The Kin Keepers’ Collective is pausing new memberships until the New Year. If you would like to receive an invitation to join us then, please email us at kinkeeperscollective@gmail.com by clicking here.
A Love Song to Liminality:
I, we, mostly everyone I suspect, is comfortable thinking of anything as having a distinct beginning, middle and end.
Birth is the beginning. Death is the end. Liminality is the middle.
Liminality is life.
Liminality is perpetual.
Life is perpetual.
It reminds me of a Buddhist elder describing the practice of living in the present moment (for what is any spiritual practice if not an attempt to make sense of this existence we find ourselves in?), how the present moment is not static, how as soon as you try to pin it down or capture it, it’s gone.
Not actually gone, but moved.
The present moment is perpetual.
It reminds me of a talk I heard once by Tomson Highway who was musing on the violence of the English language (and most non-indigenous languages actually) that work in binaries, dualities, conflict, and hierarchies; compared to Indigenous languages that reflect a world view of everything in relationship with everything else. So, instead of a hierarchy, life – all life, all before and after life – is organized in a circle, how everything life/death/birth, past/present/future, plant/animal/element, is connected, interdependent.
How we are all one.
How we are perpetual.
Never really gone, but moved on in the circle.
It reminds me of the journey of dreaming Kin Keepers into existence, of its beginnings with two – a Haven – and its middle with three – a Collective – and its liminal perpetuity of what it is becoming.
I love you, as you are and as you are becoming.
It’s something my partner says regularly since we found each other, something I was always curious about. Where did that idea, that phrasing come from? Was it a quote?
It took me a long time to ask. It took me a long time to trust it as genuine, if in fact I do yet. There is a part of me that flinches at the possibility that it’s a passive criticism of my imperfections, but that’s mine, not his, and that part of me comes to the conversation less and less as time moves on.
I love you, as you are and as you are becoming.
Turns out they are his own words reflecting his own orientation in our relationship.
His love is perpetual.
My love is perpetual.
Our love is perpetual.
As we are and as we are becoming.
Kin Keepers’ is entering its third year, and it always existed, in the perpetual liminality of as we are and as we are becoming.
(this photo is of a thanksgiving cactus, given to me as a gift on the launch of Kin Keepers two years ago. It blooms every year at this time. I have rechristened it the Kin Keepers Kactus)
What will it look like a year from now?
Everything ends.
And often we don’t know that something has ended until we look back and remember it was once a part of our lives.
We don’t know what Kin Keepers will look like a year from now, three years from now, ten years from now… on and on in perpetuity.
And it doesn’t matter, except for how it feels for us, here in these bodies, here in this Collective
But our sincerest wish is to share this journey of togethering, in the present moment, as we are and as we are becoming.
~ Janine
The Kin Keepers’ Collective is pausing new memberships until the New Year. If you would like to receive an invitation to join us then, please email us at kinkeeperscollective@gmail.com by clicking here.
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