Liminal Space and the Ever-Present Threshold
In the second of three posts on the creation of his debut pamphlet collection, Down the Heavens, Alun Hughes describes the journey of perception of place via nature-based practice and the motivation for his attempts to language the times.
On the cover of Down the Heavens is a kissing gate. It is at the end of a path between the cemetery and the allotments, under a spray of Scots pine trees. This is one of the ways into the Heavens that I use most often. A few feet below it, before the track drops steeply into the valley where Lymes Brook runs, is a step.
When I began this listening, I started utilising various nature-based practices that I had learnt in the past whilst being involved with what some call ‘wilderness work’. This is work with people in nature that can be focussed both developmentally and therapeutically. One of these techniques is the marking of a threshold that is crossed once a clear intention or question is formed in oneself.
Which brings us back to the step. On countless early mornings over the last few years, I have stopped on that step below the pines and looked out over the tops of the thorn scrub across the Heavens. It is here that I have marked a line on the ground, sometimes with a stick or the heel of my shoe and, at other times, with a few leaves or feathers I have found close by. I wait until my intention can be articulated, i.e., ‘that I may listen’ and then step over the threshold, opening to the moment.
In my experience so far, the threshold can mark time between the world of the day to day and that of the imaginal. This, for me, is where nature communicates through moments of synchronicity that coalesce with pictures in my imagination. It could be anything and anywhere; water flowing between two steppingstones, the light cross hatching across the flow into what appears as reptilian or a dragon’s skin. Or a stormy moment of mind being soothed by the brushing of an unexpected leaf across my face.
It is these instances that form the seeds of poems. They may be small, sometimes only a few words scrawled into my pocket notebook (a constant companion) which are brought home to work with and, at other times, they can come complete, as a first draft. This is the liminal space I have endeavoured to inhabit creating work in the Heavens. I have been trying to find language that homes itself and speaks in the edges, the border land between material reality and the lake of the imaginal.
The threshold itself can be understood as a reduction, like the sill of a door, which can open into another potential of space, into previously unknown depths of the mystery. Looking at the times in which we are living, when more and more people see the global threshold through which we are all passing, willingly or not, a transition from one era to the next, I find myself listening to nature for a resonance that might bring us into tune with our home, into a pro creative balance; as one species existing equally with all others or, at least, those who are left.
This time is now being proposed by some geologists and picked up in popular culture as ‘the Anthropocene’. I have read work that proposes the transition as being from that to what was coined by the writer as ‘the nextocene’. There is an abiding feeling of shallowness here. I am left wondering if this could simply be a stage in the Holocene epoch and we happen to be living out a few chapters where groups of humans created a system of stories to tell themselves, and grew to such proportions, as to cause incredible damage to the biosphere; a point in time where we had become so pathologically narcissistic that we named a geological period after ourselves. Incredible! I recently went to see Stephen Jenkinson, the Canadian writer and teacher, do a show in Oxford. “Ah yes,” he said, “The Anthropocene, now no matter where we go, or where we look, there we are!”
Nonetheless, whatever the name of it is or not, we know that we are here, living through these times of profound change, where we know that our behaviour has compromised the wellbeing of our home and the viability of all species to thrive together, where we know that it is us that must completely reset how we are living here. This is a journey we must take, and maybe one of the roles of the artists is to make work that attempts to language the unknown through all mediums, to try and articulate a viable form of being that might make some sense of these threshold times.
Stepping across a line into liminal space, into edge, is where my faulty attempts are trying to speak into. Not only the moments where nature provides her endless trove of the imaginal realm, or the material place in which I find myself but also to witness the expansion within the silent space of the threshold; the edges between dimensions of perception, where imminence sits stilled and already full of the moment of change.
Again and again, that moment has proved itself to be constant and always available when I find my own stillness in nature. In these threshold times, where we do not know how long it will take nor what is on the other side, I remind myself to just keep making and hope that we might make it across (or some of us at least) if we take all necessary steps with a clear intention.
Alun Hughes is a poet and singer living in Stroud, Gloucestershire. In 2020, he received a MA Creative Writing with Distinction from Bathspa University. In 2021, he was a digital writer in residence with Dialect at the Cotswold Water Park and won third prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Competition. His pamphlet collection Down the Heavens, is published by Yew Tree Press and is available from them as well as Stroud Bookshop. Somewhere Somewhere, an album of nine poems from the collection to original soundtracks, made with the band Lensmen, is due for release in mid-November from Irregular Patterns.
Social media and links
Facebook Twitter and Instagram @alunowl
https://yewtreepress.bigcartel.com/product/down-the-heavens
