Life on the Edge of Things

 Lately, I've been listening to a song on repeat -  Mipso's "Coming Down the Mountain."

In the song, (written post election!) the speaker's overwhelm urges her to pack up her stuff, leave her community behind and head off into the mountains alone. There, she surrounds herself with beauty: waters for fishing, fields of rhododendrons, and solitude. 

Listening to this song over and over, it occurred to me that I'm stuck on the invitation at the core of her story. It's more than the slow and folksy melody that makes me daydream about moving to the mountains. It's the deep, pit-of-my-stomach, irresistible resonance I feel when I listen: Yes, please. I need that. I long to check out - I long for a break from my pain, my sleepless nights and my hurting body.

Mountains, leaving, retreat and change are all on my mind, of course, because I've just returned from vacation in Asheville, a magical mountain town in the Appalachians. Our time in Asheville felt like a long, much needed exhale, and it stirred up some new things in me.

I love traveling because of how it offers a unique bird's eye view on life back home. In Asheville, I could see clearly how I'm living in liminal space, straddling the world of the healthy and the kingdom of the sick. One evening we drove out to the majestic New Belgium Brewery, which is like a DisneyLand for beer people. (I don't drink, but my sweetheart is beer fanatic, so I try to be a good sport.) Sitting there on the patio, I felt especially on the edge of things, feeling worlds apart from my happy and tipsy bar fellows. I felt the tension of looking healthy, yet feeling consumed with fatigue. Belonging but also so very separate. 

Liminal space (from the Latin limen for "threshold") is the territory between who stages, rooms or experiences. One might experience liminal space during big life transitions: the birth of a child, a new job, and, of course, during illness. These experiences shake us up from our cultural sleepwalking, which is why most people who are chronically ill or face ongoing adversity tend to be ultimately more wise, tender and awake than most - if they can accept life's invitation to grow and change. All great transformation happens in liminal space.

I have read that some native peoples call liminal space "crazy time." It's the space between the destruction of an old way, and the invitation to enter a genuinely new and creative thing. Inevitably, liminal space hurts. It's always uncomfortable, and there's always an push to hurry back to normalcy once the dust has settled.

But for a lot of people with ongoing health challenges, the dust never settles. Some are stuck betwixt and between for years and years, and one's quality of life depends on how she relates to her "crazy time."

Last November, I met a wonderful woman at a conference in Cincinatti. Wendy was also living in liminal space - her daughter was really, really sick - and we were energetically attracted to each other with a magnetic force. We ate almost all of our meals together. 

"You know," Wendy told me, "people spend lots of money and travel to India to get what you have." After living in an ashram for seven years, she knows a thing or two about the spiritual life.

"Look at you," she said. "Everything about you is real. You are wise beyond your years. I know it hurts so much live here, but you are wide awake to life."

Just like that, she shifted my "crazy time" into sacred time.

When I listened to "Coming Down the Mountain"  this morning for the hundredth time, I loved it for being a song about leaving, but also a song about coming back. With each listen, I accept that no mountain town or wildflower field will ever take me as deep as the of experience living in this body, in this moment, with this grace. 

Peace to all those who hurt, ache and long to leave. May you fall in love with your life on the edge of things.

xo