Liminal (or liminality) might seem a new and unfamiliar word but
its roots are ancient, traceable back to the Latin ‘limen’, meaning
‘a threshold’. Discovering liminality is like finding a new colour in the
spectrum. Once we find it we see it everywhere.
Anthropologists use the term to describe ritual points of life
transition, such as from childhood to adulthood, and we can apply it to
other life changes: from woman to mother, friend to lover, health to
sickness, or sickness to death. A fixed status of liminality may not be
pleasant, think of homelessness.

The concept can apply equally well to natural events or places,
dawn being the threshold to the day, the shoreline the transition point
between sea and land. Social and natural liminality might combine,
as when a river forms a political boundary.
It follows that older societies, through their transition rituals, understood
liminality far differently, and perhaps better, than we moderns.

A century ago Georg Simmel observed that the new urbanised,
technological society, through concentrating social density, reformed
our collective sense of time and place. Positively, society became more
cosmopolitan. But freed from old moorings of place and status we
became subject to new principles of anonymity and connectedness.
We know more about the fictional life of strangers than our family or
locality, while our technology has turned night-time into day, provides
ice in summer and strawberries in winter.

It may be that the suspension of natural cycles and the loss
of solidarity-confirming rituals are a central source of spreading
depressive illness and sense of alienation. If so, we have yet to discover
an alternative, although the creation and appreciation of art and the
reinsertion of nature in our lives must surely be among them.
In so doing we may come to reevaluate liminality and our regard for
liminal places; not as something to be endured but rather enjoyed:
quiet corners in a busy world.

Geof Rayner