Threshold: as defined by Google
1- a strip of wood, metal, or stone forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room.
2- the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested; a limit below which a stimulus causes no reaction; a level, rate, or amount at which something comes into effect.
I brought the pale, winter New England sky home with me. The winter winds are soft and the Atlantic more turquoise than indigo. The cyan backdrop mixed with sunlight diffuses the vibrancy of both plants and water, creating a softer palette for the king birds who dance across our pool's surface, wetting their beaks and bottom feathers. Gone is the thundering boom of ocean swells, instead a subtle rushing and folding of waves that meet the rocky shoreline below.
A day later, in an exercise I will call snapshot for my writing class, I wrote,"A muted quilt of greens ...meets the turbulent turquoise now turned indigo... meets a swath of floozie blond grasses. It’s all blur- the stye in my left eye can’t help but look angrily at Outer Brass. As if wearing a filmy gauze of cellophane, my fuzzy vision paints the familiar scenery into a tropical carpet of remembered colors and textures. Goats surprise me as I effort to focus my gaze; blacks, browns, grays, and whites speckle the scrubby landscape of our neighbor’s overgrown property. Our eyes meet, 10 eyes in total. 1 human. 4 goats. An exile amongst natives."
And then, in another exercise I will call earshot, I wrote, "The lapping ocean slaps lavic rocks, making sounds of constant friction where seams meet their opposites. Earth and water, vessel and fluid, edges and currents, dust and water. I listen with eyes closed, hearing a lullaby as I gaze at the seams within me. The constant motion of my mind and body. The need to ground my inhibitions. I am both bone and blood, as elemental as the terrain that holds me in her song, caught in a wave of my own making."
These collections of words help me anchor back on the Rock, back home, back from it all, where all can happen, where all can overwhelm. A fluffy Margot rests behind me, her paws crossing the threshold between the deck and the kitchen. Like Margot, my body is rooted to the Caribbean soil and rhythms, while my toes are still reaching for something else- my children, parts of my life in Connecticut, answers to questions that ruminate as a writer, artist, seeker. What keeps me on this threshold? Is it the longing to belong, the longing for what was, the longing to what's not here yet, but is slowly materializing?
To return home after filling my cup with my daughter, family and friends and then knock it over with my curious tailspinning, I find my stamina, confidence and trust spilling out before me- down the rocks towards the shoreline of contrasts, seams and edges. The menu of my trip North felt like a game of Twister, my body parts stretching to see and do and taste and listen and talk and drive and laugh and cry. And in hindsight (always) there was a lot of stretching going on, and with that, some growing pains. But when the proverbial wipe out follows from all of the spinning, I am begged to consider the motions I just put myself through, the lengths I traveled, the effort I put in.
Five days later, the spinning is starting to slow and I notice new space to breathe into, new ideas rising to the surface. It was my choice, and mostly joy, that urged me towards the point of tipping over, and now I get to discern how to put the pieces back together and what to pack into my next trip. To start, there will be no trips North in the near future, and when I go I will only bring a carry-on and will only make one date/visit per day. For as much as I want to catch up and engage with loved ones and specialists, I can't do the 5 different beds in 9 days, breakfast walks, lunch walks, doctor visits and dinners. As 6 year old Dave would say,"I'm not put together that way."
The opposite of abundance is deficiency, but, when it really comes down to it, abundance is a state of mind. Whatever thresholds you may find yourselves upon, whatever chasms or summits surround you, let's remember to make lemonade out of the lemons and know I'll be here to cheers with you, as soon as the sugar dissolves in lemon water.
With a whole lot of everything,
St. Sunshine
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