Walks
A few hours on foot, side by side, with somewhere to look besides each other. Most of what I do starts here.
Jesse Wilson, Liminal Midwife. Serving joy that waits in thresholds.
Both halves are ordinary words. Here is what each one is doing.
From the Latin for threshold — the strip of floor underneath a door. Liminal time is the stretch after one thing has ended and before the next has taken any shape. You are not where you were, and you are not anywhere yet.
Someone who has been in the room before. A midwife does not make the birth happen. She keeps company with what is already underway, knows the territory, and can say out loud what is ordinary at a moment when nothing feels ordinary.
A good deal of this happens on foot. A trail does something a room cannot: it puts two people side by side rather than across from each other, moving, with somewhere else to look while the hard part gets said.
I am not standing on the other bank calling over. I am still walking my own thresholds. What I can offer is that I have been in this country before and did not get lost permanently.
None of these sorts you into a category. Pick whichever one you can picture yourself doing, and we will sort out the rest by talking.
A few hours on foot, side by side, with somewhere to look besides each other. Most of what I do starts here.
A standing hour, in person or on a call, for people who want to keep talking to the same person over a long stretch.
Six or eight people, an evening or a weekend, in the company of others who are also mid-change.
Endings get sympathy and beginnings get congratulations. The long stretch in between gets almost nothing, which is strange, because it is where most of the actual living happens.
ReadA close look at one particular week — the one after a house is emptied — and at why the relief and the vertigo arrive together.
Read