Notes from the Threshold

On the Pain, Power, and Beauty of Becoming

“A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres...”— John O’Donohue

You have arrived at a threshold. You know this because you dream of standing on a cliff’s edge, preparing to trust your wings. Or maybe you are trembling at the edge of a dark forest, following a faint intuition that’s calling you forward. Or maybe you sit in front of a blank page, with an idea that feels too risky to put into words.

Maybe you know it’s time to speak a hard truth, step into your light after hiding for too long behind others. Or maybe you are facing a changed reality that is suffused with loss.

Thresholds have long been understood in mythopoeic literature as potent places of transformation, risk, and initiation. Crossing a new frontier is never as easy as simply stepping over a line—it requires an often terrifying initiation that tests our mettle and commitment.

Though we sometimes envision a kindly crone holding a lamplight at the crossroads, the gatekeeper is rarely so benevolent. Fear is always the guardian of this liminal realm. In the imaginal world, they might appear as a terrifying presence, an impossible feat, a dangerous precipice, or a vicious inner critic.

Hungry Alligator Area Rug by Undrfoot

The Death Mother is one such guardian. She is the inner archetype of invalidation, control, and shaming silence. She is not death itself, but she may as well be for the stultifying block she puts in our way. She is that energy that prevents our life from moving forward.

She stops us before we even leave the gate. Before you even think about attempting something new, engaging your creativity, or stepping towards change, the Death Mother is there.

Like Medusa, she only needs to raise a single eyebrow for your whole body to turn to stone. She is that paralytic energy that dismisses your ideas and demands your silence. She is provoked by any show of autonomy, daring, or radiance, and feeds on your shame and powerlessness.

She doesn't want you to cross the threshold because your crossing would dismantle her power. Her voice often mimics the authority of so-called common sense: You’re too old. You’re unorginal. You’re not an expert. No one cares. And because it sounds so rational, so familiar, we mistake it for truth.

But here’s the secret: shadows always rear up when they feel threatened—right before they retire, like an old dog by the fire.

The Death Mother’s voice is the signal that you’re getting dangerously close to something that matters.

Of course your instinct is to recoil. To step back from the edge-place, to let yourself be overcome by the narcotic allure of the unconscious, to fall back asleep. This is only natural when facing such a formidable foe.

But the Death Mother appears precisely because something real is at stake. She isn’t just an obstacle—she is a functionary of the threshold, a test of your courage and discernment. She asks: Are you sure you want this? Are you ready to be seen? Will you choose aliveness even when it costs you false belonging?

In some traditions, the guardian must be fed, named, even thanked. I think of this as symbolic of the price that must be paid. She is the resistance that forces us to slow down and clarify why we’re here. She is the test of our conviction necessary for the crossing.

Her job is to forge our courage, by daring us to defy her. She doesn’t block the threshold so much as reveal it. Showing us how, if we choose to say yes to our next becoming, the false self must die.

In many Indigenous traditions, initiates are spiritually dismembered during vision quests or dreams. They may lose limbs, organs, or even skin in the Otherworld, only to be put back together in a new way. They may be given a new vision, a new name, or a more powerful medicine.

This motif of dismemberment in initiatory rites signifies the radical deconstruction of the false self, so that something older and more essential may be re-membered.

Perhaps you know the story of how Osiris is dismembered and scattered, and how Isis, in her devotion to him, re-collected and reassembled his pieces to become more than he once was. On the far side of this ordeal he became a god of the underworld and the afterlife.

Whatever you are being asked to surrender—whether it is the pleasing persona, a silence that kept the peace, or the internalized expectations of who you were told to be—it’s important to know that the threshold is also a birth. As you step across your personal edge, you will be required to inhabit a new shape. One closer to your essence, and more porous to the world.

Initiation is a kind of ancient re-membering, a return to what you’ve always-never known. A vow to embrace that life that is trying to be born through you.

But it needs to be said: not all who stand at the threshold are ready to cross.

And that not-readiness is also a form of wisdom. Because it is a point of no return. You may need a season of strengthening: to assess the risks and build trust in the scaffolding of your truth. It’s not unusual to meet the Death Mother a hundred times before you can distinguish her voice from your own.

Hesitation may also be a series of painful reckonings. A time to ask: Where have I been complicit in staying small? In what ways have I obeyed the Death Mother’s voice because the cost of defying her seemed too great?

This reckoning, where we look honestly at the bargains we’ve made for belonging, is a transfer of power. Before we can step into the land beyond the threshold, we may have to name the ways we’ve upheld these silent contracts, to reclaim the power to break them.

Fascinatingly, the word hesitation comes from the Latin haesitare—to stick, to cling, to pause in uncertainty.

This clinging is the body’s way of staying close to what matters, attuning to the real cost of crossing, and weighing it against the deeper call. Whether you are using the pause to take a moral inventory, or simply letting your body catch up to change, the threshold is not just a line to step over, but a space of its own. A place of gathering energy and courage to inhabit the life that lies beyond.

But at some point, we must actively set things in motion.

Getting caught up in the question, What is my purpose? can be its own form of delay—like looking for the perfect shoes rather than walking forward. Eventually we must take a risk toward the passion, the inclination, and the resonance that knows our name.

Amazingly, when we do, the larger field begins to respond. By whatever name you call it—the Divine, the Holy in Nature, Sophia—the Anima Mundi is endlessly campaigning for us to move across our thresholds. It actively wants us to soar.

It sends you dreams of stones whose songs only you can hear, animals that beckon you down a dark forest path, or of a bridge that forms under your feet when you leap. It also orchestrates synchronicities—affirmations from the living world that appear when you are on the verge of who you’re meant to become.

You are not alone. The greater intelligence of the earth wants you to flourish because you are a revelation of its larger unfolding.

We are prone to forget that our stories are not ours alone—they are expressions of a larger dream. Like a letter that, once read, belongs to the reader too, our lives are shaped as much by unseen currents as by conscious choice. The dreams we receive, the grief we carry, the synchronicities that call us forward like memories of the future—these are all agents of change from the broader field of becoming.

Life is a correspondence. A letter written between us and the world—between soul and the great dream of the earth. In this way, our becoming is a participatory act: part offering, part response to that larger field of meaning.

Like the land itself, our story can never truly be owned. It can be loved, stewarded, and tended to, but the ground beneath it is ancient. We walk upon layers of meaning shaped by those who came before us. And we too leave a trace of our bravery behind when we cross every new threshold.

We add to the body of memory of all those who risked transformation, who dared to be disassembled and remade. And who knew that what is borne from such crossings is not meant to be hoarded.

That the fruits of our becoming whole are really gifts—meant to be given freely.

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If this piece met you at a meaningful threshold in your own life, know that I’m out here cheering you on. I write to give shape to what so often goes unnamed, at these liminal thresholds between our worlds.

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