The Liminal Space

I’m between places. Regularly exploring in the North Pennines, I’m aware of the similarities between the land and me. The landscape is liminal, still transitioning between what it was and whatever it’ll be. Abandoned farms and mine buildings, huge industrial chimneys, and deep quarries gouged out of the earth… all in some impermanent state, not quite reclaimed by nature, but embraced by it.

I too am caught in a liminal space, somewhere between pre-pandemic and whatever comes next, between good health and pain, between hope and fear.

Trees grow up through deserted houses, poking out of the roof. Ivy covers walls like fresh green paint, pushing aerial roots through cracks and joints until it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. A barn owl makes a daytime appearance, quartering around the long grass that surrounds its abandoned-ruin home, hoping for a snack.

This space, this between place, is the only thing that isn’t diversion or distraction. It’s pure escapism, sidestepping into another world and putting the regular one on pause. This grass, these trees, the water, all looked the same before as they do now, they are grounding, a touchstone for normality.

Putting one foot in front of the other feels right. The rhythm, the pace. No room for thinking about anything more than the direction I’m going or if it’ll rain. Watching nature in its circle of life and death, and the treasures it leaves behind: a perfectly preserved rabbit skull one day, the flawless feather of a Great Spotted Woodpecker on another. I bring them all home and display them, a shrine to the in-between. Proof of existence.

And I think maybe I’m like a house on the hill, standing in that liminal space, not quite one thing or the other. Braced against the unknown. Fear and anxiety pushing their roots between the cracks in me, until we find a way to live together, not quite sure where one ends and the other begins.