From Liminal Space to Beginnings

I went to my first yoga class in over a year recently. Yoga has never been a first line of offense when I am in need of fitness in my life. I am deeply self-conscious in a yoga studio. Hyper aware when I am slow to catch on to a pose and to the limitations of my flexibility. My body, in many ways, rejects the push toward opening itself up. Perhaps it’s an outward manifestation of a fear of being so flexible that I bend and break under the pressures of others and this world. But “hard” Black women are created under such fear. I dream of a life of ease, of knowing that trees with deep roots sway and bend and kiss the ground while never breaking.

To say that change and transitions are hard is to flatten the circumstances around them. It’s been over two weeks since I filled a room up with my belongings and left the Bay for my longest time away in over seven years. I’ve been thinking about leaving for over a year. I’ve known for some time that I’m being called to movement, but I had ignored the invitation until it was staring at me on every corner.

Seven years ago I had turned toward a feeling that chasing wild dreams was stopping me from seeing all the beauty and potential all around me. So I had put down roots and slowed my movements, breathing deeply into a life of proximal community and care that has allowed me to grow into the woman that I am today. I would never trade that era in my life, even knowing what came with it. But God has been forming questions in me that I can’t quite read nor do I have the answers to. But in it, He is asking me to trust that I am yet again being called to a season of movement.

It was one month between my decision to leave and my lease ending, which I used as a marker for my leavetakings. I remember the exact moment which my mind switched. I spent the beginning of August in the majestic landscape of Mesa Verde National Park. We were working with Indigenous park rangers on storytelling and leaving lasting artifacts of their perspectives at the park. I was moved by their commitment to ensuring that their peoples’ history and present were not forgotten; to seeing them come into their power as narrators of their personal and communal stories. On one of our walks on the land, my friend Spencer spoke to me about the growth that comes with movement, a journey he himself was getting ready for after several years working at the park. He recounted the story of how the Ancient Pueblo people knew that the land around Mesa Verde was not their permanent home, but that it would serve a purpose of teaching them things about themselves and the land that they needed. They stayed for a long time, and when they had gotten all from the land that they needed, they packed up and headed South, becoming the Pueblo tribes that we know of today.

When we say that place matters, all the places in our lives matter. I am the sum of every place that I have called home. And like the Ancient Pueblo people, the ground beneath me is shifting again in search of new beginnings.

When I think of the weight of transitions, I think about how those around me carry it too. I recently spent a week in the Central Jersey Shore, working with a partner on their strategic plan.Prior to that week we had hit a wall when it came to making major changes to their funding priorities and language. As a place-based funder, there were a lot of feelings and concerns around how shifts in their work would alter existing relationships. We wrestled with this for weeks and finally, as we sat around a table together, they allowed themselves to lean into the promises of new directions and how to communicate those changes to those around them. Ultimately, the changes will not sever those relationships, but rather clarify their ‘why.’ I’m trying to do the same.

There was a moment in my leaving that I felt this pang of impact most acutely. I had been packing up at a breakneck pace, sleeping only three hours max a night, and living off of Trader Joe’s packaged foods, in the week leading up to my flight. There had been very little time to sit in the space of emotions. I was running on deadlines and decisions alone. But on my last day in Oakland, I brought lunch over to my close friend Paola’s house. A friend who has long since become family. I ate with her and her sister and mother, toasting to the autumn equinox and the things I hoped would be left behind on this journey and fall away. Midday became afternoon, and I reluctantly prepared to leave. As I walked toward my Uber, I looked back to her and her family standing outside their home — a place that holds many memories for me of being held by community — to see me off. Waving me on to this next period of my life. Wishing me well even if wellness may not include a return. It didn’t take long for the tears to come.

In the Uber ride I called my oldest brother to check in on a prayer request he had sent me earlier for his wife’s family member that we’d known for a long time. He’d gone into cardiac arrest and they had been trying to revive him. I knew from the moment my brother answered the phone that he did not make it. The tears flowed more for the sudden loss of life. I sat there in the lonely liminal space between endings and beginnings, as I watched the Oakland scenery pass by and let the tears be my companion.

It’s not that all things end that gutted me. It was that things could change so quickly and alter the spaces for all involved. The Oakland scenery was only mine for an evening more. For a moment I worried that the flexibility of the next six months would break me when I suddenly became uprooted.

I managed to pack my things for these first few legs of my time away into one checked bag, a carry on bag, and a backpack. Hours of rolling clothes and the miracle of packing cubes. But over two weeks in and I am reminded of these words from Octavia Raheem: “You meticulously packed your bags for the journey. You thought you had a map, compass, or guide. It turns out that you only have your senses. If that is all you have, trust. It is enough.”

When I realized that the feeling of being called to movement was the voice of God calling me to act move on faith, it shifted my focus and purpose of these next six months. Faith is not knowing the questions that I am trusting to find answers for during this time. It’s knowing that even uprooted, I am never unmoored.

So in that yoga session, the first in over a year, I breathed deeply and stretched my limbs as far as they would go and then some. I turned my face upward toward the brightness of the skylights and stretched my fingers toward the promise of beginnings.