She Took A Face From The Ancient Gallery And She…

Knocking…

A friend recently wrote a great post about saying “yes”, and it got me to thinking about accepting, seeking and knocking. My own form of spirituality is most frequently practiced while wandering in natural areas. Doors have opened to me there of their own volition. But sometimes, a person has to knock. Is it always a good idea to knock on a door? It’s a gamble, isn’t it? And when we are talking elements, spirits and gods, who knows what may be behind the door—one thing is probably for sure, though. We may not know who or what is behind the door we knock on, but it is very likely that the entity knows who we are.

Lately, in a stretch of forest I frequent, I have heard knocking. And the creak of opening doors. In an outer sense, these sounds are probably woodpeckers and tree trunks in the wind. In an inner sense I feel it’s a call. A call to knock on some doors myself.

Arcane Thrifting

One of my liminal practices is thrifting. Thrift stores themselves are liminal zones—a central place where a stream of items with a variety of histories arrives from former homes and incarnations and then departs to different homes and new usages. I thrift for several different reasons—as a hobby, for income purposes, to find things I need and…for magical purposes.  I’ll give an example: shortly before starting this blog I found myself in a thrift with a friend and I was attracted to a large pile of black and white vintage photos. I picked them up and was looking at them with partial attention, as I was listening to my friend talk about a doll she had as a child. As I stood there, one photo dropped out of the pile I had in my hands and drifted to the floor, landing face up at my feet. I gasped aloud. All of the sudden I couldn’t even hear what my friend was saying. I just stared at this picture on the floor. It was a visual distillation of all of the thoughts I had been turning over in my head about liminality, passageways, and the “haunted child” concept. This one thing, out of the gazillions of things in the store, had made itself known to me. It was the only thing I took home that day but it had a profound effect on me, as it prompted me to start this blog and move forward on my ideas about liminality. I never go into a thrift store with the idea that “I’m going to have a mystical experience!” It just happens. I am however, always open to the experience.  Whether it is a spiritual outcome, as in the account above, or a commerce related outcome, like the time I suddenly veered off course (“heeding the call” as long-time thrifters say) to go to a tiny resale store and found a cache of rare prints, it pays to listen to subconscious directives. This attention and openness to the magical flow that is around us, even in what first appears to be a mundane setting (a dingy thrift store, a highway underpass, a small city park), is the basis for a very powerful spiritual practice.

Entranced at the Entrance

Entrance—entranced. How close those words are. One day I stood at the opening of a bracken tunnel in the woods, spellbound by it’s shadowy interior, not moving, not speaking, not thinking, just seeing.  Everything came down to that entrance and everything around it became soft-focus. I stared for a second, or perhaps, I stared for an hour. The thing happened where time was distorted and I had no purchase in the solid world.

When I finally left the woods I found that, instead of the 45 min or so that I thought I had been gone, I was gone for three hours. Did I spend that entire time staring at a fern-lined hole in the earth? I don’t even know. Old fairy tales are full of accounts of mortals falling into the land of the Good People and thinking they had only been there for a day—only to find when they returned to their own world that hundreds of years had gone by. Contemporary science fiction (and even scientific theory) is full of stories of worm holes and time travel where the passage of time is warped and incredible things can happen. These days, much is made of the state of “flow” where a person is engaged in something they are deeply interested in, or feel a great affinity for, and the concept of the passage of time ceases to exist. Do we speak to the gods and spirits in these timeless, shifting spaces? We are entranced by them at the entrance to their world. And sometimes, we enter.

Area X

I recently finished “Acceptance” the final book in Jeff Vandermeer’s trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) about Area X and the Southern Reach. This trilogy deeply impacted me. It has been classified as horror, fantasy, science fiction, and an environmental manifesto, and I can see all of these things in the books. For example, there is a strong flavor of Lovecraft in the trilogy, especially of my favorite Lovecraft story “The Mountains of Madness”, but without the florid language and overwhelming unease with nature that you can often find in Lovecraft’s writing. As far as environmental/societal commentary, that is obviously in the books as well, and the author states that he garnered some ideas out of the French anarchic Semiotic(e) tract, “The Coming Insurrection”.  Personally, I am less interested in the horror/science fiction/societal aspects of the books than I am in the fact that this trilogy is an amazing exploration of liminal spaces and psychotopography.

Briefly, if you haven’t read these books (and I won’t spoil it), the story centers around a geographical/dimensional anomaly that has suddenly appeared in the southern US. This anomaly is termed “Area X” and access to it is closed off by the government. There is a “Border” that must be crossed to get into Area X and interesting and often terrible things happen to the people who cross it. The government has been sending expeditions into Area X, but everyone dies or becomes…different. Inside Area X the landscape is reverting back to a pre-human state. And it’s spreading.

The Border is an amazing depiction of a liminal zone and in the second book, “Authority”, there is even an evocative theme of white rabbits, an echo of Wonderland. There is also a central character called Ghost Bird who is a biologist and whose husband dies due to an expedition into Area X. She signs up for a subsequent expedition. What happens to her, and her observations throughout the books, are for me, a deeply resonating distillation of the concept of psychogeography/topography.

I don’t want to reveal anything more about the story so I won’t go further—the entire trilogy was put out just this year. But, I did notice that there are plans for a movie, at least of the first book “Annihilation”, so you’d best read it soon if you want to get a jump on the movie. On a final note, the cover illustrations for these books are amazing—they are done by Eric Nyquist.

the passageway

I had walked by the passageway for more than a decade, aware, but not fully engaged.

I heard the whispering, the sighing, the chittering. And once, I briefly stepped in. The ground was wriggling with hundreds of black and yellow caterpillars. I turned and fled.

Then one day, the whispers became commands and outstretched hands. I was entranced by the wild music of the moss, the leaves and the shimmering edges of the trees. My ingress was quick and I was in deep.

I was lost…but I was found.