Crossroads

“When people ask me what I’m up to, I usually reply, “Not much.” This isn’t strictly true, of course. Inside my heart and mind, all sorts of things are happening. I’m writing. I’m growing. I’m imagining. I’m loving. I’m changing. But these are not things I can quantify in any soundbite kind of way. If I were to tell you what I was doing at any given moment, it might take me half an hour. It might take a blog post. But by any normal modern recognizable standards, I’m not doing much at all, and it’s fun to watch people’s faces when I say “Not much.” Because we’re supposed to be busy. We’re supposed to be doing things, all the time. Rushing, running, checking our phones, checking our email, going here and there, buying stuff, consuming stuff. When you stop doing these things, you cease to fit neatly into the complicated socio-economic fabric we’ve created.”

Beautiful thoughts from another misfit.

Brenna Layne

Increasingly, I find that I’m living my life in the liminal places–in the spaces where life and art intersect.

I’ve been fascinated by liminality since I began studying St. Brigid of Kildare as an M.A. student in the last year of the last millennium–a liminal time if ever one existed. St. Brigid herself is a liminal figure–a girl child in a male-dominated world, born to a Christian slave and a pagan king. Born as her mother stepped over a threshold at dawn, Brigid embodies all the complexity and messiness and contradiction of a time of flux between old and new ideas and ways of living. She’s not a saint in the way that women are supposed to be saints–she’s transgressive, challenging, cantankerous, and she’s not a virgin martyr. She may not have even ever lived at all. Brigid may just be a story, a way of understanding a pagan goddess…

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