Darkness, Saskatoons & Liminal Space: Reflections on a Refugia Retreat
Blogpost originally published by Refugia Retreats at refugiaretreats.com
There may not be a more fitting concept to capture the uncertainty and sorrow of the dark moment we’re living through than that of liminality. Liminality refers to the in-between spaces of our lives, the thresholds or doorways existing between two more stable states of being. We enter liminal space when we go through shifts in our lives, big or small––an illness, a career change, or the loss of a loved one. In liminal spaces, the world as we once knew it is upended and we struggle to understand how we fit in a new, and often more painful, reality.
For most of us, the last 8 months have been marked by significant uncertainty and loss. Maybe we feel adrift and useless, or overworked, overwhelmed, and at the very end of our rope. Some of us have lost a loved one, lost a job or lost our health. And on top of whatever personal loss we face, we are all experiencing the grief of witnessing suffering on a mass scale. As the number of covid-related deaths climbs higher every day, as ICU staff reach and surpass their breaking points, and as our elders and seniors face the deep pain of isolation, it seems impossible to avoid the heaviness and sorrow of this moment.
Put simply, this is devastating to witness. Encountering this level of suffering, especially when we know so much of it could have been avoided, is heart-wrenching and brutal. It is an experience that seems utterly impossible to make sense of.
The last thing I intend to do here is suggest that there is any quick or easy meaning to be made out of what is happening right now. I believe strongly that this kind of preventable and unjust suffering does not exist as ‘part of a bigger plan’ or to simply ‘teach us a lesson.’ However, I also believe, and know from experience, that liminal spaces can transform us, they can break us open and bring us into inhabiting our humanity more fully. But only if we let them.
Refugia’s 6-session retreat titled, ‘Seeking the Depths,’ happened right in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic. Alberta was breaking records for new cases nearly every other day; why commit to another weekly zoom call, especially now? Looking back, I can see that the retreat guided us in doing exactly what the moment was asking––to let this liminal space transform us.
We worked through a different theme each week, including resilience, gratitude, and grief and ritual. With Jodi’s help, the six of us participating in the workshop series created a container, a shared and semi-structured space that allowed us to identify and explore the liminal spaces within ourselves, and connect them to what was happening in the wider world.
Within this container, we participated in various contemplative and somatic practices. Whether it was a meditation, a drawing exercise or a guided walk, we were invited to lean into uncertainty, simply by attending to the shifts and changes already happening in us. At times this meant holding space in our bodies for feelings of anger, sorrow, fear or despair. In other moments it meant being attentive to the symbols and stories that we were gravitating towards, respecting and holding them even if we did not yet know what they meant.
For me, the transformation this allowed was significant, even while being quite subtle. When we took the time to slow down, we noticed things––how our bodies intuitively knew that to process grief we have to let it move through us; how grief arose out of our deep and loving interconnection with the world around us; and how being fully awake to this grief, although painful, was precisely what our bodies, our spirits and the world around us were calling us to do.
This all became tangible during our very last session together, when we were invited to spend 20 minutes of solo contemplative time outdoors. At the time, I was visiting my grandma on my grandparent’s farm, a place I had been going every other week throughout the pandemic in order to help care for my grandpa. Having struggled with mobility issues and dementia for years, the family had just decided several weeks earlier to finally help him make the move into a long term care home.
He was on my mind as I stepped out of the house into the dark, snow covered farmyard. I wandered around slowly and soon found myself beneath the old saskatoon bush growing at the far end of the garden. Looking up at her I recalled what I knew of her life––the bounty she provided, the time my dad pruned her back way too far, the huge stinging nettle plants I had cleared out from under her this past June. Every single day for years my grandparents added her berries to their morning oatmeal. My grandma always said this is what helped them live so long.
My heart ached as I thought about my grandpa sleeping alone in his care home after 67 years of falling asleep holding onto my grandma’s hand. I reached up to touch the small, hard buds on the ends of the saskatoon branches. Moose would come this winter, gnawing off some of them, winter-kill might get others.
Like us the bush will spend this long winter waiting.
Like us she is facing the inevitability of change, of loss, of death. But unlike us, the saskatoon bush is graceful in her surrender to this uncertainty––every single August she spends her precious sugar generously, growing hundreds of new buds, never knowing which ones will make it to spring, getting to burst open at the sun’s warm touch.
As I stood at her side I felt something inside me soften. It wasn’t until that moment that I even knew how much I was resisting. I was resisting the loss of my grandpa’s presence, the loss of the farm, the myriad of losses associated with the pandemic. I thought about this, about the uncertainty of winter, about liminality, about not knowing how much would be lost, and not knowing who we would even be without the world as we knew it.
Part of the contemplative exercise had been to give an offering of gratitude. So I poured water on the roots of the saskatoon bush, giving thanks for the life she had so generously provided to those around her, especially to my grandpa.
Honoring the web of life that my grandpa was immersed in for so many years helped me to accept that in some ways, his role on this land had come to an end. However, it also opened me up to understanding what would live on.
The land that he and my grandma had cultivated, the land that sustained him and our family for (only two!) generations, lives on in me and my siblings. It lives on in next spring’s pink and white bloom. And, perhaps most beautiful of all, it lives on in the cow moose my grandma asked me to chase out of the garden one morning in September, who was enormous and content, gnawing away in the saskatoons.
Gabrielle is a third-generation settler on Treaty 6 territory and is based in amiskwaciwâskahikan in the kisiskâciwanisîpiy (North Saskatchewan River) watershed. She is a graduate student at St. Stephen's College, studying theology, climate grief and spiritual care. Gabrielle is spending her quarantine either writing, avoiding, or ranting to a loved one about her thesis, which is on climate grief and how it impacts the ways young organizers make meaning in their lives.
