Entering Liminal Space

Winter Solstice Advent - 1

Doll nestled on one of the great stone basins of Newgrange

At this time of year, as well as many others, although Decembers has a deeper urgency, I find myself craving a deep silence. This is a silence that stretches beyond idle chatter, it’s a yearning from the repetitive cycles of thought, conversations cycling the same ideas and a quick fix urge to reassemble them to be more effective.

It was a growing tightness in my chest that brought me over an unknown threshold, into a liminal space between strained breathes. An alarming feeling which urged me to dial 999 (not a light decision, but I know the extremes of asthma), and within a couple of hours, two medics were sitting before me, analyzing blood, pressure and oxygen stats. A steroid injection was administered, with an unanimous decision to keep me out of hospital.

This infection dragged me down into a journey into a scary liminal space. I’ve been here before, a place where haunting questions circle like biting fish - am I going to fully recover from this? What is it like to live with something that might shrink your experience of life, which gives me a deeper consideration for those who experience chronic illness everyday.

Time in this liminal space has been ugly. There’s been many tears, there’s been lots of self pity, there were many fears, which I don’t usually give the light of day to.

I’d wake up up from a delirious sleep, night shirt and duvet twisted around me, to find myself lying on a slaughterhouse floor, looking into the eyes of a pig being dragged by her legs into a gas chamber. Hours later I awake my eyes crusted in what feels like dust, and I’m starring into the face of a dead grandmother, holding her grandson tight, buried under the tons of rubble. in a neighbourhood in Gaza.

What we do with these experiences. Viruses are powerful, they wrack our physical and mental health. I experienced Chicken Pox as an adult a few years ago, and felt I was mentally hanging on by a thread. I make no excuses of taking meaning from things, we need as much meaning as we can these days, tell these stories of things, read what divination is offered to us.

As a doll maker, creating dolls is how I make sense of things. Weaving together threads that I don’t fully understand, while cutting others, noting what seems different, for things usually change in some way.

And then I realise I’ve actually began making this doll, some of this experience is that of entering the deep. The things we sometimes bring, need to be transmuted. This doll will lie in her own portal tomb, etched with symbols of my becoming. Symbols of my shapeshifting. Symbols which speak to change.

I shared her photo in my previous post on the collective keening doll, as I brought her to the holy well waters to baptise her in the waters of this sacred place.

Holy waters that well maidens might once have offered.

Her back is marked with a cup and ring tattoo a symbol with many interpretations. A symbol whose meaning I interpret as representing our ability to shapeshifter, to move out of how we might normally see things, allowing us a new perspective. Connecting us to our need for experiences, for trance, and alternated states of consciousness.

from a 3D scan of the Cochno Stone

I live just a few miles from the Cochno Stone. It’s a Bronze Age rock art is found on a stone measuring 42 by 26 feet, featuring around 90 carved indentations, considered to be one of the finest sets of petroglyphs in Scotland.

Poulnabrone Dolmen, The Burren, Co. Clare. - Featuring on the Monumental Ireland website

The Winter Solstice symbolises the cycle of death and rebirth. What lies in our darkness, that we constantly shove back down two it doesn’t see the light of day, things we don’t want to consider.

Sometimes life has a way of taking us down, forcing us to focus and face things. There are many things in this experience of being ill I can’t even give words to, but I am here sifting through it, and knowing the reverberations that have reached out from the liminal into the everyday.