Liminal

6 July 2020

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.

https://www.definitions.net/definition/liminality

Clouds are liminal markings of my transition

A dictionary definition for (my fascination with) clouds may read as follows: “a visible mass of condensed (soul) floating in the atmosphere”……..

I once read somewhere that liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ The liminality of my transition started long before I became aware of it. This liminal space of condensed ‘nothingness’ started with a slow awareness of the sky above me. I started looking up compulsively searching for clouds. The fascinating, floating masses of everchanging beauty could not escape my eyes. Flux became part of me. It was, unknowingly, the only escape my soul and subconscious was capable of for years. I needed not to have had knowledge of the ‘next’ – the universe already did.

I became mesmerised by clouds. I still am.

My camera roll is filled with clouds….. not memories, people or places: mainly clouds. People started talking to me about clouds, cloud formations, sunrises, sunsets, and of course storms. I became the ‘cloud lady’. People sent me pictures of clouds. My social media status evolved around the habit of looking up. I now realise why: I could not make myself look down, forward, or backward. Only upward. Something compelled me to capture a moment, a feeling that I could not grasp: an instantaneous moment of escaping into a dream. I became the queen of this hopeless, beautiful obsession that kept my soul from disappearing.

This I know now. Not then.

In this blog I will attempt to share the story of my obsession, and the realisation of its liminal value.