Liminality

I am in between — wandering a threshold — ghosting through fields of Asphodel — wondering how in the Hades I ended up here.

There are hundreds of Asphodels — the hillside covered in clusters, in colonies, in hordes. How did I not notice them before? Three years on this mountain and this is the first time I’m seeing them — truly seeing them — for what they are.

Markers of a transition — sentinels of a season, shifting.

My seasons are shifting. My skin is breaking open and the buds are emerging and I’m caught between joy and horror. (Do we ever stop changing? Why would we even want to?)

I seem to end up here more often than most, my identity sloughing off in the dark as I crawl my way from room to room, from day to day, from year to year. Or maybe my singularity is an illusion — and I would do better to remember that I am simply human: altered by time.

If I let it change me, will I become more of myself? Layers melting off to reveal something like the core of me: a pit, a stone, a seed.

Springtime has its own kind of grief, and this is it: saying goodbye to numbness and cold; welcoming the painful rushing back of sensation — the pins and needles that follows the thawing.

Change comes, whether we are ready or not. And until then: liminality.