[It’s April! This post is about March. It’s a few weeks late, because, well, I am busy and a little lazy, which I wear as a badge of honor sometimes in our culture. This article kicks off my commitment to posting 4x a year during the transitional months—March, June, September, and December. The times of in-between seasons, solstices and equinoxes, offering an opportunity to deepen our relationship with liminality/threshold/in-between in our lives.]
March can be a difficult month for me. I want to say that I feel tender and openhearted by the sweet signs of spring, by the crocuses and the daffodils, and that I love the feeling of being a metaphorical seed waiting to bloom, but I don’t necessarily.
As a long-time resident of the Pacific Northwest, I generally feel impatient for the sun and in need of its vibrancy this time of year. I get anxious about whatever is about to bloom in the spring and summer of my life. I mostly feel uncomfortable.
I was noting this discomfort on a recent call with colleagues, expounding on the fact that, in addition to this transitional seasonal discomfort, I was feeling agitated by the general in-betweenness of everything in my life: being middle aged, raising a middle schooler, transitioning from student to practitioner, attending to my mother in her transitional time from life to end-of-life. Everywhere I look is transition to transition.
My kvetching went on without much self-awareness until one of my colleagues and friend gently began to reflect to me that I seemed to be struggling with the liminal space of all the thresholds in my life. She recommended a TedTalk by Sarah Sawin Thomas who speaks of our lives as a series of moving from threshold to threshold, through the myth of Demetra and Persephone.
It wasn’t until I watched the video that the irony of my complaining hit me. My friend was reflecting to me the very language I use on this website to describe my intention for this work. Threshold is literally the name of this endeavor and I write of meeting you in liminal spaces where healing occurs. Can I be present with this (what feels like endlessly) transitional time of my life long enough to see its gifts in the very way I invite clients to do the same in liminal space?
I deeply love the liminality that somatic sessions invoke. We fall in between time together, where sometimes we touch on something that waits in the dark for me, you, us to see it. But I know the path there can be uncomfortable. Can you sit with the discomfort, the sadness, the joy, the grief long enough to illuminate the truth of what is there. Can I?
As some of us move through middle age, I feel we are uniquely poised to feel and document the discomfort and contentment of this middle time between the two main eras of our lives. I mean, all this shaping and squeezing into new form must be for something, right?
At some point, hopefully, we will pass on to the next stage of living and the sharpness of sensations of this middle time might fade. I sometimes wonder if this is the difficult magic of this middle age: the sometimes-relentless feeling of passing through a threshold. Or moving from one to the next to the next.
We live in a society that has been grossly inept at marking times of transition. Rites of passages are something we must (and luckily in some circles) make up. We are just now learning as a society to mark the time of (peri)menopause. Maybe this cultural awakening for women’s transition will lead us to all the other rites of passages we have missed collectively, like adolescence and dying.
In the meantime, I was recently soothed by one of my training teachers, Dohee Lee, and her explanation of the Earth element in the Chinese five-element system. Within the five-element system, each element has a corresponding season that signifies certain properties of living. Within this seasonal system, the Earth element represents the transitions in between each season, winter to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall and fall to winter.
The Earth element also represents the womb, the digestive system, grounding, and containment. Essentially, as we move through transitional times, we are also contained within the loving and accepting presence of Mother Earth.
As I sit with this seasonal metaphor and think of myself held by mother energy, it’s easier to feel the gentle rocking of the in-between, back and forth between the polarities I currently inhabit: young and old, mother and closer to empty-nester, student and teacher, daughter and griever.
I am also feeling the need to revisit my relationship to March, to the intense in-betweenness of this time of year, marking the transition between winter and spring, and the dark seasons and the light ones.
As I sit here at my desk, the sun streams in through the window and warms my face. Its warmth is gone as a cloud passes over it and then warms my face again, as the cloud floats away. We dip in and out of winter and spring as it transitions, reminding us of the cadence of being able to be with all thresholds—in and out of the darkness and light as we land, a bit more settled, somewhere in between.