Of Thresholds and Change….

We are on the threshold of so much these days…the beginning of summer, the re-opening of the world.  The turning of the year…

The poet Gregory Orr tells us to pay very close attention to our thresholds, for it is there that we can discover the richest concentration of possibility and new life.  When viewed in this way, the times we are in offer us all that we need to navigate the change we want to see — in ourselves and in the worlds close to us.

Orr instructs us that it is good to linger on the threshold, to get one’s bearings, grow familiar with the terrain, before rushing into new spaces too quickly.

Here is Orr on thresholds:

In the ceaseless interplay of disorder ad order in our daily life, it is possible (and important) to imagine that there are certain situations where this unstable interaction can be held for a moment in steady state.  One such suspended moment is the poem, which freeze-frames the interplay as language so that we can contemplate it, feel it, ad concentrate on it.

[I would add that prayer and deep contemplative silence do this as well.]

The shape of a doorframe…represents a powerful architecture – during earthquakes, people are advised to stand in doorways because they are stronger and safer than anyplace else in a house…When we are at an existential or psychological edge, the instability of subjectivity is potentially as dangerous as the chaos of a minor earthquake, and the rectangular shape of the page with its poem [or painting] can be as reassuring as the doorframe in which we seek shelter.

The threshold is a place of transition; as such, it is a place of enormous vitality and activity as well as danger.  Science provides its own analogue to thresholds – seething biologists call the ‘margin effect,’ which notes that life energy concentrates and is more various at places of transition.  Most marine life-forms inhabit the edges of the sea; more bird and animal species are found in that area where meadow blends with forest.

In our daily lives, the image of the threshold can be useful, too.  The threshold is that place where we become aware that we are on the borderline between disorder and order…

On a day-to-day basis our threshold is constantly shifting and disappearing and being repressed out of anxiety, whereas in poetry [or prayer, or art] we seek out poems that can take us to our threshold (or one of our thresholds).  It is just such a place were we feel most alive, whee both exchange of energy and change itself can happen.  It is on a threshold, at the edge, where we are most able to alter our understanding of the world and of our own lives in it.

(from Poetry as Survival, by Gregory Orr)

My prayer as we enter summer is that we find our thresholds and greet them with gladness, for it is here that we will discover the next steps beckoning us on our journeys.

Namaste.