The Terrifying Possibility of Everything

Posted on July 2, 2012 by ann

A while ago, I wrote about the void I felt creeping in my awareness. I am now fully engulfed by it and it has a name: liminality. It seems there are many people who have experienced this, too. The internet makes one feel less and less alone.

Modern liminality rests on the idea that we can, at times, occupy a space in between binaries. As I shift about within this liminal space, I find it is bottomless and vast. I don’t know whether I am moving forward or backwards, fast or slow, or if I am simply standing still. It’s almost as terrifying as standing in an empty, wide, white-walled room.

Stephanie from The Little Way captures the exact way I feel when she writes:

You realize you are in liminal space when you have left something behind, but you haven’t entered into something new yet. You find yourself sitting, cross-legged, on the threshold of life. It’s not that you wouldn’t move forward, if there was something to move into. There just isn’t another door, another road, another ship. It’s just you and the moment you’re sitting on.

It’s heady stuff, this liminal space: a bit like being under water, except there is no pressure of the wet to remind you that you exist. It’s easy to get breathless and overwhelmed by the feeling of somethingness.

While searching around for somewhere to place my foot, I realized I’ve always dwelt in this liminal space. This time around the awareness is magnified by experience, but when I look at marginality as a form of the liminal space, as George P Hansen writes in “Ghosts and Liminality: A Brief Introduction“, I understand I have always dwelt in the margins. I have always been slightly outside of everything, an observer and sometimes even a mere subject allowing things to happen to me because I could not find solid matter to form my own existence.

And that’s the terrifying moment in all of this. In this liminal space, between what was and what is, there is the possibility of what can be and that is everything. All of the utmost and purest good in this world exists in liminality along with every unmitigated evil. And even the ambivalent mix of the two exists in its own recursive liminality.

For a long moment, it becomes difficult to breathe.

When I begin to make form, what will I create? Where will I end up? And when?

Stephanie’s blog post is reassuring. “Dream holy and terrifying dreams,” she writes. And I have. And I will.

“For now, embrace it. Know that God is in the waiting.”

And so, let us wait.

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