Daily Archives: September 30, 2014

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Travel

Liminal consciousness

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Fall                                                                               Falling Leaves Moon

Carlsbad Entrance from the twilight zone. Beyond this point there is no natural light.
Carlsbad Entrance from the twilight zone. Beyond this point there is no natural light.

Stood tonight, arms on our mantel place, a fire crackling below me, wondering. What will I lean against this time next year? Will I hear wind coming down the mountain, the bugling of elks, the cough of a mountain lion? There might be frost on the plants outside and a chilly night ahead.

This is not I wish I would still be here kind of wondering, nor is it I wish I knew where we’ll be next year. It’s just curiosity, a sort of advance scouting. If all goes well, by this time next year-in the Great Wheel season of Mabon, a bit more than a week after the fall equinox-we should have been in our new place for over half a year. Strange to consider that.

Liminal consciousness. It arises when we know a transition is upon us, a time when we are no longer where we were, nor are we where we’re going. The weeks before a marriage. The summer after graduating from high school. Pregnancy. Interviewing for a new job. Getting ready to move to another place. In the broadest and most ultimate sense of course life is a liminal moment between birth and death. Liminal consciousness arises when we wake up to our condition.

Tonight, on our fire place mantel, I woke up again to the physical sense of moving and of

Angled window close up Chaco Canyon
Angled window close up
Chaco Canyon

having been moved. That awareness gripped me and I lived in it fully, not for long, not in a wistful way, but I was in it. Now that moment is in the past and I’m in Minnesota, with moving tasks and daily life here capturing and holding my attention. As is appropriate.

But stay aware for those moments of liminal consciousness. When they come, they have learnings for you.

 

Great Work, Latin, The Move, Translating De Bello Gallico

Slowed

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Fall                                                                            Falling Leaves Moon

Been moving at a reduced pace the last four days. Latin each day, getting further into Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Today he set out on a characteristic fast march from Rome to protect “our province”, a part of which is now Provence, from marauding Helvetians. Whom he’d set up with a betrayal by a wealthy leader of their people, Orgetorix. This is the war when Caesar, in the ever expanding effort of Rome to secure its borders, bleeds himself into world history. He speaks of himself in the third person.

Beyond the Latin, not so much else. Picked a few raspberries. Electrified the visible fence. (Kate says I should call it the invisible fence, except I didn’t bury it, I strung it on an existing fence line.)

Finished up the Southern Reach trilogy. Not sure how I felt about it. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it might have been good. In essence it presents an alien invasion that is so alien we can’t even be sure we’ve been invaded. Its central idea, that an alien might come to earth in a way so outside our experience that we would have difficulty recognizing it, seems valid to me. Anyhow. Check it out or not.

Watching the news, picking up positive threads about the environment. Bill McKibben’s 350 organization’s 400,000 person march in NYC was good news. Increasing public disapproval of the Polymet mine project is another. Coal seems to have been knocked back on its heels, at least here in Minnesota and by Obama’s actions, in the rest of the country. Little El Hierro has gone 100% renewable as did the Danish island of Samsø. Even the President’s decision to reach out to a smaller club of wealthy countries for action on carbon emissions is a positive sign, maybe the most positive of all these.

Still, as a Sierra Club staffer said when I gave her the same list, “Yeah, but doesn’t it make you nervous?” She’s right. Gaining ground would be so unfamiliar to us that we might make mistakes. But we have to take the risk that our message might finally be gaining in both public and political circles.

Feeling like I might get back to the packing side tomorrow. Clean up some clutter left behind after the SortTossPack push. Vet yet more files. Pack photographs, office supplies. There’s still more to go.