To my understanding, liminal spaces are just "in betweens" - neither fully one thing nor the other. The edge of a forest is liminal - neither forest nor field. Dusk is liminal - neither night nor day. In a way, we all live in a liminality - we live in "today", which is neither "yesterday" nor "tomorrow", but is constantly shifting from one to the other.
Ancient American Indian concepts included an existence in a liminality - humans live in "the world":, which is neither "The Above World" nor "The Below World", but is in-between those two, neither one nor the other. All 3 Worlds - The Above World, This World, and the Below World - were connected by an "axis mundi" or "world tree", often the cedar tree to Native Americans... which I suppose is probably where the cedar got it's sacred medicine connotations. It could be used to travel from one world to the next, or to send messages between them.
Celtic concepts carried liminality. Samhain, for example, is neither "summer" nor "winter", but the precise point where one flows into the other during the equinox.
Liminality also caries the risk of being "sucked in" to one or the other worlds. Take the edge of an ocean, for instance. It is neither fully "land" nor fully "water, and is in constant motion, moving, churning, changing from one to the other and back again, which carries the risk of water-things being thrown to "land", or of land-things being sucked out to sea, never to be seen again.
Paradoxically perhaps, liminal spaces are both stable in their constant change, and also UN-stable, moving from one to the next and again returning, never staying in one exact state or the other.
Yet we live in liminality... day in and day out, so to speak.
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Ancient American Indian concepts included an existence in a liminality - humans live in "the world":, which is neither "The Above World" nor "The Below World", but is in-between those two, neither one nor the other. All 3 Worlds - The Above World, This World, and the Below World - were connected by an "axis mundi" or "world tree", often the cedar tree to Native Americans... which I suppose is probably where the cedar got it's sacred medicine connotations. It could be used to travel from one world to the next, or to send messages between them.
Celtic concepts carried liminality. Samhain, for example, is neither "summer" nor "winter", but the precise point where one flows into the other during the equinox.
Liminality also caries the risk of being "sucked in" to one or the other worlds. Take the edge of an ocean, for instance. It is neither fully "land" nor fully "water, and is in constant motion, moving, churning, changing from one to the other and back again, which carries the risk of water-things being thrown to "land", or of land-things being sucked out to sea, never to be seen again.
Paradoxically perhaps, liminal spaces are both stable in their constant change, and also UN-stable, moving from one to the next and again returning, never staying in one exact state or the other.
Yet we live in liminality... day in and day out, so to speak.
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