WELCOME! Below, you will find a piece that combines my love for dreams, fairytales and navigating passages of all kinds. Living the symbolic life is what, I believe, we sorely need to redeem. Doing so, cultivates attitudes of reverence and joy for nature, our own reasons for being and the manifold relationships we encounter in everyday life. We live during a time of unprecedented change and challenge. Framing our collective experience as a ‘rite of passage’ gives it meaning and purpose. To learn more about how Psyche’s Stories can provide guidance during our hour of greatest need, please sign up to receive my newsletter. Thank you!

Exploring the Liminal Landscape

Presented by Jenny Gordon, PhD, Jungian analyst

Eugene Friends of Jung   

October 21, 2023   

What do we mean by a ‘liminal landscape’?  To begin my response to this question, I am going to share with you a very personal story of a liminal experience. Consider it a ‘representative case’ for, in the particular, one can often perceive something that is universal. 

 It was about 11 a.m. on a workday, a Monday, when I received a message on my phone from my brother who lives in Eugene.  He was with our 93 year old, very abled and relatively healthy, father.  The message was urgent, “Come home. It’s about Dad”. This was a very unusual kind of call, so I cancelled my clients for the afternoon, and immediately drove home.  Dad had moved in with us five years earlier.

My father, Dr. Glenn Gordon, was a beloved physician and a naturally born leader – it helped him to be an extravert!  Among his progressive ‘campaigns’ was the instrumentation of Oregon’s Death with Dignity law. This law allows physicians to deliver compassionate end of life care by assisting terminally ill patients who wish to die.

Our Dad had decided that his life had come to completion and that he wanted to spare us any prolonged care of him.  He was ready to die.  So, that morning he took a lot of pills and texted my brother to come by around noon, believing that he would be dead by then.  Well, it didn’t pan out that way.  When I got home, my family sat around the kitchen table absorbing this fact.

Out of love for our father, we submitted to his firm decision and wish to help him ‘let go’. As he was not terminally ill, he did not qualify for physician-assisted suicide. Instead, he opted to stop eating food and to stop drinking water. His dying took seven days.

What truly impressed me in this process was how each of us, his 5 living children, automatically organized ourselves to serve his dying process. Each of us contributed our unique strengths and skillsets without needing to talk about it.  We all instinctively knew what we needed to do and how to show up.

During that liminal week, in-between the state of my father being alive to my father being dead, we experienced several facets that are common to ‘the liminal landscape’: among these are suddenly being separated from the ordinary/known reality and entering unchartered, what felt like sacred, ground.  Our home became a sanctuary during that holy week.  We all coped with uncertainty, managed ‘ordeals’, lived with ambiguity.  

What I awakened to during his final passage unto death, was a spirit of communitas, another feature of liminality, among my siblings.  We entered almost immediately into a shared state of attunement with each other.  The feeling of belonging and social bonding was strengthened as we worked together. It united us, even into joyful communion, during a very sorrowful time. The ‘glue’, I believe, that held us, day in and day out, was love with a shared purpose.

 Needless to say, the week was a transformative one, like all rites of passage are intended to be. This period of liminality ended upon his death.  We resumed our lives, forever changed, and with a new social status. 

One meaning of the term ‘Liminal’ refers to a period of transition in-between two stable social identities or cultural conditions.  Anthropologist Victor Turner explored this liminal phase more deeply within the context of studying initiation.  In his seminal essay, titled ‘Betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites of passage’, Turner identifies three parts to an initiatory experience: separation, liminality and re-incorporation.  I have embellished some of what initiates might experience during the period of liminality between separation and re-incorporation. 

When, on that fateful day in March of 2020, we found ourselves in Lockdown – we were all thrown into an in-between state of liminality.  Suddenly, covid numbers had risen to a tipping point and, especially without knowing how the virus was transmitted, our sense of a stable, predictable world toppled.  The pandemic had reached our doorsteps.  Its arrival separated us from known, ordinary circumstances.  We collectively entered a liminal landscape.

 A year before the pandemic hit, in March of 2019, the Eugene Friends of Jung together with 350 Eugene hosted one of my personal ‘sheroes’, Carolyn Baker; the title of her presentation was: Placing Climate and Other Catastrophic Events Within a Larger Story.  (The talk was recorded and can be found on Youtube.) This larger story, she puts forth, essentially places what we are going through globally within the archetypal pattern of a rite of passage.  A planetary-wide rite of passage.  Wherein all 8 billion of us humans are considered to be the initiates.  She calls it a ‘dark night of the globe’.

