Liminal Spaces | Sarah Sawin Thomas | TEDxLincoln

[Music] so the ancient Greek myth tells us Persephone was going about her normal life when suddenly the ground caved and swallowed her whole once underground she scanned the disorienting scene but could recognize no familiar landmarks no ways to apply existing logic and organization to this space all at once it seemed Persephone's life was lost to disruption and dislocation where she found herself in a liminal space a murky place between where she once was and where she had yet to go marked by exceptional disruption to the familiar flow of life naturally she wanted her life back and yet the benefit of sudden transport into unfamiliar places affords us the urgent opportunity to reorient to rise and even transform sure Persephone is an ancient myth and yet we all can relate because we've all been there so the good news about my discovering a non ruptured brain aneurysm is that the condition didn't alert my attention first at the time when the ground caved beneath and seemed to swallow me whole with the news my pre-emptive discovery appeared to be the only good news as an English professor I'm I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I had to really think twice about how to even spell the word aneurysm it was that remote for my radar so I scrambled to read everything I could before I flew to Florida for surgery and I remember feeling hamstrung by the prospect of knowingly and a symptomatically entering a relatively new surgical procedure that could if gone wrong render me disabled at best or if gone right could lead to a fairly uneventful recovery so with that amplified stress I scrambled to go into my headspace the place I grew to trust most and then plunged headlong into an internet wormhole and while I learned all the facts about the procedure factors I floundered and that's because it's in these liminal moments when we're getting ready to cross a major life threshold that it's just not enough to be informed it's not enough to know medical statistics and jargon and the process that will hopefully get us to the other side we think we want knowledge but I would argue that we want to convert that knowledge into understanding and new vision in order to tries so thankfully I kind of settled down a bit and put aside my obsessive internet sleuthing and instead picked up psychiatrist gene Shinoda Bolin's book close to the bone in which she explores the subject of liminality as it relates to life-threatening conditions and mythology actually and here she explores the in-between she says a liminal space is an in-between we occupy in profoundly disorienting circumstances and so with that she further probes this idea of liminal being not an everyday word for a reason it's reserved for the exceptional for when were initiated into questing toward knowing something we didn't know before on a whole body level and while our physical selves lead the way the really tough work I see here is in the interior the interior questing were first we have to pause and really Square with the challenges before us and in that squaring and sit with ourselves and pay attention to the emerging questions that come and when we do that then we're able to potentially reorient to the new normal that we're in and then possibly start to think differently and then create new pathways that are hopefully life-giving so I'd like to ask you to think about the liminal spaces that have opened up in your own lives what what thresholds have you crossed or maybe you were crossing some thresholds right now I'm wondering if they're thresholds that were thrust upon you out of circumstance and maybe were unwanted or maybe they're thresholds that were of your own making because they tend to flow in both ways for instance a few years ago my my father and I entered a limbo space when he learned that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and when the earth opened up and seemed to swallow us whole with that devastating news we really found the need to sit with ourselves and pause and reorient to again our new normal which was seemingly the underworld or the hospice facility and one question that that surfaced early on was is it possible while he's still able and relatively pain-free is it possible to reorient the space in a way that is less about despair and dying and more about living more about purpose and contribution and maybe even communion was that even possible shortly after Valentine's Day a local florist came and brought heaps of book flowers and they were beautiful they just weren't sellable and so she left them on the kitchen counter and naturally the nurses were so over leveraged with critical patient needs that they didn't even notice them and so there they lay for a long time well not one to overlook an ironic situation my father looked at me with a glimmer in his eye at one point and said and thereafter said and I didn't see any DNR directives did you I understand now that in that moment that critical pivotal shifting moment where then we gathered vases picked up our shears arranged the flowers and delivered them to his hospice roommates I realized that this act was as much an act of defiance as an act of love defiance to the the seemingly inevitable net Hospice is a place to come and die only arranging and delivering flowers became a way for us to think differently to create a new pathway a weekly ritual for the florist and for us where we created a garden of sorts in this dying place so when I think about deciding to live in a dying place I'm reminded of Persephone's story so I told you the real dramatic part where she plunges into the underworld and seems to last forever true but later on in this story she gains her agency and she finds a way to rise and come to the surface of the earth and return with the bounty of spring so I wonder if this is a universal liminal question for all of us how do we find the bounty of spring when unfamiliar and maybe unwanted situations open up in front of us I also wonder if we ever fully exit a liminal space for as poet Robert Frost says in his famous poem a road not taken' you know as we're going on this life path may be way leads on to way where it becomes a series of thresholds an extended path like this during one of my lowest days in hospice I decided to look into dancing which I mean at that point I thought I was off the rails I mean the last thing the body and soul wants to do you know after a day of Hospice is get up and dance but somehow it was the urge was persistent I just had to do it and I remembered you know I I danced as a kid and I loved it but like a lot of youthful passions you shelve them and then you white-knuckle it you grip adult life and you know you you get serious and often sedentary and who under those circumstances wants to dance but what I've come to know is my father and those with him in the hospice facility and also those recovering alongside me in the ICU post brain surgery would implore us to find the time find the time to lift and be lifted to honor instead of critique and place small our resplendent bodies they've carried us so far and with such strength stamina and grace well as a dance instructor now I find unparalleled joy in shedding physical inhibition in celebrating mobility and bold unapologetic expression while inviting others to do the same these liminal passages surface questions that I continue to ask the first one how do we survive the underworld of disorienting and unwanted circumstances the first and how do we find the bounty of spring find ways to rise and seize opportunities to be more to defy the seemingly inevitable and create more humanizing and innovative spaces in our lives the effective teachers asks these questions every day especially now which is why I think I heard National Teacher of the Year Mandy Manning's call after family separations at our border in which children were imprisoned and denied education this this spring I joined the national teachin held at the El Paso Juarez border in that space most of the 50 states were represented by stellar teachers teachers of the year past and present where we gathered for many reasons including to create a liminal space and like all liminal spaces I sense the complexity right away that at once I was awestruck by these passionate brilliant teachers who had convened together and yet mindful that we were here because of this deep heartsick weariness weariness of the real vulnerable humans in our lives and beyond our lives weariness from carrying the weight of reporting responsibility teachers have when they observe child abuse that teachers are legally and morally obligated to report when they observe child abuse and a deep deep weariness from speaking truth to an unresponsive and fear-mongering power after marching to the El Paso Juarez border we formed a circle of solidarity that that I will never forget and at this threshold we held complicated space to draw attention to our nation che months later yo-yo Ma's image surfaced and brought in a small way the bounty of spring cello against concrete with no accompanying Orchestra yo-yo ma played his instrument at the southern border and scheduled all of his concerts to take place thereafter in border cities here he created a threshold he declared I am living in liminality by pausing by holding space within the music of really hard questions defying what seems inevitable and thinking differently toward new pathways a better nation hopefully let's live this way this way it's the thing I would impress upon my younger self and what I urge us to do now is to see our lives as a series of liminality that both appear unplanned yes but also of our of our own making take time I would say to really dwell and search in wordly as we cross those spaces while inviting others to dwell with us for its here in the liminal space where we're best able to discern and mobilize our fuller humanity [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 41,619

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Humanities, Consciousness, Emotions, Learning, Personal growth, Philosophy, Struggle

Id: HWlKLhJW_P8

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019