Introduction to The Hallway (mini-episode)

My first episode for y'all is a mini-episode.  It's a little episode where I give you a bit of background about how I (and we) got here.  (You know, recording a podcast like I said I would never do.). 

Or, really how this podcast came about through a Divinity school in Scotland, Grey’s Anatomy and a very southern saying.  😂💕

Transcript

(There are some variations on this in the Live version)

My first episode for you is a mini-episode.  I wanted to give you a bit of background about how I got here.  Or, really how this podcast came about through a Divinity school in Scotland, Grey’s Anatomy and a very southern saying.  

As many of you know, and many of you don’t, my husband, son and I moved to St. Andrews, Scotland in August of 2020.  Yep.  That is exact thing one should do directly in the middle of a pandemic.  But, to be clear, we had decided to move a year before the pandemic started.  We moved here for my husband to attend St. Mary’s Divinity School at the University of St. Andrews.  It was a season that held what felt like a lot of contradictory things.  So much excitement about moving to this beautiful place and the joy of continuing to slow down our life.  And, there was definitely difficulty in moving during a global pandemic, with shutdowns on the regular in the UK.  And, then, the death of my Dad, whom I love very much, in December of 2021.  I talk a lot in my work about the holding of grief and gratitude as we navigate life.  And I was living that in bigger and deeper ways than I probably ever had before.  

 During that season, I was processing with my husband and he introduced me to the concept of liminal space.  To be honest, I am a little concerned that I didn’t know it before, but I didn’t.  Liminal space, in my understanding, is the place between things.  When you have left something and you have not yet entered into what is next.  When I heard my husband talk about it and then I read more about what it is, I thought, “That’s it, that is where I am. I am in liminal space.”  

 There are two definitions that I found that capture liminal space for me.  The first is from Richard Rohr.  He wrote, “Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next.” The second is from the Cambridge Art Association.  They wrote, “A liminal space is the time between the ‘what was’ and the ‘next.’ It is a place of transition, a season of waiting, and not knowing. Liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and let it form us.” I like that a lot.  

 As I continued to research it a bit, I found that, in visual art, liminal space is often represented by Hallways, especially abandoned ones.  Ones that look a bit forlorn and very empty.  In June of 2022, Jake Pitre wrote an article for the Atlantic where he said this about the pandemic and visual representations of liminal space:   “Some of the most enduring images of the past two and a half years have been photos of freshly abandoned public spaces: an empty Times Square, utterly calm Venice canals, a seemingly deserted Shanghai. Their immediate power came from their uncanny postapocalyptic vision: This is what the world would look like without us. But years into a global pandemic, they now strike me as something else: artifacts of a world in transition.  Across the internet, another term for this genre of imagery predates the age of COVID-19. Liminal spaces can be found across Twitter (@SpaceLiminalBot has 1.2 million followers), Reddit (r/LiminalSpace has about 526,000 members), and TikTok (the hashtag #liminalspaces has more than 2 billion views), where users post contextless eerie pictures and videos that attempt to capture a state of being in-between. Liminal spaces are now an aesthetic in online parlance, meaning where like-minded people see compelling images and post variations on them.”

So, I was not the only one settling into the comfort of the concept of liminal space.  Others around the world were experiencing it too.  However, I may be the only one who then took a random clip from an episode of Grey’s Anatomy and paired it with a Southern saying to express a new way of be-ing in liminal space. Here’s what I mean…

 Sometimes, I will watch videos on Facebook.  You know, short clips of shows instead of watching the series.  So, one day, I was mindlessly doing that.  (Yes, it is something I am working on.)  And, a clip of Grey’s Anatomy came up.  I don’t really watch that show.  I think I might have watched a couple of episodes in graduate school, but that is so long ago that I can’t really remember.  But, in this episode, there is a woman who has been very badly beaten and sexually assaulted. And, she has huge trauma reactions anytime a male doctor or nurse comes near her.  So much so that she doesn’t want to have her operation.  So, her female nurses and doctors promise her that no doctor or nurse will be male.  But, they also go a step further.  As they are wheeling her bed out of her room and to the operating room, they have gathered all the women in the hospital to line the hallway.  And, the men of the hospital are guarding the other side of the doors so no man will enter.  It was soul touching powerful.  And, they didn’t just do it in one hallway.  They did it through all the hallways and in the elevator…pretty much everywhere she was taken until she got to the operating room.  Again, powerful.  
 
 After I watched that clip, I sat there and thought, “We are so often told, ‘When one door closes, another opens, but it’s hell in the hallway.’ But, what if it wasn’t?  What if it was a place where we came together and helped each other in the hallway?  What if it wasn’t a place of fear and all alone-ness?  What if it could sometimes be a place of rest, connection and maybe even growth?’”

So, that is how we got here.  Divinity school concepts, visual art representations, a powerful moment in Grey’s Anatomy and an old southern saying.  Now, we get to come together, share and learn how to make a home in the hallway.  How to be present with each other’s fear, loneliness and challenge as we are in the in between spaces.  I have no belief that I have the answers here or know exactly how to do this.  And, I have been practicing it through my 20s, 30s and now 40s.  So, I will share what I know, how I practice and what has definitely not worked.  And, I will work hard to gather others together that have spent some time in the Hallway and are willing to share too.  I hope you will come along with us and, if appropriate, gather others alongside you.  Tell each other your stories.  Learn together.  Grow together.  We are, truly, all in this together.  

So, welcome to the Hallway.