skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The expression "Beyond the Fields We Know" was coined at the turn of
the last century by the Irish peer, Lord Dunsany, a gifted playwright
and master storyteller, who used it in many of his tales to describe the
realms which lie beyond the world we live in, Elfland or Faerie being
just one such world beyond.
The Irish poet William
Butler Yeats, a friend of Dunsany's, once said wistfully that he
(Dunsany) wrote from "a careful abundance", and more recently, Lin
Carter called Lord Dunsany a magnificent storyteller, and one of the
last great masters of English prose, superior even to J.R.R. Tolkien in
subtle artistry. Dunsany 's work has been a major influence on most, if
not all of the fantasy writers who followed him, and "The King of
Elfland's Daughter" rivals anything else ever written in the field of
fantasy literature.
What separates us from Elfland and
the other realms beyond the mundane one we inhabit? At the edge of the
fields we know lies a hedgerow, a very ordinary sort of hedgerow
containing a rustic gate. Hedgerow and gate mark the presence of a place
which is not here and not there, not up and not down, not in and not
out, not real and not imagined.
The hedgerow and its
rude gate are a threshold or liminal space, and like all such places,
they possess strong magic. They are not simply a barrier between here
and there, as they seem to be at first glance, but a corridor or
passageway into the unknown (but occasionally glimpsed and heard)
mysterious worlds which lie beyond the mundane fields we know. Beyond
the hedgerow and its gate are worlds rich and strange; dimensions which
are by times, extraordinary, enlightening, creative, ecstatic,
exhilarating and absolutely terrifying.
Thresholds are
compelling places, and they can exert a powerful tug on the
sensibilities. Every hero's journey or heroine's journey begins with
one, with a call to adventure, one breathtaking, serendipitous,
watershed moment in which she or he discovers a threshold, responds to
its eldritch music and steps across it into another realm.
Mircea
Eliade wrote of doors and thresholds as being potent mythic symbols and
passages, corridors where passage from the profane to the sacred
becomes possible. The philosopher Martin Heidegger described thresholds
as joinings or spaces between two worlds: potent common or middle
grounds which hold, join and separate two different realms, all at the
same time. Thresholds are sacred places which form a boundary between
what is "here" and what is "there", but they are, in themselves, neither
here nor there.
"Here be dragons" was an expression
used by early map makers to indicate that some of the regions shown on
their fanciful creations were unknown (and possibly dangerous)
territory, and they are also good words for journeying beyond the
threshold. Traveler beware, dragons may await you on the other side,
but there are wonders to be seen, and wisdom, adventure and
enlightenment await at every turning. To cross the threshold and go
through the gate is to set off on a grand creative adventure.
Within
the seemingly empty space of a doorway or a threshold, one sometimes
senses ancient, wild and chaotic forces in motion. Thresholds have the
power to open a cranny between this world and others, letting those
tumultuous otherworldly forces blow through. The ancients assuredly knew
it, and they undertook special measures to secure their thresholds,
carving arcane protective sigils on door lintels, placing sprigs of
rowan and Brigid's crosses in the doors, burying pins and needles under
their hearth stones, sweeping and blessing their thresholds and mounting
horseshoes over their doorways to keep the fey without. They considered
sunrise, noon, twilight and midnight to be threshold times of day when
divination and magic could be worked by those skilled in such arts—such times would have been fearful for those without magical gifts or
the protections of the Craft.
Sleeping, dreaming and
awakening are threshold (or liminal) states, and so is the very act of
breathing. Doors, windows, hearths, labyrinths, mazes, tors, barrows,
stone circles, caves, bridges, crossroads and bogs are thresholds
opening into other realities and other modes of being and thinking—as
are quiet woodland trails, oak groves, springs and mountains. (I find
myself thinking of the Queen Mother of the West and the mythical Peach
Blossom Spring here.)
The old fire festivals of the
Celts are perhaps the most powerful threshold times of all, for the four
feasts of Samhain (Halloween), Imbolc (Candlemas), Beltane (May Day)
and Lugnasadh (Loaf Mass or First Harvest) fall at the times of the year
when the veils between the worlds are thin and magic is indeed afoot in
the great beyond.
For students of Zen, thresholds,
doors and gates are powerful symbols and metaphors for mindful living
and the plane of earthly existence. Buddhist literature contains an
abundance of references to such places, and there are reams of
commentaries on them. In Buddhist practice, anything at all may be a
threshold, door or gate, and beyond each and every one, enlightenment
and the Buddha are waiting to be discovered. Through the simple act of
entering a doorway or stepping onto a threshold, one acknowledges and
makes a commitment to something which is at the same time smaller and
greater than the self. One contemplates the intrinsic nature of the
threshold, the random thoughts which form there and are held within the
space, those who traveled the path before us and came to this place and
those who are yet to come. When one is thinking kindly of other beings,
doorways and thresholds become gates of compassion and realms of Tara.
Most
of the thresholds we encounter in our mundane lives are physical
objects like gates, doorways, chimneys and windows, but there are times
when thresholds are intangible and invisible to the human eye—interstitial moments rather than physical places. These tiny "aways"
allow us to transcend ordinary life for a brief intense interval and go
somewhere else entirely. Anyone who has ever been carried away entirely
by a gnarled tree in a hidden grove, a limpid forest pool, a fey breeze
or a wild orchid blooming in a sunlit summer fen knows the feeling very
well.
Ours is a winding trail holding wonders and
surprises, and whether or not we realize it, we all encounter thresholds
from time to time. Sometimes it is only a few steps from here to there.
We need such places in our mundane lives in order to survive and
evolve, to become authentic beings and exercise the creativity which is
our birthright. Thresholds allow us to step out of the ordinary world
for a while, and into the rich realm of the archetypal, the strange and
the creative.
When one is attuned, the siren voice of
the liminal is everywhere. We approach the liminal in our own way and
our own time, and the lens through which we filter our experience is a
unique and very personal thing. For some of us, the gateway lies through
church services and collective ceremonies—for others, it is private
prayer, meditation and stillness—for still others, the way is through
art, communion with the natural world, carefully crafted rites of
passage and the old seasonal festivals.
In my own life,
I encounter the liminal in books, music, photography and stillness, in
lighted candles and incense, in deep twilight and the perfect shapes of
trees, in strong coffee and the keyboard sonatas of Scarlatti, in winter
days in the shire when the air is so still that one can hear snow
falling among the trees, in herons and loons (anywhere, anytime) and
walks through the oak woods in late autumn, in the creaking timbers of
old log barns, wood smoke, dark chocolate, good cognac and the
fragrances of bergamot, lavender and rosewood.
