Those of you who know my story from ‘Under the Witz Mountain’ will not be surprised I find life a bit ambiguous. There is a perfectly fine English word that is almost not part of the American language. The word is liminal, and means living on an edge, at a threshold, and between two places or two states. The Witz Mountain book takes place in a liminal space, between Christian and Mayan, the living and the dead. I have a hunch, though I am no professor, that the word limbo has to do with the luminal, a place that is not earth or heaven, a place that is nowhere, a place for waiting. A Catholic book says limbo is the edge of hell.
I see us all as liminal beings. We live every day between joy and sadness, relaxation and anxiety, anger and grace, and, like under the mountain itself, between life and death. At least in the western culture, the thinking that came with the Spanish and, for the North Americans, the English, this is not part of the thinking. There must be a part of our mind that tricks us into thinking we are not in this liminal space. It’s the same part of the mind that is hit daily with random light particles and sound waves and chemicals in the air, and turns the chaos into a stable illusion as familiar as a faded photograph. The world we see is not the world we live in, but it’s one we’re comfortable with.
This same brain creates the illusion that if we are alive in the morning we will be alive in the evening. If we go to bed moving all our arms and legs we will wake up moving them. It’s a preposterous assumption, but we don’t think twice about it. It’s the illusion they call ego, that we are discrete men and women, dots and dashes, moving smoothly through time.
It’s not that God is dead. God never existed in our illusion. Right now I am sitting with my feet in a pool of water. The water is warm. My back is against a flat rock. The rock is cool. This moment is a liminal space, the edge between past and future. Almost nobody lives here. The English word liminal is not even in my American dictionary. Every time I type it, my spell-check turns it into ‘Luminal.’ We live in that other world, the virtual space of the ego, a place where God-Ahaw, who lives only in the real moment, never existed. And never will (so stop looking at the sky).
My mama used to quote scripture. ‘Don’t be anxious for tomorrow’. I see her at the pila washing the same skirt her mother washed, humming while she worked. ‘Tomorrow will be anxious for itself’. I thought it was so sad, the washing that never ended, but she was in her moment. There is nothing in the moment that can make you anxious, not even a reminder that the world illusion might crumble to dust.
Of course it might.
