The following information on liminal states comes from Wikipedia. However, throughout the brief article, there were cautions that citations were needed. In other words, this is someone's offering unsupported by references.

'Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes...

The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives.

People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal.'

Grizzly things do happen in one’s back yard.

Some three weeks ago, it was the two-inch mid-section of still-living snake flesh, cleanly segmented as though with a chopping knife. The tube of skin rested on the jutting root of an oak, cleaned out and quivering, perhaps fresh-fallen from the beak or talons of a kite or hawk. It was beautiful—glistening blue on one side, pale on the underside—and utterly unnerving.

This evening, I watched a mockingbird out the window. It was pecking and dropping its food on the concrete over and over—what looked to be a compact insect. I couldn’t understand why the bird was having trouble, and why the insect was still alive after so much abuse.

Later I walked that way, and saw ants at the feast of what remained: a baby armadillo’s head with pointed snout, rubbery scaled armor like a collar, cleaned out through the neck. The head and neck were tough (though not hardened) even at such a young age.

Not meanness, just everyday ordinary survival or death in the wild. The birds and ants with happy bellies. The reptile and mammal with the short straws this time.

This being human is a guest-house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
Who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture.

Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you
out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi
The Guest House
Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

baked apple-
cornbread dressing-
golden tea
and little cakes—
I've been fed;
may I feed you?

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Victor Frankl


Maybe I’ve a reason to believe
we all will be received
in Graceland.

Paul Simon

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language. Even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

Rumi

Lake Martin



My friend took pictures of hyacinths, and wished sincerely we had a canoe or raft to take us out into the swamp. I wandered a few feet away, and as I took this blurry shot, a man in a white truck on the dirt road behind me stopped and asked if I knew where the boat tour was. It was supposed to be near a concrete picnic table.

I hadn't heard of any boat tour at all. Within four minutes, we were on the boat with its observant guide, being carried out into the swamp, soon to experience many of its mysteries.

The man in the truck disappeared. According to the two other boat passengers, women from Denmark, they had been lost, and the man in the white truck had led them all the way to the lake, and to the concrete table.

Gentle men. This week, there have been gentle men wherever I have turned.

Before there can be tenderness toward others, there must be tenderness toward self.

These are some things I know:

That the bottom line is not money.

That sex without love is like cotton candy if you’re lucky, a bad hangover if you’re not.

That things, junk food, drugs, compulsive TV watching/video game playing take up spaces empty of love and true occupation.

That being known by many is of less value than being known and well-loved by a few.

Little lies can really wear down a relationship.

That the physical symmetry of a hothouse flower or a stylish head does not have the staying power of an honest face, or an intriguing puzzle or real conversation. A beloved droopy-faced dog is as welcome a sight as a Barbie or Tarzan. A beat-up guitar has the resonance of all the music that has echoed from within it. We worry far too much about looks.

The question still comes up: are we safer out in the open, or hiding in our structures with the doors locked? I don’t know the answer, but for my own comfort, lean toward the former.

Sarcasm should not be used with children.

As for human relationships, be tender where you can. And keep at it. We will fail again and again, which gives us the opportunity to grow with the repair work.

What a surprising number of physical problems find their causes in convoluted interpersonal situations. With kids, ailments can reflect family dysfunction. The ailments stack up and grow, made even more complicated with medicines and treatments and the labels attached by doctors and parents. If need for tenderness and trust are met, and family knots disentangled, the rest may dissolve into dust.

I know from careful observation that somehow our world converses with us. If an unusual event happens once, that’s interesting. When the unusual event happens twice, thrice, or more, or continues to chain-connect, pay attention. There is some teaching or direction, comfort or gift of love being offered.

They’ve found missing matter in web-like threads across the universe, interconnecting the galaxies. The ionized hydrogen plus oxygen and other elements (called baryonic matter, not to be confused with the more mysterious dark matter) has been too hot to be visible, and too cold to be measured by x-rays. Scientists at University of Colorado-Boulder found the matter by using the light of distant quasars, like flashlights through the fog, the article says.

"We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe," said CU-Boulder Professor Mike Shull. "What we are confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter in the universe."

Is it possible energy, or vibrations, could travel the strands? That might explain a lot.

University of Colorado at Boulder (2008, May 20). Missing Matter Of Universe Found; Cosmic Web Discovered. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 21, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2008/05/080520152013.htm

A short article by A. R. Williams in the June National Geographic discusses the return of the use of honey to treat wounds. When infused into the bandage, honey can be very effective, and, unlike with antibiotics, problem bacteria do not become resistant to treatment.

spider-bit
and in a stupor
I tumble, roll,
and Break
into flight…

It was a large dragonfly beating on my windowpane early this morning, hanging upside down by a thread of web. I slipped into loafers, found a soft-headed broom and went outside. The thread easily released, and the dragonfly gently dropped onto the straws of the broom. I rested the broom across the arms of a wrought iron bench on the front porch. The dragonfly, spanning four inches across, had wings like glass, a body of dark gold. Its maroon eyes were almost spherical, and looked to be gazing at me with interest. I tapped the wings with a finger, but there was no response. I'd been too late-a spider had already injected the insect with a paralyzing agent-a common but grizzly practice so that she could wrap up her hapless prey to provide fresh living food for future youngsters. Spiders are not practicing Buddhists.

