Honour the space between no longer and not yet. Nancy Levin
Liminal space has its root from the Latin ‘limen’ or threshold. It is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next’, a place of transition, a season of waiting, and not knowing. It is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.
Historically it was used to depict a phase in a hero or heroine’s journey. More recently, the concept has been adopted to represent potent spaces of transformation when an individual, group or culture is no longer in a previous state but is not yet in the new state; when old ways of being no longer work but the new ways have not yet emerged.
Liminal spaces exist solely to be travelled through but not lingered in. Physical examples include corridors, hotels and roads. In our lives, rites of passage between teens and adulthood or pregnancy. Franciscan friar Richard Rohr states that This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealising normalcy. These thresholds are inevitable and disruptive.
The magic lies in between things. Charles De Ling
When there is no possibility of retreat we will find the innovation that only the liminal situation can bring. In short we find the leap of faith. Alan Hirsch and be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to accept the life that is waiting for us. Joseph Campbell