One of the pleasures of my life is teaching undergraduate students the importance of liminal time/space and how to spot and interpret it in the world and in ourselves. For example, I am now teaching a seminar on liminality and contemporary issues, and we are exploring sequential themes: archetypal patterns in myth and literature, ritual and ceremony, the process of initiation, pilgrimage, the coexistence of multiple liminalities, war, natural disaster, the intersection of the human/non-human, gender, social revolution, developing liminal resilience, race and marginality, the aftermath of atrocity, eco-uncertainty, and liminality and the arts. One thread always connects to another and another.

The reason this seminar easy to facilitate is because there is so much raw material surrounding us. In each and every instance, examples abound. Here. There. Everywhere. Let those who have ears, hear, as it is said. Let those who have eyes, see.

When personal experience does not connect with one topic, its parallels do. For example, most of my students do not have personal experience of war or its aftermath. They don’t know about the liminal existence of the warrior or what it is like to have their city bombed and destroyed. They have not been attacked and taken hostage. They know none of these things personally. And yet, they do, by analogy.

Many know trauma in one form or another. They know post-traumatic response. They know what it is like to lose a loved one in an accident, endure a school shooting, grow up like an orphan, live in a society that is not one’s own, or be assaulted. They know what it is to lose a former life without having a new one lined up to take its place. They know austerity and addiction. They know these things. For them, the empathetic leap to a parallel experience is not that far, provided they are willing to allow their gaze to fall on that other place, that other person.

That’s why stories are so important. We live by them, create them, understand through them. If we dare enter the story of another, even a mythic story, we may end up discovering our own, even if it is dressed in different clothing.

It has been said that this existence is a daisy chain of liminal events, or that life itself is liminal, a great in-between bookended by life and death. That seems very true in many ways. It certainly recognizes process and liminality, the repetition of threshold-crossing. But if everything is liminal, how can we say that any one moment is? Perhaps, like the multiple topics of my liminality seminar, we swim in an ocean of liminality with distinct sea creatures making an appearance. The overall field is liminal, but rising intensities dot the fabric, moments of oversized liminal ambiguity, thresholds that seem to define everything that came before and after them. We all have those. In fact, our world has those.

Perhaps the best we can become has to do with acquiring the best outlooks and skills of a sea captain navigating by the stars at night, reading the currents, rising to dramatic occasions. The kind of person we become is as important as the particular liminal thresholds we cross, however dreadful or hopeful. When we surround ourselves with fellow travelers of a like disposition, given to the crossings, the discovery, the endurance, the transformations, then what first appears as dread becomes a kind of portal through which we may pass. And strangely, we sometimes don’t even know it’s happened until after it’s over.