Vincent van Gogh, The Vestibule of the Asylum, 1889, black chalk & gouache, 61.6 x 47.1 cm

From the Tender Loving Care exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Rites of passage give structure to life in the same way seasons do. Whoever passes a certain threshold has concluded a phase of life and enters into a new one. Thresholds, as transitions, give a rhythm to, articulate, and even narrate space and time. They make possible a deep experience of order. Thresholds are temporally intense transitions. Today, they are being erased and replaced by an accelerated and seamless communication and production. This is making us poorer in space and time. In our attempt to produce more space and time, we lose them. They lose their language and become mute. Thresholds speak. Thresholds transform. Beyond a threshold, there is what is other, what is foreign. In the absence of the imagination of the threshold, the magic of the threshold, all that is left is the hell of the same. The construction of the global is premised on the ruthless destruction of thresholds and transitions. Information and commodities prefer a world without thresholds: unresisting smoothness accelerates circulation. Today, temporally intense transitions are disintegrating into speedy passages, continuous links and endless clicks."

- Byung-Chul Han, from The Disappearance of Rituals [PDF], 2020.

Nocturnus - Aquatica

"It is wise in your own life to be able to recognise and acknowledge the key thresholds:

to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there;

to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward.

The time has come to cross."

~ John O'Donohue

WRITE 31 DAYS - TIL / DAY 23

WRITE 31 DAYS – TIL / DAY 23

23 October 2022 – Today I learned: why I like spooky but don’t like scary [1]. Eliza Brooke at Dirt: On Spookiness covers it really well. I love her take on the liminality of spookiness: “Technically, spooky means ghostly or spectral, two words that relate to liminality. To me, spookiness is a suggestion. It leaves the door open to the possibility of life beyond death, of a world that’s much…

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Doors of Europe • 

Who Are You

Welcome to another insightful episode of Contemplative Living with David Bennett, your go-to podcast for spiritual reflections and meditations to help pave your way toward inner peace. In this engaging episode, David asks Who Are You - Really!

In this week’s episode of the Contemplative Living Podcast, we explore “Who are you?” Who indeed… Where is your threshold of Being? As humans, we have been taught to believe we are separate, absolute individuals. Am I my job, my family, or a conglomerate of all those personas? As humanity’s madness swirls around, be the Pillar. Explore the wonder, the miracle unfolding. It is our responsibility…

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im tickled thinking about where the gateways might be located on the earths we know of....

What on earth is going on in the Star Trek fandom today, it's like my dash exploded

lol 28 years ago today, the Star Trek Voyager episode "Threshold" aired. The premise of the episode was that humans cannot travel at or faster than warp 10, because if they do, they would be traveling at "infinite velocity" and would exist in all points of space time simultaneously. Tom Paris found a way to travel at this speed, and doing so accidentally hyper-evolved him and his captain (Janeway) into giant salamanders, whereupon they immediately reproduced and created 3 baby salamanders. They were then turned back into normal humans, and forced to leave their salamander babies on the planet they had escaped to.

The episode was long held as the worst star trek episode. Not just the worst Star Trek Voyager episode, but the worst episode, period, because it was extremely weird and people turning into salamanders greatly annoyed a lot of people who don't know what fun is. Tumblr, having discovered this episode like excavating an exciting fossil, has taken a shine to this episode and many people now produce art and memes and eat pepperoni pizza in celebration of its air date, mostly to annoy the episode's creator, as in a very Arthur Conan Doyle way, he hates this episode and wants it de-canonized.

Anyway, happy Threshold Day!

"Subterranean Infiltrator" by Nocturnus - From "Thresholds" (1992)

Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time | Mary Shelley, Mathilda

(via Photo by Jesús Silvosa on Pexels)