I'm doing and why, and they step a little more softly around me, sensing somehow that however much they join me in grief, there are always places we cannot go together.
Is there a part of me that would like to light a torch and bang a drum and parade out into the night, singing songs of lamentation and reciting poems of longing? Most certainly. This year, I'm going to take that part of me into the Omen days, with my pen and paper, my eyes and ears, and my listening heart.
Before we go, a story from a reader of last week's missive on celebrations: Amanda writes, "It really is amazing the many, many ways to celebrate and how we are all different...My husband and I both like to try new recipes but with three kids we rarely give ourselves the time. Birthdays have become the opportunity to try something new instead of a traditional cake. So far we've experimented with Boston cream pie, old fashioned sour cream cheesecake and Black Forest gateau along with trying to find the perfect carrot cake. I love that I get to make something for my husband that he would normally never request and vice versa...We also do not buy commercial wrapping paper for gifts because it feels like an expensive waste and instead use Japanese furoshiki to wrap presents."
We hope that this focus on celebration is inspiring you in new and fruitful ways. Thank you for being here with us, in the in-between.
With Joy,
Dor + Tay
|
