Hello Shining Ones,
I was pondering of late whether I am always at some form of threshold in my life, from micro to macro thresholds. Or threshold times, like the one it feels we’re living through collectively, where the borderlands seem so infinite we’ll never get to crossover.
This equinox, I find myself at a twilight threshold. I have just published my first book-journal, the Sunset Journal, which will be going out into the world in October in time for Samhain. In tandem, I have decided to offer myself to the ‘Sunset Way’ for the next year. This will mean some business pruning and reorienting creatively to immerse in our rich after dark folklore, folk wisdom and mythology, the dusky wonders and curiosities of the natural world, the Otherworldly messages of night dreams and Celtic dreaming, and whatever else offers its torch to this path. I am nightborn after all, a midnight December child.
I created this ‘Threshold’ card (from my emerging Celtic Dream Oracle: Ancient Symbols to Guide Your Modern Life) in November, Samhain of last year, its time has finally come to share.
Threshold
Keywords:
Betwixt and between, Holding, Healing
Suit:
Time
Symbol:
A blue cosmic egg stands at the gates of what is to come. A place of holding, of gathering energy before it pushes through the narrow passageway and is birthed into the flowing waves of new life.
Lore:
As with all of my oracle cards, there is personal lore collaged into them. The image of the egg came after dark when I dreamt on a November night of blue eggs sparkling in an immaculately clean toilet. My dreaming self knew the egg was important, in many creation myths, the universe itself is born of an egg. Blue is a colour of continuation, the skies above that travel into faraway places beyond the scope of our eyes, the sea that dissolves into the forever of the horizon.
The shadowy excrement and waste of life that I had been forced to face was now becoming new life itself, that in time could hatch from one or more of these beautiful blue eggs. Inspired and hopeful, I created the ‘Threshold’ card a few days later.
The Latin root for liminality comes from limen meaning ‘threshold’. It is the middle stage in the archetypal rite of passage - separation, liminality, and incorporation. Or enclosure, metamorphosis and emergence. Although we may feel stuck here, it’s where change happens and where the deepest, most painful, frustrating work is done.
The night after creating the artwork, I was gifted another dream. In it, the Threshold card was placed at the front door of my house and when I turned in the hall, I could see it had also been placed at the back door. The Threshold cards were blown up to a size that covered the doors themselves. Each, a ginormous oracle card. I reached out to touch the blue egg in the card, and it moved upon meeting my fingers, as did all of the shapes, like I was moving the parts of a puzzle by hand. I then heard a dream voice say, ‘Offer yourself to these oracle cards, to putting all of these shapes together, and you will receive healing.’
Often, we are asked to offer ourselves to the requests of the threshold without the clarity we desire (like what kind of healing?) or any guarantees of what the outcome will be.
Yet solace can be found in how healing itself arrives at thresholds.
Brigid, who is both a goddess of leechcraft, the craft of healing, and a miracle-working saint, came into this world on a threshold. The daughter of a Gaelic chieftain, Dubhthach, and a bondwoman, Broicsech from Portugal, she was born neither free nor a slave. Her father was Pagan and her mother was Christian; Brigid is both a goddess and a saint. She came into the world at dawn, born at the borderlands of night and day. Her mother gave birth to her in the doorway of the homestead, one foot in the house, the other outside. Brigid entered the world betwixt and between.
She is an artist of the liminal, a woman on the threshold.
When this card appears:
The Irish word for threshold is tairseach from the Old Irish tairsech, meaning ‘threshold of a door’ and the less obvious ‘edge’ or ‘windowsill’.
You’re outside in the dark, lantern in hand, peering through a window into a life you cannot yet make out. Dusky, waning, covered in twilight and shadow. Maybe you’ll turn back and abandon what lies in the beyond, or perhaps you’ll summon the energy to see this night through and enter your new home when the door finally swings open.
Either way, the threshold is yours for the taking.
Journal prompt:
How might I become an artist of the threshold (even when I don’t want to be here)?
Offerings
Sunset Journal
My Sunset Journal has almost sold out on preorder, which I am beyond-the-beyond grateful for - if you’ve ordered a copy, posting will begin the second week in October (thanks a million!). I took my own copy on a tour of the Hill of Tara last weekend while foraging hawthorn berries with my youngest lad. The photo on the left is the journal meeting Sheela na Gig, and to the right at the ever-living well of Bóinn, the white cow goddess.
Celtic Dreaming Self-Guided Workshop
As sunset gets earlier here in the northern hemisphere, the time for dreaming ripens. If you’d like to learn about the dreaming traditions of your ancestors and cultivate or enhance your own relationship with your night twin, I have a self-guided workshop available. Remember, what you are seeking may also be seeking you.
Croí isteach,
Jen x
Sources
Betha Brigte (‘Life of St Brigit’), translated by Whitley Stokes
The Anthropology of Religion by Fiona Bowie
Sparkling blue toilet eggs is an excellent evocation - I love your dreaming space dearest! 🩵✨
Blessings at the Threshold! 🍁🍄