Liminal Space

I've been staring at the same four papers for two hours now. I had big plans arching towards productivity, yet I'm vis-à-vis with piles of what feels like the most repetitive sentence in the world. However, yesterday my little brother called to update me on his new job as a fry cook at a local fast food chain, so I suppose tedium is all relative. 

This time last year I was finishing my Master's thesis, an endeavor that brought me a great deal of meaning, satisfaction, and (dare I say).... enlightenment. A process that, when finished, left me with a deep feeling of vacancy and uneasiness, only to be reclaimed by a desire to continue the journey through the labyrinth of academia. Too many ends were left untied. 

Photo taken by yours truly.
Falcon on Mt. Tamalpais, California.
March 2012.

When honing the "grand claim" of my thesis, I repeatedly returned to the word "space"—space of the city, space of the Russian psyche, space of the text. Sitting in my advisor's office, he scrawled "liminal" in front of "space"—"to reexamine the liminal space of Petersburg by way of the text." I fell in love with that liminal space, and consequently, I find it becoming a reoccurring theme within my own spaces.

The emotional murkiness of the past year has, to be sure, been one that has forced me to reexamine my highly internalized world. I've brought into question a number of things, including my career, work, and future plans. What once brought me a great deal of meaning, both spiritually and emotionally, was gone. Years ago, I chose to reject the spiritual dialectic I was brought up with, and now I find my desire to reexamine the spiritual burgeoning inside of me. I need to reconstruct it for myself. I find myself searching for something, continually reminded of my zeal for the questions, ready to confront them face-to-face. 

The other day, I came across Paul Theroux's 1941 quip, "Travel is only glamourous in retrospect"—A notion that brings to mind my own messy excursions. How terrible I feel when I've been traveling for hours, days, and I smell, and I'm hungry, and I don't speak the language, and the man next to me on the train falls asleep on my shoulder...how I loathe it. How I want to be home with my cat, clean and full. But I return to it. I return to it because I believe I'm going to find something there. I live with the precious and nagging desire to understand the spaces in which I live my life.  

The liminal space. The transitional space. This is where I find myself. Which brings me to the desert.

Several years ago, a beloved French professor incorporated the issues of immigration and borderlands as a theme in her French 202 class. In this, she shared her experiences living and working in various borderlands, particularly her journey on The Migrant Trail: A 75-mile walk from Sásabe, Sonora to Tucson, Arizona. A walk that seeks not to be political, but to walk in solidarity with those who have lost their lives on this trail as well as the families who mourn them. 

Her experiences inspired and encouraged me. She called the desert a "thin place," a space that, as Eric Weiner describes, disorients and confuses. Where  "We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world." 

After four years of considering it, this year I will walk the trail. I am ready. Not only because I believe in the urgency of its cause, but also because I hope to find something within myself in this thin, liminal space.