 We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that Covid-19 arises within the context of our environmental crisis and climate emergency.  Having exceeded the safe threshold of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere, our goldilocks planet is no longer habitable for many species.  150 species per day are going extinct.  Some places on Earth, once hospitable to human life, are no longer viable places to live.  Between 2008 and 2016, 21.5 million people per year were displaced due to weather related events.  It is forecasted that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050 due to climate chaos.

When viewed through this archetypal lens, the unraveling and collapse of our eco-system offers us an opportunity – an opportunity, if we heed its call, to become initiated into a different way of relating to each other and to our natural world and to the cosmos itself.  Framing our experience of the liminal landscape to one of an initiatory experience gives it meaning and purpose.  But how? How do we move through this liminal landscape so that we are changed for the better?

To this, I turn to the wisdom held within fairytales.

Crossing thresholds and moving from one ‘world order’ to the next is the stuff of fairytales. Indeed, fairytales comprise one domain of Jungian studies because, quoting Marie Louise Von Franz, ‘They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche.’  Studying fairytales gives us clues about navigating predicaments, such as the ones we are facing now.

I will end my remarks with one such example, for your consideration. Fairytales are like ‘big dreams’ told to adults. They address universal themes using psyche’s language of symbolic images and symbolic actions.  We are attracted to them for this reason: we can identify with the heroines and heroes as they move through ‘impossible tasks’, steal from giants and break through the spells of witches and wizards.  When we analyze them through the Jungian lens, and apply them to everyday life, fairytales show us what is missing in collective consciousness, or what is out of balance between culture and nature. Many of these stories teach us how to traverse liminal landscapes.  By the end of the tale, a new order is established and what was missing is redeemed.

It is no surprise, really, to consider Hansel and Gretel as a tale for our times.  Something has gone terribly wrong, at the beginning of the story, as a severe drought is happening. Nothing will grow and there isn’t any food to eat. Hence, the children’s hunger becomes a real problem for their parents.  To solve it, the step-mother devises a plan to send Hansel and Gretel into the forest to perish.  As you may recall, that’s not how the story ends.  Instead, the brother and sister find themselves standing in front of an enticing house made of gingerbread and candy! The little ones are famished and begin to nibble on the sugary windows and walls of the house when, suddenly, an old crone appears who fully intends to gobble them up herself! She locks up Hansel in a cage and puts Gretel to work building a fire in which to bake her brother.  At the crisis point of the tale, the witch asks Gretel to check to see if the fire in the oven is ready.  Clever Gretel asks the witch to show her how and, when the witch peers into the fire through the oven door, Gretel decisively pushes the witch into the hot fire and slams the door shut!     Gretel frees her brother, they stuff their pockets with food, and one by one, on the back of a duck, cross the river, to reunite with their father. 

At the crisis point, what I like to call ‘The Gretel Moment’, when Gretel pushes the witch into the oven, what gripped her to make that choice?  I imagine three instincts are at play: First, love for her brother. Second, a strong desire to say ‘yes’ to life including her own.  Third, an equally strong desire to say ‘no’ to that which might extinguish it.  What is redeemed through her symbolic action is the principle of Eros (love); our heroine personifies an ethic of care both for her brother and for herself.  For all of us, this tale speaks to our own life and death situation as a species.  We are living during the 6th known mass extinction.  Can we harness sufficient love to care for all living things?  Can we harness the political will to act decisively against forces, within and without, that threaten to consume us?  Gretel’s action demonstrates that we, too, have the capacity to seize this moment at this critical time.  She shows us that we, too, can choose to align with the power of love to say ‘yes’ to that which serves life and ‘no’ to that which will destroy it.  Along with Gretel, we must take action. 

Moving from the universal, archetypal dynamics shown to us in this fairytale, to its particular expression in your own life, the questions become:

(1)          What, or whom, do you care about, and love enough, to say ‘yes’ to as we move through this liminal landscape?  And,

(2)          what will you decisively say ‘no’ to in order to help all of us see this through?

Clearing    By Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save the whole world

or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create

a clearing

in the dense forest

of your life

and wait there patiently

until the song that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know

how to give yourself

to this world

so worthy of rescue.