The Fertile In-Between: A Practice for Liminality

We are taught to celebrate beginnings. The graduation, the wedding, the first day in the new role, and the keys to the new house. We are taught to mourn endings — to grieve what we have lost, to honor what is over, to find closure. Beginnings get champagne. Endings get rituals.

What lives between them gets almost nothing.

William Bridges, in his foundational book Transitions, named what most of us have lived without language for. Every transition has three phases. The Ending — what we are leaving behind. The Neutral Zone — the in-between space where we are no longer who we were and not yet who we are becoming. The New Beginning — what is forming on the other side. We move through all three whether we recognize them or not. Most of us recognize the first and the third. The middle is the one we lose, and often resist.

This is the territory of liminality. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, writing in 1909, gave us the word. He was studying rites of passage — the rituals cultures across the world use to move people from one life-stage to another, from child to adult, from single to married, from living to ancestor. He noticed that every rite has three phases: separation from the old, transition through the threshold, and incorporation into the new. The middle phase he called liminal — from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. The space between the doorposts.

What van Gennep observed about the liminal phase is what most of us experience when we are in it without knowing what it is. The person in the liminal space is no longer who she was. She has not yet become who she will be. She is, structurally, neither. We see what happens when this phase is collapsed — the company that restructures and asks employees to operate in a new way overnight, without time to digest how their old work transforms into the new work. The grieving woman who has lost a parent, sibling, or spouse and is told to get over it, to stop talking about her sadness, to move on. 

The cost of skipping the middle is that the work the middle was meant to do gets pushed underground, where it does its work anyway, slower, harder, and often in distortion. Cultures that took rites of passage seriously surrounded this phase with care — set the person apart, gave her tasks suited to the in-between, recognized that she was undergoing something the community could not rush. In those traditions, the liminal phase was understood as the sacred middle—the place where transformation actually happens.

Our culture has lost this.

We treat the in-between as a problem to be solved. The space between jobs is unemployment, to be ended as quickly as possible. The space between relationships is loneliness, to be filled. The space between who we were and who we are becoming is getting through this, figuring it out, finding myself again. Even the space at midlife is culturally
predefined as “retirement,” an ending of one kind of life without consideration
for how to remain vital, visible, and live with purpose. The cultural script tells us how to act — to make a list, to make a plan, to start something new. To collapse the middle phase into the New Beginning before the middle has finished its work.

The cost of this collapse is what we lose when we skip the liminal. The middle phase is not empty. It is fertile. It is where the deep restructuring happens — the kind that cannot be willed, cannot be efficient, cannot be hurried. Nature gives us the structure of this everywhere we look. The seed is gestating in the dark, before any green has shown above the soil. The mother carrying the child for nine months, the body doing work no plan can substitute for. The chrysalis is where the caterpillar dissolves entirely, becoming undifferentiated tissue before the butterfly’s form takes shape. The bud holds everything that will become the bloom, in a form we cannot see from the outside.

The liminal space asks for the same kind of patience. What is forming in you cannot be rushed. What is dissolving in you cannot be reassembled. The work of the middle is not action; it is presence to what is happening underneath, where the conscious mind cannot reach.

This is the territory for which the practice of Visual Wisdom Keeping was made. The work between the Ending and the beginning. The work of being in the middle without trying to escape it. The work of trusting that what cannot yet be named is not nothing, but everything that is becoming.

Visual Wisdom Keeping gives us a practice for the liminal space. It is slower. It does not produce visible results in the way the doing-self wants. It works through layered making — the spread that builds across hours and sessions, the colors that find each other before the meaning surfaces, the symbols that arrive on the page before the mind knows why. The hands move. The page receives. What was inarticulate becomes visible in form before it becomes visible in language.

Wisdom Maps are made for this. Each one is a guided practice in liminality — not a course on how to get through, but a held space in which to be inside, attended by the structure of the practice itself. The first Wisdom Map, Crossing the Threshold, is built around the three movements William Bridges named: Leaving Behind, In the Liminal, Something Forming. But where Bridges teaches the structure of the territory, Crossing the Threshold gives you a way to inhabit it — to put your hands into what is forming through you and let what is forming meet you on the page.

If you are in the middle of a crossing right now, you do not need to solve it faster. You need a practice that meets you where you are. Crossing the Threshold is the first one.

→ Begin with Crossing the Threshold