Feeling the season of transitions and thresholds

Georges Island, in Halifax harbour, at the threshold of the Atlantic Ocean and historically a place of transition for prisoners of war and displaced Acadians.

I’m coming to the end of my year, and all my travel is finished. I have a few small paying gigs left this month, all of which are online. My autumn has been much busier than usual, with much more travel and in person hosting that has been the practice. I am entering into a delightful period of darkness and expansiveness. The secular world calls this time “Christmas” but the Christian world knows it as Advent, and it’s the perfect liturgical season for the rhythms of life in the northern hemisphere. And it invites us into the waiting, the not-knowing, the hope that light will return again, even as we have the knowledge that it indeed will, perhaps the faith that it will.

Simon Goland writes about thresholds and transitions today:

We often treat transitions like an inconvenient pause between the “real” parts of life. But in truth, these are the moments that sculpt us. When the familiar dissolves, we are invited into an apprenticeship with the unknown.

And the unknown is a surprisingly good teacher.

It teaches us to notice the small, quiet signs, the ones we habitually and often overlook. It teaches us to trust our deeper intelligence – the one that lives in the body, not the mind. It teaches us that clarity is something that emerges, not something we manufacture.

Transitions whisper, “Slow down. Something important is trying to find you.”

He and I share a love of these moments. In human life, there are few universals across cultures, but the deep meaning of times and spaces of change and transition seems to pass through every culture and community and every person I have ever met. The heart is triggered to experience grief and loss while also preparing to meet what comes. Faith is acute in these moments, and hope is born in these moments. There is nervousness, and a sense that we aren’t in control of what happens next. The art is to stay with it and that requires a practice. And that is why we don special clothing, sings special songs, engage in special rituals, to mark the moment as sacred, to hold on and to savour this incredibly special nature of time and space.

Peter Rukavina explores this is a grounded way with his description of going to a Chivas cup match in Guadalajara last week. Going to a big match in a new country is always an intimidating experience but even more so if football and football culture is totally new to you. It’s interesting to read all the ways he prepared for this threshold crossing so that he could rest in, as much as possible, the enjoyment of what was to come.

I could read poems, stories and blog posts about thresholds all day long. I have always been entranced by crossings and how people make sense of them. An obsession like that means that you see them everywhere. I would almost say that the impetus to write stems from confronting a threshold. It brings us to a creative moment. If you are an artist, you make sense of that moment with your medium of choice. So, here is yet another reflection on thresholds, from more than a year ago, from my Bowen Island neighbour Shari Ulrich.