Post-liminality

The last six months of my life have been turmoil. They’ve also been weirdly productive. And I don’t mean productive the the corporate American work ethos sense of the word, but in the sense that things were flowing, and I handled what I had to handle, and I was fairly calm the entire time.

You have moments in your life where there’s a before and an after, and I’m moving into an after. And it’s fine. It’s one of those things that comes for us all.

I temporarily relocated to the Pine Barrens for two months – an area of southern New Jersey that is very rural and will stay that way thanks to being protected. When you think of exotic plants, do you think of New Jersey? I don’t either. But this place is otherwordly and strange. Eugenicists did studies there in the early 20th century. It was home to moonshiners. It is home to the Jersey Devil and the Black Dog. There’s a lore to the place, but you don’t need to live there to feel it. Just drive through it – the unmarked roads and homemade billboards, how empty it is at certain times. It’s a beautiful place, and unsettling.

When I was there, I was divided. I had a lot I had to do, and I needed to wander a bit. I went to the marshes, to places connected to my childhood. I looked around at things I don’t normally notice – that’s a thing you do more as you get older. I remembered things that I’d forgotten.

And then something triggered – for the second time in a year – and I had this absolute outpouring of new writing. I published a poem from one of them (Last Leaves, Issue 9, page 16 – the Feral edition, appropriately enough.) The outpourings came from something interesting both times – the realization that I needed to dig in and grapple with something, really get dirty and roll around with it, instead of moving past it. Dive into the depths. Wrestle with it. Fuck it if I need to. Get drunk and dance with it. The sort of demon-wrangling you can only do if you’re willing to stand in front of the mirror and invite it in.

The first demon turned into a swamp and snaked around in the mud with me for a while. This one vacillates between being an ocean and being the wind. They identified as feminine both times, and they’re origin stories – the origins of different things that took on lives and characters and stories. And you know what both of these things have in common?

Southern New Jersey – marshes and forests, oceans and wind. Clearly I have a setting inside of me that’s become quite lush over the years.

But how all the turmoil moves through that setting, and the shapes it’s taking, the names, what it’s doing, where it’s leading me – that’s been a crossover. That’s part of why I feel myself in an after. You get to a certain age, you can feel things shift.

There’s a lot of befores and afters tumbling around the world right now. We see them everyday, and we are all entwined with our own, and they’re not binary. They seem to be that way, but it’s not a line you step across, and you may not always be firmly in one space or the other. I felt liminal for two months. Now I feel like something is starting to emerge, and I’m not trying to name it or look it in the eyes just yet. These things are wild sometimes, they like to scatter. I’m just letting it happen. I’m trying to hold myself open.