Libations from
the Liminal
Mistakes May Have Been Made
This week’s libation is poured out on the threshold of your local polling place. Read or listen to “Mistakes May Have Been Made,” a short story from Tales From the Liminal.
Between Worlds: An Icon Maker at the Front in Ukraine
On a two-week leave from the front, icon maker Hryhoriy Prystay talks with The Liminality Project about faces that recall the Passion, time that stretches, and the sacred found in humanity.
A Crone Walks Into a Catholic Church
This week’s libation is poured out in a prairie beneath the Harvest Moon.
The Trap of the Liminal: Why We Get Stuck in Between
A threshold is meant to be crossed, but often we shy away from the pain that accompanies transformation, settling instead for the slow decay of refusing to change.
How to Navigate a Liminal State
When it comes to the interior work of a liminal state, muscling through doesn’t work. It just delays the process. Or worse, shuts it down entirely. The liminal has work to do in you. The goal is to let it.
Here are some practices to help you through.
Wandering the Borderlands: Welcome to the Liminal State
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Liminal states are hard. When we get suspended between the person we were and the person we have yet to become, it’s always some kind of dark night of the soul.
Liminal Times: Thresholds of the Turning World
Some hours seem to possess a different atmosphere. The world pauses, and time itself becomes a threshold.
Why the Backrooms Haunt Us: The Psychology of Liminal Spaces
Some places are built only for passage. Others become liminal when their purpose disappears. In either case, the familiar can turn strangely uncanny.
The Art of the Liminal
Wherein S. K. Kruse makes the case that if you want to create Art of any kind, you must submerge yourself in that liminal interior space between the Conscious and the Unconscious.
Democracy: POV
(First published in Arkana, Issue 18, April 2025)
When the alien apocalypse comes
democracy won’t matter at all.
When they intercept our satellite transmissions
and scratch their thoraxes
in perplexity
at the hijinks they witness on our news…
(Listen to Audio or Read More.)
A Good Friday Lament
A Good Friday Lament
Jesus
Your name is an embarrassment
A sound bite
bumper sticker
billboard slogan….
(Watch Video or Read More.)
The Second Coming
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” W. B. Yeats
This Post Brought to You by a Whole Lotta Genius
There are a lot of geniuses floating around the story of Allegri’s “Miserere mei, Deus.”
We Cannot Live in a World Interpreted for Us by Others
“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.” Hildegard of Bingen
Live with a Full Moon in Each Eye
“Admit Something” is the best poem I’ve ever read on love. It circulates as a poem by the Sufi mystic-poet Hafiz (alternately, “Hafez”), who lived in the 14th century in Shiraz, Iran, but poems like this one from Daniel Ladinsky’s books are not so much translations of Hafiz’s work as they are “renderings” of the mystic poet.
How to Savor a Cake Baked with Embarrassing Icing
I’ve got about 13 poems dog-eared in The Essential Etheridge Knight, but I think “A WASP Woman Visits a Black Junkie in Prison” is my favorite.
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
“All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different...” T. S. Eliot
I just Want You to Know Who I Am
It can be tough being a lyrics person in a beats-driven world. Before I started writing Libations, the only humans I could subject to my song analysis were my children.
Person of Lyrics + Mother of 11 = Captive Audience of Annoyed Offspring
The World is a Vale of Soul-Making
John Keats is one of the early 19th century English Romantic poets, but, as a post-20th century reader of his letters, I see Keats, the thinker, in the intersection of a two-set Venn diagram, with Romantics in one circle and Existentialists in the other.
Resilience and Resistance
When the few stand against the many, when the weak stand against the strong, the act of resistance awakens in us the ennobling possibilities of our own existence. David and Goliath. The Patriots and the Redcoats. The Battle of Thermopylae. Someone recently suggested to me that this rooting for the underdog is a distinctly American thing, and, while I’m sure there are exceptions and nuances across individuals, cultures, and epochs, I believe it is, fundamentally, a human thing.