Living (And Dying) In Liminal Spaces

I grew up in 1980s New England, with little to no knowledge of Mexico and Mexican culture. I still remember my first-ever experience eating at a Mexican restaurant. 1998, after all, was not too long ago. I had the mole, and it was life-changing. Soon after, I was living in Los Angeles and receiving a mostly wonderful, sometimes wrathful (due to my own ignorance), crash course in Latino culture. I had a lot to learn. 

When I moved to Mexico to live there full time, Mexican culture was still relatively unknown to me. It still is. This unfamiliarity is part of what attracted me to Mexico in the first place. Each time I visited Mexico, it felt like stepping into a dream, an entirely separate reality. The language foreign, its friendly people foreign, the fluidity of daily life so unfamiliar, and yet so comfortable. It’s still hard to assign words to my experience of Mexico and its energy.

I often wondered, and worried, if the pleasant, dreamlike experience I had would fade away as Mexico became more familiar. Would I love Mexico and the Mexican people more or less as I learned the language, dropped into routine and became further immersed in the culture? Five years into this experiment the mystery remains. The desconocido inviting me to come closer, although I don’t know that I will ever truly ‘know’ Mexico. I will always be an extranjera here. 

The longer I stay in Mexico, however, the United States and the people there have become more foreign, too. I cannot go back. I come across visitors, some of them friends from the US, and feel I less connected to them, they increasingly feel like strangers. We no longer share the same worldview. 

And so here I am, living as a foreigner in this place that feels like home, while ‘home’ feels so far away. I’m ok with it. I love it here.  

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Liminal. It’s a word that can apply to both space and time. It describes a state of being that is neither here nor there; materially, energetically. The liminal occupies the before and after, both sides of a border and the threshold in between. It describes a transition, a becoming, a process. 

I once thought our task was to traverse the liminal, to get to the other side. Today, I view that as a mistake. To live in the groundlessness of the in-between is to occupy the infinite, to live with the spaciousness of freedom.

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Having immigrated from there to here, I am no longer merely of ‘there,’ yet also not of ‘here.’ Life as an expat has helped me realize there is an aspect of liminality in each and every moment. There is a pause between breath out and breath in. Between sleeps, the transitional period of daytime. Perimenopause, a transition. We are always becoming, and also, fading away. Life itself, the liminal space between where and who we were before we were born, and where and who we will be after we die. I am a living person, and I am also dying. 

I have found great joy and peace by dancing with these ever-fluctuating boundaries, letting go of needing to locate myself within any one space, place, time or identity. In some sense, this has always been a practice of mine, to become more fluid, like water. When living in the US, I lived many lives. I survived and learned to thrive by being able to soften around identity, to shapeshift. In Mexico, the practice has become more intentional.

Mexico is not the water I was born into. Like a fish out of water, I sense the fluid energetics here as ‘out of the ordinary.’ And so, perhaps precisely because I am an outsider, I find it easier to let things go, to laugh it off, to get curious, to stay open. I benefit greatly when I can relax and go with the flow.

Not everyone responds to change or differences like this, and neither do I, always. Often, when feeling threatened by the unknown or unexpected, we double down on what we do know. We cling to the identities that keep us feeling solid, separate and thereby feeling safe and protected, hunkered down with our tribe. Unfortunately, our attempts to assert our identity as a single thing, belonging to a single place, to feel grounded by standing our ground, put us in conflict with the ever-fluctuating energetic nature of reality. When we throw up boundaries, insisting the only truth is ours, we (and many others) suffer from it.

Followers of Terror Management Theory (TMT) might say this is how the unenlightened respond to the ever-present fear of death. When we live in the paradigm of death denial, when reminded of our mortaility, we unconsciously double down on belonging to a single place, a single culture, a single ideology. We become increasingly hostile toward those whom we perceive as different, not belonging. 

On the other end of the spectrum, wisdom and compassion, acceptance of death, comfort with liminality, holding lightly to identity and increased tolerance of the ‘other’ all seem to go hand in hand. 

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What might it be like to live while holding, continuously, the truth that we will someday die? It feels like it might include shedding the black and white thinking and living, more comfortably, in the space of both-and, the in-between.

Life as an expat invites me into this practice, Yoga and meditation invite me into this practice. May I remain, comfortably with the uncomfortable, neither here nor there, living fully.