Part 8: The Beauty and the Between
No one can heal by maintaining or fostering illusion.
— Alice Miller
It’s in the darkness, it’s in the moment of crisis, when you have fallen through all of your own expectations that there is the opportunity for rebirthing.
— Barbara Holmes
I profess the uncertain
with gratitude.
… the almost untenable premise
that between counting one and two
nothing is lost.
— Jane Hirschfeld
I sat on a train, it’s windows wide and panoramic.
I remember thinking it felt like some kind of portal into some expansive mountainous world.
The sheer beauty of the landscape hurling past my window was unlike anything I had really ever seen or experienced, and my location at that moment was as unrecognizable to me as my own reflection in the window.
It was summer break, and I was in Norway visiting some longtime family friends.
After a few days with them at their home in Oslo, I was venturing out on my own.
I was headed northwest, toward the city of Bergen.
Just me and my disillusionment on that seven-hour train ride across the Norwegian mountains.
Similar to when I arrived in the Netherlands, I found myself again in liminal space.
I was not yet where I was headed, nor was I any longer where I had come from—I was somewhere precisely in-between.
There was a strange and necessary beauty to the place “between,” I reflected.
Not just literally as I stared out my window at the beautiful landscape rushing by, observing the necessary passage of time and place found in the precise in-between place of my origin and my destination — but so too, I realized, the same was true for my spiritual position.
