Ever notice that we don’t step right on the doorway into a room or a building? We step from this space to that space without actually touching the door frame. Sometimes we lean on the door frame to talk with someone or wait to get someone’s attention (*cough* teenagers *cough*) but even then if you look, the feet are usually either in one room or another. It’s only the shoulder that’s in between.
In between is a difficult place to be. Neither here nor there, neither this nor that. It’s one of the reasons we didn’t like our teenage years, besides hormones, pimples, and high school. The same can be said of those last weeks of pregnancy, the dragging out days of the legal divorce proceedings, the time between the last day of school and the awarding of the degree, on and on and on…you get the picture.
But in between is also a place of amazing transformation. It’s why all the myths and faery tales are of characters going to far away places and meeting teachers and challenges and dangers along the way. You know, in between where they were and where they’re headed? In my culture the most powerful medicine teachings are given in the between places, in the space between the realm of Spirit and the world all around us. The Uktena lives in the in between places like the edge of a lake or the canyon between two mountains. Bear and wolf and snake speak to us, not in the house or in the field with the livestock, but on the hill when we release the everyday and open ourselves to listen to guidance, when we are most in between.
In between moments happen all the time, but we feel uncomfortable with them because they don’t follow the rules. We don’t have comfortable habits that get us through them, we don’t have etiquette to follow, there are no procedure for the in between bits. In those times, be they a moment or a day or a week or a year, we have to be fully present. We have to use everything we are to figure it out, feel our way through, be our best guess of what is right in each moment. It’s awkward and we are rarely perfect at it, but that’s where the growth lies.
