Secrets in the Dark

Note: This was originally published in our bi-weekly e-newsletter, Liminal Spaces. To get future issues delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

“And the time came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”—Anaïs Nin

Dear friends,

Last summer, my wife and I planted a Hawthorn tree in our backyard. When the September heat gave way to October freezes, she shed her leaves in preparation for braving what turned out to be one of the snowiest winters I can remember here on the Colorado Front Range. And now, in late May, though the maple trees have leafed out and the cherry is in full bloom, she sits in silence. I check on her every morning, lingering under her thorny branches in hopeful expectation of her awakening. And as much as I watch and wait, she won’t be rushed. She seems content in this sacred time between sleeping and waking, death and rising. 

Like her, we often find ourselves in transition, struggling to let go of what once was and yet not ready to embrace what could be. We are in tension: The old will no longer do, but we aren’t sure that what comes next will be better and more true than what we leave behind. We sit uncomfortably between the familiar and the unknown, longing to feel as certain and sure as we once were.

In truth, life is comprised of many of these liminal spaces between being and becoming. We struggle to embrace what they have to teach us because we long for certainty, for assurance, for there to be no gray, only black and white. It’s in our nature to want to see six steps ahead, to predict, to control, to minimize risk, and to believe we have all the answers. It feels safer that way. But certitude and control only lead to stagnation and decay.

Nature shows us another way, a way of surrender that leads to transformation. 

Whenever we find ourselves between here and not yet, standing on the threshold of knowing and unknowing, we are in divine time. It is here in this necessary time between times that we learn to surrender, coming to grips with our finitude and our inability to really know or control anything. And as much as we’d rather skip this step, to go directly from death to rising, we dare not. In fact, nature shows us that we cannot. 

Like the Hawthorn, who will not be rushed but rather trusts in her Creator to gently invite her into a new season of life, trust that you too are being led forward into a new season of growth, change, and renewal. Instead of resisting this liminal space, rest in it. Sit in hopeful expectation that a great work in your life has already begun, you just may not know it yet. 

The next time we find ourselves in liminal space, may we abide there for a while, embracing unknowing and finding contentment in simply being. 

For some of you, transition and change aren’t new. You’ve already experienced liminal spaces in your spiritual life. What was it like? What did you learn from it? What will you do differently the next time you find yourself there? Shoot an email with your story to info@sophiasociety.org so we can learn from your experience. 

And to encourage you the next time you find yourself in the uncertain or unfamiliar, I offer the poem below as a reminder of the beauty we find when we stop struggling and surrender. 

Learning to wait,

Gary Alan

A Poem for Liminal Space

Like Spring secretly at work within the heart of Winter,
below the surface of our lives
huge changes are in fermentation.
We never suspect a thing.
Then when the grip of some
long-enduring winter mentality
begins to loosen,
we find ourselves
vulnerable
to a flourish
of possibility

and we are suddenly negotiating
the challenges
of a threshold…

At any time you can ask yourself:
At which threshold am I now standing?
At this time in my life, what am I leaving?
Where am I about to enter?

A threshold is not a simple boundary;
it is a frontier
that divides two different territories,
rhythms, and atmospheres.

Indeed, it is a lovely testimony
to the fullness and integrity
of an experience or a stage of life
that it intensifies toward the end
into a real frontier
that cannot be crossed
without
the heart being passionately
engaged and
woken up.

At this threshold
a great complexity of emotion
comes alive:
confusion,
fear,
excitement,
sadness,
hope.

This is one of the reasons
such vital crossings
were always clothed in ritual.

It is wise in your own life
to be able to recognize and acknowledge
the key thresholds;
to take your time;
to feel all the varieties of presence
that accrue there;
to listen inward
with complete attention
until you hear 
the inner voice
calling you
forward:

The time has come
to cross.

Excerpted from John O'Donohue's To Bless the Space Between Us and put into verse here.

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