I came back out a couple times to check on the dragonfly, but it was still there, frozen in place on the broom. I feared I'd made a mistake, failed to rescue the insect, and now it was no longer in a position to be a food source either. But, maybe three hours after the rescue, it was gone, apparently recovered from its anaesthesia and newly focused on whatever it is that pleases dragonflies.

What if what works is running toward passions? Instead of wrestling and whining about our flaws and guilty pleasures, we leave them in the dust.

Looking Up:


The virtue tragedy teaches, if it teaches anything, is compassion.

Leo Kottke

Leo Kottke, that humble portal to an altered state. Here are some links to his music:

Julie’s House
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwWBC_ZlLeE

Hear the Wind Howl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Ee6YFuKuA&feature=related


To keep my body’s compass true, it helps to work out all of the kinks I can. Fingers, toes. Hips and shoulders. Neck and knees. Wrists and ankles. Spine. Open up the chest and abdomen. Information can flow in uninhibited by stiffness, ego, and self-defeating baggage. What feels like gyroscopic energy within can spin freely. Once the body is loosened up, I don’t understand what pulls it forward, but it feels like a magnet or vacuum. It feels good, a little uncivilized, and sometimes happy. Like blooming toward sunlight, or trotting like a hungry puma toward prey. I don’t know the name for all this, just sharing what I experience. The drizzle this morning only enhanced a sense of expansive well-being.

Today's News

Things break and fall
The air is clean and sharp-scented
Of Broken pine
Love is a serious mental illness
Plato said
A two-foot garter snake
Beige ribbons on green
Has finally appeared
And disappeared
A girl in China
Has lost her legs
And gained a chance at survival
Because of photos, recordings, video
Poignancy is at a record high
On the planet
as people grow wistful
about events their ancestors
would have lived and forgotten
or never have known at all
Lightning marks the end of night
Thunder cracks the sky
and Gleaming wet branches
Carpet the earth and pavement
Guitar notes run
a rainwater stream
Beyond the wall
Not recorded
sweet without bitter
Once only now the only performance
The air is clean and sharp-scented
of Rain-washed arpeggios
of music
from a Traveller's hands
tugging strings

I carried the case without the camera
no pictures of the best of the day
when the breeze flowed over the water
and hyacinths winked in the light
a snake hung from an old cypress,
and gazed at its own reflection,
the voice of one ferryman,
as true to his setting as
the young fat gators
glistening on the log,
guided our eyes to the
papery hive of bees,
to the yellow-crowned night herons
tucked in their nests.
The boat's motor fluttered and choked
and was brought back to life more than once
as clouds of dragonflies lifted and rocked,
as rain shed its grace upon our heads,
and the friend who drove seven hours to find me
found heaven chanting a reply.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.

David Lynch

Sometimes I feel so damn slow, and I get hard on myself. It's as though I were stuck in stagnant waters, so different from people with nicely scheduled lives. And then the dams open, and I'm moving along. I run into the people I'm supposed to meet. I see I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, that I'm where I'm supposed to be, with the people I'm supposed to be with. One of the biggest lessons I've learned these past years is that of timing. The body is a compass. It not only points out direction, but when to move and when to pause and hang back. You've got to pay attention to how your compass responds to people, places, sounds and smells. Don't assume you know until you've listened to the smallest physical reactions. Then, the hardest learning is to trust your compass.

How do different species of animals measure up against humans? (Do they have language? Self-awareness? Do they wage war? Can they count? Use tools? Do they have opposable thumbs? Can they make a Humvee? Sit stuck in traffic at the same time every day?) It’s a good question, but rather one-sided.

What if we focused on the other perspective: How do humans measure up against other animals? (What skills do we lack compared to jellyfish? What awareness and communication abilities have we abandoned in the embrace of language? How do other mammals nurture young? How many scents can we identify in competition with a bear? How come dogs don’t seem to worry about aging, or having only three legs? Can we gauge wind strength and direction like an egret can?)

And what can we learn from a pecan tree? What does a pebble got that we haven’t got?

In frenzied motion
bees brush through
the tiny golden jungles
of cherokee roses.
They roll,
and roll again,
bathing in pollen,
groveling in ecstasy,
pushing, pushing
among the stamen.

She shrugged and said: "Our births are messy, our deaths are messy and we make messes in between.”

I smiled. A weight blew away like dust.

Myanmar
100,000 dreams released at sea;
are we listening?

I was waiting to catch a plane, and I idly drew the round-headed emblem of the men’s restroom near my gate. On the way back, a man seated next to me, head rather despondently in his hands, wrote in what looked to be a journal. The cover of the journal had a sticker on it: AskMen

One of the interpretations of all the Xs and Ys in my path of late could have to do with Christianity or genetics or DNA or chromosomes or something. Today, there was one X and one Y, side by side, almost framed on the path in rectangles of earth. As though shouting at me, do you get it yet?

No, I don’t. But perhaps it has to do with men?

It may disrupt the status quo, but it's an asset to see through another's eyes.

'From a drop of water...a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.'

Sherlock Holmes
"A Study in Scarlet"
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Looking up...