The Constant Existence of this Liminal Space

I feel the space I am navigating these days in my cells and neural connections as a weight, a stick-y-ness, surrounded by echoes but no one thought truly stretched out enough in my mind to become coherent.

The space is one of desiring balance - or at least a feeling of balance being possible if only for a moment. On one end of my unbalanced life, I can see the possibility of grace, spaciousness, and E A S E. Possibility because the consistency of soaking in any of those elemental vapors is minute and hard-won, and the feeling of staying in these elements - as a daughter of immigrants, multi-job hustling single mom, volunteering because we must fight for change, course-taking because I need to keep growing - is soaked with guilt. So when I am able to feel the openness and release in my body that is gifted by these spaces, what follows after is a mentally nauseating rollercoaster, with those loop-de-loops that give you whiplash, of the tasks on my to-do list, the work I am behind on, the opportunities I am passing up because I can’t find the time, but also, the reminders of why space is needed, how my need for rest is decades deep, how I am not a battery - and even they die out, how I need space for my thoughts to settle so I can see them for what they are, how I am not just a body but a soul that is connected to the strands and pulsating vibrational wisdom of ancestors before me and all the energy contained around me and in the next generation that came from me.

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That last part - the next generation that came from me…..whew. When I say that becoming a mother and motherhood has cracked me open and continues to in the deepest and most painful ways, I mean that I have been broken over and over again becoming and being a mother and to say why would mean I need to speak about the what and how and even I don’t know if I can just yet.

But just this one piece - parenting- and all that is contained in ‘conscious parenting’, and when I say conscious parenting, I mean a decolonised form of parenting rooted in the recognition of things (literally the Samsonite cloth-covered suitcases filled with all the hopes and dreams of the generations before you who survived colonisation and partition with closed mouths and boarded up hearts) that you carry into - nearly automatically - the parenting relationship: The cycles of intergenerational pain, grief, and trauma but also the intergenerational joy, hope, wisdom, culture, recipes, and oral stories that you can hear thrumming through your veins if you are still enough. This conscious parenting is a version of parenting I have recognised as rooted in the want to do better because we know that we may be the first persons in our generational lines to have the opportunity to do so. So the weight of that responsibility - to break such rusted-over chains, to show up and sit with it all because you have an opportunity to do so, and you are more awake and aware, and therefore you must show up and if you don’t show up then not only do you do yourself a disservice, but your ancestors who have given their lives and blood to hydrate the soil you were born out of, and your child, your child who looks to you for guidance and wisdom and safety and hope and love…..

The constant existence of this liminal space - the in-between: grief and joy, love and heartbreak, devastation and hope, wonder and aloneness, rest and survival - is the reality of so many. There are no answers or solutions. Only these moments where we pause long enough to write words in a blog in the hopes that this one thought becomes coherent enough to feel proud to have wrestled with and hope that this too will mean something.

Much love in the days that follow.

-Uma

TREES: A MICROCOSM is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.