Day 5 Breathing a New Dawn represents our daily opportunity to anticipate newness. Transitioning from night to day presents this momentary liminal space wherein we stand in what was and not yet. An invitation if you will to imagine possibility and express gratitude.
Liminality is a term coined by Arnold van Gennep, expanded upon by Victor Turner, to represent transitional periods in a person or group’s life. Liminal states can be experienced as fluidity, ambiguty, and like you’re there and here where there is the former and the here represents the not yet. A person traveling through a liminal state can feel disoriented in the both/and way one might when things are in flux. This sort of flux is not necessarily negative or bad - just an aspect of transition. Fascinating was reading about Christine Valters Paintner’s dawn descriptively characterized as a liminal space.
“Dawn is one of the sacred hinges of the day, a threshold moment when we move from darkness to light, and that shift to light can become a portal to a new beginning. Each morning when we awaken, we might open to the possibilities it offers us.”
I hadn’t considered awaking in terms of night/day, rest/awake, what was/what will be. It’s this future possibility that is intriguing. And isn’t it the idea of a future which motivates someone to embark upon a change? This possibility of a future state propels us toward action. So it is with starting a workout plan, not solely for the sake of working out but for the spiritual journey, my intuitive awareness that the process is about possibility. The breath prayer presented by Christine Valters Paintner: “I breathe in possibility, I breathe out gratitude” is an invitation “to dwell for a little while longer in that in-between space where dreams and rest can still inform your way of being present to the moment.”
Quote source: link to amazon.com:
