Living liminal

At my place of employment there are these slanted Mirrors which run along the length of the building allowing you to monitor customers as they shop. It's intended to discourage and deter nare-do-wells from shoplifting. But one day last week the humidity and my erratic energy patterns(caffeine problems) came to a head on one of our typical Tennessee stormy summer nights, and so when I looked into the mirror for a split second hoping to catch my breath, it seemed as though I was looking into the reflection of an entirely different place. There were no magical kingdoms or unicorns in that reflection, nothing to simply justify my description of this "liminal experience". It simply it seemed as though the "real world" that the mirror was portraying was simply a gauze over a flickering light which illuminated our motions at a flame's whimsy. It was like watching moth wings beat inside of a lamp hood. Our movements seemed ephemeral and fragile and I felt that if I could reach out and touch that world inside the mirror, then I could pull of the skin of that world, like wings off a moth, and find the real body, my body, falling straighten into the gravity of that world. 

These sort of moments are common in my magical workings, but it was strange, and yet exhilarating to find this sort of calm and uncanny mixture of the "between" and the mundane nestled right where I perform the most menial, uninteresting of tasks in my day to day life. Here, on the grounds where I simply rinse and repeat in the great washing machine that is my retail working retinue, I found that our own bodies are still fluttering, still beating with that riotous chaos which gives us life, even though the patina of commercialism and consumer driven desire usually snuffs it out to a dim ember, so that all I usually feel and see are the down cast eyes of the man who just wants a pack of cigarettes and little else, not even a smile and a greeting which, when offered, he barely even acknowledges. Yet in the mirror, he was glowing, effervescent, a wisp of a light which, when snuffed out, gets swallowed by the larger light of the looming atmosphere.  

In the office it's not uncommon to hear the pipes banging against the lockers, which creates the illusion that someone is opening and slamming a locker door.  Once or twice it set me off guard, but after it's regular occurrence I realized it was the result of document-able and explainable phenomenon.  But just the other evening, I saw movement out of the corner of my eyes, and as usual, I shrugged it off as one of my coworker's heading back to their locker. When I went to grab some lotion out of my own just a few seconds later, no one was there.  My heart skipped a beat, my breath grew heavy, and I could only whisper, "I see ya'll are following me." 

I've traversed through these paragraphs to come full circle to the idea of the liminal and what walking the path of the witch really means outside of the mystery and mysticism of the circle. Our lives are not cleanly cut, the circle is always within other circles, touching and intersecting like ripples across the sea during the rain. My own path of fae hedge crossing work proves time and time again that you cannot simply take off the "hat" so to speak and expect only magical and transformative events to occur within our demarcations of "magic time."  Time and time again, it seems as though our magical systems and beliefs fall apart when we end up falling just a little too far over the line into the world of fae. 

I suppose that that is what grounding is for. Too often I find my spirit and energies easily uprooted by the call of the those across the hedge, so please take warning. Effective magical work needs be done with a foot firmly planted in this world and the next, but it's rather refreshing to be proven wrong about a closely held belief. Like the time when I called to the fae for the first time, expecting Lady of the Lake like women to meet me in trance, when what I get is an old drunken man asking if I've seen his moon shine bottle and if I could leave out some milk and honey for his twin daughters who have gone off again.  Or the time when that summer queen showed up all dressed in peacock feathers, convincing me that she was Hera, only to open up her mouth and show off her set of bloody pointed teeth.

If you go in with expectations, which is only natural, be prepared to have them smashed. In my history of walking the path of the hedgewich, I have found that just when you think that all you are doing is making an offering out of rue water, you consequentially end up offering a spell of protection over some baby entities who have come into your life out of the blue.  

Liminal in one sense means having a dual existence, but it can also prove to show that all of our actions have the two faces of a coin as well. Intention and will are all fine and good, and without them we wouldn't be witches, now would we? But once the fae step in, they often take what we offer and pour out and configure it in new ways. It's as though our moments across the hedge are not just about linear actions, but about stitches in an unravelling tapestry that is quickly and eternally being rewoven into the present. 

The essence of faery is the essence of change. Part of this relationship I have built with my magic and the hedge has shown me that in order to participate in such changes is to stand still, let it catch you up in it, and go along for the ride. I suppose that is contradiction, we must be still to move into the change that sweeps us up into the destructive, yet  re-birthing power of the worlds between worlds.  Yet also you cannot rest at anyone time on one perception of the universe. It's as though you have drawn a card. The first time you glance down at it, it's a spade. But the second time, it's suddenly an ace. It is the exact same card but you have drawn it in a multiplicity of instances resembling this exact moment, and yet it is never the same. Just like when you walk into the same valley in trance, the exact same one you found to be the home of a river sprite, and yet now, you meet a tree named Gall and he has no idea who you are talking about and has never met her. They both exist, but the time and ripples have  washed over each other, changing the landscape, without erasing your own experience. 

And so today, when I go into work later on, I might look into that very same mirror and see only the bland faces of singleminded shoppers who either look to get lost in our treasure trove of cosmetics and candy or hope to find the holy grail of a deal they think they are getting with that misread coupon. But that gauze of light, that rippling sinew of energy that resides is still there, thrumming, waiting to be touched. I just haven't stepped on the right patch of grass over the hedge to see it. Maybe the sky is too dark, or my muscles to tired, or my mood to sour. But it is there all the same.  

Close your eyes. Inhale, cross the hedge, exhale. What you find is anyone's guess, but it will never be the same card once.