Moments of: The Blog
What a Long Strange Quarter This Has Been
I imagine that you, like me, entertain yourselves these days with some kind of counting game: How long have we been in quarantine? How long have we been doing distance learning? When will this be over? To be perfectly honest, I also ask myself, How many weeks until I retire?
We have been doing shelter-in-place for almost exactly two months now and only two weeks remain of the quarter before finals. Elementary school questions like “when will we get there?” are a certain way to contain these amorphous days that have less contrast, less vibrancy. The ways we usually structure our time, our community, and even our identities are blurred. We are inhabiting liminal space, a time in between life as we knew it and an uncertain future. Liminal, from the Latin, meaning threshold, is a place of uncertainty, and theologian Richard Rohr suggests that “the global pandemic is an example of a vast, collective liminal space.”
The time between high school and college is another example of liminal space; it is always a time of uncertainty where students vacillate between excitement about what lies ahead and nostalgia for the known sweetness of the life they’ve loved with their teachers and friends at Sonoma Academy. This year, without the usual and explicit rites of passage, senior retreat, prom, and graduation, and faced with an uncertain fall semester at college, our seniors might be feeling particularly untethered at times.
On the threshold of retirement, and a bit like our seniors, I, too, am very much in between a previous sense of self, the previous ways I structured my time, and an unknown future.
Here’s the great thing, however, for our seniors, for us collectively, and for new retirees. The inherent potential of liminal space is the very same creative force that put the universe into motion. If we can tolerate the ambiguity, the uncomfortable feeling of being slightly untethered and disoriented, we open ourselves up to the possibility of transformation, for the emergence of new ideas, new solutions, a new sense of self that is stronger and more wise. We don’t know yet the ways our lives will be different after Covid-19 and though we yearn for a return to normalcy, our “new normal” must be committed to new ways of being and living on our planet.
In recent weeks, I let the kitchen door slam behind me as I step outside into the liminal space between evening and night, to lend my voice to the 8 pm howl. Howling seems to traverse the liminal space we share, a primal expression of community and solidarity. It’s certainly a good way to cleanse oneself of a day of communicating electronically!
For the past 18 months, since I announced that this would be my last year, I’ve been asked countless times what I will do in retirement. While I have a few, not fully formed notions, I don’t know exactly, and I find one of those silver linings in now being able to say, “nothing.” There’s no place to go. No retirement travel on the horizon. I’m grateful I can afford groceries and Instacart and I’m going to plant a vegetable garden. I am going to open myself up to the great potential for transformation. I’ll keep howling for a while. And, as I suggested in my opening Convocation speech last fall, John and I, from just on the other side of Taylor Mountain, will be listening for the return of your Coyote howls echoing through our beloved campus.
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