I am in a strange place right now.
Not a bad place or a good place. Something in between, which is harder to describe and honestly is harder to sit with than either of those.
I have been releasing—old patterns, old memories, old ways of understanding myself and my place in things.
The ego death I wrote about, the emptying, the ground forming beneath me that is still happening. It does not happen all at once. It happens in layers, slowly, often at night when the day has become silent, and there is nothing left to distract from it.
And what I am finding is that releasing is only half of it. The other half is the waiting. The space between what has been let go and what has not yet arrived to take its place.
We talk about transformation as if you glide from one thing to the next. As if you let go of the old and the new steps in to fill the space. But in my experience, that is not how it works. When the old leaves, and for a while, sometimes a long while, there is just space. Empty. Without any movement, and that is a little frightening.
I have been thinking about the caterpillar.
Not as a metaphor in the way it is usually referred. But as a biological fact. Because what actually happens inside a cocoon is not what most of us imagine. The caterpillar does not slowly, gently grow wings. It dissolves. Completely. Into liquid. Everything it was breaks down into something formless, something that does not yet know what it is becoming. And from that liquid, that complete un-forming, is how the butterfly takes shape.
The in-between is not the pause before the transformation. It is the transformation itself. The dissolution is the work.
Just as life takes birth in between the inhalation and the exhalation, in that rest between two activities is where something essential lives. We rush past it a thousand times a day without noticing. The breath does not hurry from the inhale to the exhale. It pauses. And in that pause is the decision of renewal. That’s where the decision of new birth happens. The in-between is not empty. It is full of the thing we are always searching for.
I am dissolving.
And what I am learning slowly, imperfectly, is that the urge to rush through this space is strong. To find the new role/identity quickly, to know what comes next and how to manage it. And to have something solid to stand on. That urge is very human. But I am learning to notice it and not follow it. To stay a little longer in the not-knowing. To let the liquid be liquid.
Another thing is that there is no map for this place. Every other part of the journey had some kind of signpost, a teaching, a framework, a practice, something to do. The liminal has none of that. It asks only that you remain. That you do not leave before it has finished with you.
I will not pretend that is easy. Some days the emptiness feels like I can pull through it. Some days it feels like loss. Some days it is hard to tell the difference.
But I am here. In it. Not rushing toward the next thing, not pulling the old things back, just sitting in the strange, uncomfortable sacred space between.
Whoever I am becoming is forming in the background to present itself at the right time
I am learning to trust that.