stretch of life you might be in right now.
No longer who you were. Not yet who you're becoming.
Liminal
Old cultures treated it as sacred and dangerous.
Ours pretend it doesn't exist.
Every rite of passage had three stages.
Separation from the old life. The threshold,
where identity dissolves. Return as someone new.
The middle stage was considered so dangerous that
nobody was allowed to cross it alone.
We kept the experience and deleted the container.
That career ending, the divorce, the faith that
stopped working, the year after the business fails.
All initiations, arriving with no elders, no map,
and no name.
So the person in the middle draws the only conclusion
available. Something is wrong with me. They're mid-crossing
in a culture that no longer recognizes crossings, mistaking
a treshold for a breakdown.
The middle of a rite of passage looks exactly
like a breakdown.
The old cultures knew one more thing.
The crossing needs a witness. Someone who has been
through their own dissolution and can hold steady
beside yours, so the dissolving doesn't become
drowning.
That role had names in every culture on earth.
wisdom.economy
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