Encouraging Words in Times of Fear

How do we find courage and trust during times of transition and turbulence? Living school sendee Felicia Murrell invites us to hold transitional moments in our minds and hearts in this moving poem, “Liminality and Certitude,”  originally published in “ONEING: Transitions.”

 

Liminality and certitude are always 

at odds with one another.

Anxiety thrums through the body, unmooring—  

Pause.  

Relax your shoulders, unfurl your hands.  

Try a deep cleansing breath.

Give yourself to the earth.  

Let Mother gift herself to you.  

Let your feet hit the soil,  

remember the patterns of growth,  

the cycles of life.

Things bury deep. Things grow in the dark.  

Things rise again.  

All things transition.

In the radiance of dark, there is process:  

the unfolding of mystery,  

things words cannot articulate, 

a threshold to freedom the mind cannot comprehend.  

But the body feels,

the heart knows:

This is liminality.

The threshold of transition,

from death to life, from evening to morn,  

from gestation to giving birth.  

The unknown is a part of it all.

—Felicia Murrell