threshold
Sometimes, it feels as though threshold is the word running through everything I write. For today’s word meditation, I have gathered, from a post I wrote some years ago, two of my favorite images on thresholds:
In any new journey, there is a threshold-a line, a border or edge, a gate, a doorway, a bridge, a passageway, a span of time, or set of behaviors- that lies between the old, familiar, known world and the new, unknown world. Because thresholds are the first step into the unknown, they can evoke fear, doubt, and anxiety. Whether thresholds are physical spaces or measured in time or behaviors, they are liminal (Latin ‘limen’ or ‘limin’=threshold) or transitional spaces: a lot of change is happening here. I remember traveling in trains whose compartments were linked by accordion-like connectors that passengers used to cross into the next compartment. Because the connectors were made of rubber or some other soft material, they shook when you walked through them, and felt unstable and unsafe. I imagine that’s what a threshold feels like.
What if, next time you are faced with a personal threshold of change, you imagine a lily pond in the very center of a dark forest? The forest is shrouded in the silence of dusk, yet another liminal time. The water of the lily pond is still except for the occasional ruffle caused by darting small fish. Hundreds of lily pads cover part of the water’s surface, forming a precarious dark green island. Slender yellow-pink lily buds stand proudly in the middle of inky black-green. The buds are tightly closed, like a clenched fist unwilling or unable to soften. The entire scene looks like something straight out of a painting. But the magic isn’t only in the setting. Every time you venture upon a new life threshold, what if you imagined that a lily bud in the pond in the middle of the forest softens. And in the dark of the night, the water lily blooms. When you hold that image, and place a hand on your heart, you might experience that same softening, as though you, too, are a waterlily on the verge of blossom.
What does the word threshold bring up for you?
Lovely reflections, Priya.
I feel like I vaguely remember reading the first one from a while back, which was cool.
The immediate thing that comes to mind when I think of thresholds is simply what I’m going through now, which is too much to explain here. But what I thought second was that, I guess, in some way, we’re always moving between one threshold or another depending on what we’re considering :)
This is beautiful, Priya. The image of the "accordion-like connectors" as threshold feels so true to lived experience — that strange in-between where the old reality no longer fully holds, but the new one has not yet become solid beneath our feet.
And I loved the water lily metaphor. It reframes thresholds not simply as crossings to endure, but as moments of psychic and spiritual softening — perhaps even an initiation.
Maybe every authentic threshold asks something in us to unclench before we can blossom into the next becoming♥️🔥🙏