Navigating Liminal Space
In the past few weeks I have found my self contemplating liminal space much of the time. This Mercury retrograde has been surprisingly chaotic for me in a manner I didn't anticipate as it wasn’t hitting anything in my chart directly. Yesterday, I finally realized that in many ways it was, no surprise, mirroring my internal state: At the border; betwixt and between.
As with many of my clients the past year has been a time of intense change for me. Navigating the path of my life as it unfolds (much of which delights me even in its unfamiliarity) I have tried to meet myself with compassion as I move through the experience of grief after losing my mother last October. And as I have indicated before my chart is undergoing multiple transits which basically means there has been a great deal of ongoing change and upheaval, much of it internal but like many of you it also has been profoundly experienced in my outer world as well.
When we speak of yearning for change often we are most often speaking about the outer world. We want the new job, the new lover, the new adventure. In other words we want the outer world to change to suit our needs. But the truth is sustained change in the outer world only happens when we shift internally. It is when our relationship with ourselves shifts that everything moves and readjusts in a lasting way that mirrors our inner experience.
To create the type of metamorphosis from which the butterfly emerges we have to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. With the unfamiliar, the unknown, it is here that we have to learn how to abide. At the end of the known, we are left trembling at the brink. Either we leap forward into the unknown, or we fall back into the safety of the familiar. We have to relearn how to move along and cherish the unknown path in front of us
Ironically of course most of the time we are living completely in the unknown but pretend it isn’t so. We assume we know how any given day will unfold, we have plans. We have an agenda that we tend to really dislike having to modify because of the unexpected. We really do for all of our protests like the familiar. It’s comfortable. As Dr Maya Angelou said “The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.”
The truth is every moment is liminal. We are always moving from one space into the next. Mercury, who is one of the God’s of Thresholds epitomizes that movement…he has wings on his feet, ever in motion.
The Roman God Janus, whom the month January is named after, had two faces. One faced the past and the other the future. As the God of transitions and thresholds (he ruled bridges, doorways and archways)Janus traversed the conceptual space between the mundane and the sacred. He is the god of infinite possibility oversaw all first steps and was always invoked to ensure safe passage.
Mercury stations and goes direct this Sunday, October 2. Through mid month we have a brief window in-between the end of this retrograde before we have the first of two eclipses on October 25 and Mars goes retrograde on October 30 (Though Mars is already slowing) and does return to direct motion until January 12.
It is a time of change. A time of the unexpected delays. Of changing plans and crossing thresholds.
The year it has become my spiritual practice to try to occupy liminal space open heartedly. To be able to trust how my life is unfolding and move with the flow, the pulse calling me forward, rather than trying to control how I think it should be based on my past experiences and expectations. And to be frank there are many moments where I get to practice a lot. Hence the chaotic Mercury retrograde, I was having trouble trusting the current moment, and then the next one after that. Mercury the magician made this clear through happenstance, one relatively minor inconvenience after another. Life is always full of synchronicities that support us we just have to pay attention.
Life, like our astrological chart, is an eternal circle, an ouroboros, an ongoing transition between endings and beginnings. As we move forward into October and the last quarter of 2022 I call upon Janus to bless all of us safe passage through all of our own transitions.
