Thresholds
Finding Light In the Between
Here in the northern hemisphere, we have entered the long light, and I’m looking for ways to linger in the wake of the solstice. It’s a small window of time, a threshold: a cluster of days with equal lengths of light—the longest days before darkness encroaches.
A threshold is for portals, and I’m looking for openings. Looking for ways to take in the long light.
Seamus Heaney says in his poem “A Herbal,”
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof,
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.
Sounds easy, but lingering in the between places makes me feel lost. Here goes anyway, with Heaney in mind, to attempt connections between my body and a place.
1. A Dock
At the end of a hot day, my sister and I stood on a village dock, weighing options. The metal ladder had broken and it was visible deep at the bottom of the water. The regular threshold was gone. There were no steps in and no steps out.
The sun sank low and the sidewalks were quiet. We could see our distorted reflections in the rippling tide. Our legs were bare. Our faces, shiny in sweat. There was a lot to let go of.
When we jumped on the count of three, I held my legs, arms, and breath close. There was no noise before the splash. I was in air, the air in me.
2. A Bridge
I took a turn off the road while I walked to the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. It was a narrow path into woods. I didn’t want to veer too far away because I only had so much time before I had to be back at the conference, so I stood on a slatted wooden bridge and listened to water below. It was only a trickle of a stream, and its surface reflected green leaves because the light split through the trees. The leaves gave the stream and me air. The stream and I gave air back.
3. An Edge
I asked the docent at a Wampanoag museum on the edge of the Aquinnah red cliffs what name he calls the island. He said Noepe. Noepe is loosely translated to English as land between water. The fertile land between streams, or maybe between the seas.
The boat ride took almost two hours on the Fast Ferry from Quonset, RI to Oak Bluffs. To get from one side of the island to the other took over an hour on the free public bus. Anyone who lives on the island knows the limits of land.
A video in the museum featured an interview with a tribal member who grew up on Noepe/Martha’s Vineyard. He talked of his deep sense of place on the island—a place he knows intimately with his hands and heart. Place as home. Below this museum are red clay cliffs, and below the cliffs is a beach. It was covered in fog the day I walked there. It was perfect. I stood between the red cliffs and the gray waves. Limited vision. Limited light. Limited sand between the sea and cliffs. When I swam, the edges blurred. The moisture, air, and light were in each other, and I was in it.
4. Slack tide
After the tide’s flood and before its ebb, the water goes still, slack. At this wrack line, on the evening of the new moon in June, just after the solstice, horseshoe crabs hollowed nests in the sand and laid their thousands of blue-green eggs. A horseshoe crab lingered for a moment, in between the tides, in between the sea and land, in between her body and her eggs, and let the moon guide her primal nature. There are decisions to be made at a threshold: what to bring, what to lose. Light. Grief. She had that moment before she covered her eggs and left. She was not lost.
That place in between, both here and there, is open for a moment. Like in Seamus Heaney’s poem, separation disappears. The regrets, the exiled parts of us, the wins: in the long light, the ephemeral light, feelings converge as spaces inside us, and around us, so that everything is understood at once as home.
Beautiful photos to describe feelings, and words to make me think, think about the space around me.
I found this peice moving and exquisite. Thank you.