Homeward Bound & Liminal Spaces — Coasting Toward Blue

I began the day with fat snowflakes falling outside the cabin where I had spent the last few days. And now, as I write this, I’m back on a train, looking out a rain-streaked window across the Puget Sound. I am officially homeward bound. And instead of having an incredibly powerful experience and then boarding a plane, only to touch down hours later and re-enter the world, I have the next few days to decompress and process the last few days. Instead of an abrupt transition back into real life, I’ll be spending extra time in this liminal space between worlds.

The past few days have been filled with energy—generative, creative, and powerful energy. A group of about a dozen women, artists all, came together to pause, take a breath, consider who we are as artists, women, and humans, how we show up to ourselves and our art, and what we want out of our creative lives.

I’m not sure I have the words right now to adequately encapsulate my experience in words, but I have my photographs. I have my art. I have memories. I have my travelogue sketchbook and these blog posts. And most of all, I have reminders of what it means to live a creative life—not just through the output of products but through attention, through pausing, through noticing, and, of course, through making and creating.

I had entered the retreat with the hope of leaving with more clarity and vision for my future. Did I? Yes, but not in the ways I had expected (I’m sure I’ll write more on all that at some point). While I entered feeling a bit stuck and filled with questions and worries, I left feeling like I had a little more confidence in the ways to move forward.

So I guess it’s fitting that tonight, a few hours into the journey, our train inexplicably and abruptly stopped somewhere inside a nearly 8-mile long tunnel. From inside, I could feel the power of the engines slow and then cut to still. Passengers poked their heads out from their rooms, trying to get a sense of what was going on. We waited for the conductor’s announcement, for information. To say the experience was unnerving would be an understatement. Yet, I couldn’t help but notice the irony: I was literally stuck in a tunnel. With darkness outside the windows (and dimmed light inside, as the train cut much of its power) and no sense of how far into the tunnel we had come or how far we still had to go, there was nowhere to go but forward. We moved with limited light and reduced power, we moved forward nonetheless. How fitting.

Thanks, Universe. Messages(s) received.