Betwixt and Between 7/29/21

A number of years ago I mentioned to a friend that I felt as if I was being invited by God to become completely untethered. It was a disconcerting feeling - but one that has never left me.

This invitation came accompanied by the image of an air plant - suspended by its roots to some object.

I learned that air plants do not need soil to grow. In fact, if you plant them in soil, they will most likely die. Unlike other plants that receive their nutrients through heir roots and soil, air plants receive their nutrients from objects floating in the air. And they don’t suck water up through the earth - instead they take water in through their leaves. They grow pretty much anywhere - as long as they have something sturdy to attach their roots too. And they can detach and move to another object if desired or needed.

There was something beautiful for me in the image of these plants so openly living in the world. I found myself striving to live into their openness. To allow this invitation of becoming untethered to feel like the plants as they wrapped their roots around a solid surface but not an immovable one. To be willing to unwrap my roots and move on when I felt the pull. To be guided by something beyond me that kept calling me forward and asking that I come as unencumbered as possible.

Last night I read a line that jumped out at me from the page and has stayed companioning me throughout the day.

The author wrote about the difficulty of transitioning from one place in her life to another. In all her imagining of the new life she had forgotten that there would be a time of transition, a liminal space requiring patience and waiting. The words that jumped out and caught my attention were “How deluded had I been to think we would be out of it (liminal time) in no time? As if the betwixt and the between of the old life and the new one would be in a finger snap” (Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling with Pomegranates, pg115).

Her words took me on a journey into my own life right now. I thought about how we are living in a liminal space right now, and how this time of transition has been more disorienting than we originally imagined. As if we too had thought that it would happen in the snap of a finger. That we had not prepared for the betwixt and the between - and yet here we are - knee deep in the transition from the old to the new.

As I sat longer with the passage I remembered an encounter I had a couple of weeks ago with an air plant at the Botanical Gardens in Des Moines. This gorgeous alien like specimen was growing out of a glass bowl, suspended from the roof of the greenhouse. I was drawn to her immediately. As I approached to take her picture, I felt like some form of kinship passed between us. I stood transfixed for a moment and then, as if coming back to my senses, snapped her picture and moved on. By the next day I was back at life with all its busyness. Forgetting her beauty, her untetheredness, her offer of friendship during this liminal time.

But it seems she is a more persistent friend then I imagined. Returning to me here in the darkness of night on the pages of a book about travel and letting go and leaning in.

It is one thing for me to say I am being invited to become untethered, to casually mention it to a friend, to write about it my journal.

It is quite another thing to actually unplant myself from soil and move my roots from one surface to another as I go along - and yet that is exactly what we have done.

My heart knows that I do not grow when firmly planted. That an environment of plantedness stifles my growth, my creativity. That it is not how I am designed to live.

But the transition of betwixt and between is still present. It is like I have sent the RSVP for the party but the actual event has not taken place yet and I am still in limbo picking out my party dress.

I am learning about what it means to wait - to be patient.

I am in the process of evolving from one who has been planted, to one who is learning how to take her nutrients from the air. Learning the new language of untethered - which has likely been my native language all along.