Thresholds

Jun 19

Addition
 
My father taught me about numbers, 
How to carry forward 
What had grown too large for its column 
Add the 5 to the 7 
Carry forward the 10 
Leaving only a 2. 
It is like that, 
Taking all you've come through, 
Combining everything gathered and lost, 
Add to the sum a little kindness 
For doing the best you could 
With what you knew at the time. 
Tally up all the fives and sevens, 
All the sixes and fours, 
All that came up odd or even, 
Then carry forward 
Your expanded self 
Which has grown beyond the limits 
Of the first container. 

From A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays by Carrie Newcomer

Math has always been a bit of a challenge for me. I was in elementary school when a new method of teaching mathematics called “New Math” was instituted in schools across the country. A few short years later, it was removed from the curriculum as a top down solution to bottom up skills. What I mean by that is that the method advocated learning and thinking in the abstract before it taught the basic building blocks, leaving someone like me pondering the mysteries of Boolean theory but always a bit vague on the times 8 multiplication table. In the poem my father is sitting with me, endeavoring to teach me the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division, to understand the elegance of how one column of added numbers, can transform into two.

The poem is about math, but it is also about a moment of threshold. As I grow and learn as a human spirit, as experience (beautiful, difficult, grievous and joyous) deepens my understanding of myself and the world around me, my life can expand beyond the container I’ve first created for it. I can shed old fears that have limited me. I can open up new windows and doors of compassion and empathy. At that time of threshold I have the opportunity to reframe and reconsider how my heart and inner resources have expanded. A threshold is not an accident, but a growing edge, a new frontier you have been moving toward and have now arrived. More often than not, you cannot return from this threshold. It is like adding 5 + 7. You can’t make it all fit in that original single column. You’ve come too far, you have changed in ways that have made you a different person than the one who crossed over.

The poet and author, John O’Donohue wrote,

“ Today many people describe themselves as “being in transition.” In a culture governed by speed, this is to be expected, for the exterior rate of change is relentless. Yet the word transition seems to be pale, functional, almost inadequate and impersonal, and does not have the same intensity or psychic weight as perhaps the word threshold evokes. The word threshold was related to the word thresh, which was the separation of the grain from the husk or straw when oats were flailed. It also includes the notions of entrance, crossing, border, and beginning. To cross a threshold is to leave behind the husk and arrive at the grain.”

I appreciate how O’Donohue talks about threshold as the process of sifting. Some aspects of change have been happening so quickly, we are still trying to catch up with new technologies that have literally exploded onto our cultural/personal experience in ways that nothing else in human history has ever done. There is great upheaval, political uncertainty and climate crisis, and for many people the knee-jerk response is fear, to hold fast to something, anything that feels like a life raft, even if that floatation device (white supremacy, fossil fuel, violence) has caused great harm and has finally sprung a huge leak. At a threshold I have a chance to sift through what is husk and what is grain, to hold lightly what I’ve come to understand as an ongoing learning process.

Right here and now, I have a moment to remember what matters most and separate it from what doesn’t actually matter at all (or not enough to give it the time and energy it was formerly given). This shifting and sifting creates the building blocks of change, the personal/ cultural understanding that allows us to let go of old containers that have become too small, and embrace what needs to expand.

During the early days of the pandemic, when our geographical movement was suddenly and profoundly limited, many of us discovered places where our hearts and spirits needed to expand. We encountered the nudges of the spirit and the thresholds that had calling to us but ignored or postponed by the perpetual motion of our culture and lives. I believe in this troubled time, as in all troubling times, there is a personal and cultural opportunity for opening, healing and transformation.

It is a time to remember, to tell the story of the calling, the movement toward that growing edge, the sifting of the husk and the grain, and celebrate every time love won out over fear. The more I find the thresholds to greater peace within myself, the more able I am to work for greater peace in the world. This is the building block of change I learned when I sat at the kitchen table with my father. Do the best I can with what is. Open up my mind to the possibility of something new and expansive. Gather up what has grown in my heart that is now to wide for its old borders and then step forward

Question: Have you experienced a threshold in the past years, months or days? Can you look back and see a series of small steps, intuitive leaps or deep calling that brought you to that threshold? Did it feel difficult but right? How did (or how might) that personal experience of threshold help you be more compassionate, self compassionate and express the change you’d like to see in the world?

Special shows with tickets now available

I’ll be performing at The Nowhere Else Festival in September hosted by Over The Rhine Here’s the http://www.nowhereelsefestival.com.

A Gathering of Spirits

Thresholds

Special shows with tickets now available

Ready for more?