Chapter 11 · 4 min 00 sec
Between The Worlds
The tenderness of simplicity — a life lived without alternatives, full of its own grace.
Lyrics· 263 words
[Verse 1] There is a place between the sleeping and the waking / that the mystics call the door There is a liminal geography / where the ordinary dissolves to more You have been there in the fever / you have been there in the grief You have been between the worlds before / and found relief
[Chorus] Between the worlds / between the worlds Where the visible dissolves to light Between the worlds / between the worlds Where you know before you know you're right Between the worlds / this is where the sacred lives Between the worlds / this is what the mystery gives
[Verse 2] In the second before sleeping / in the moment after cry In the breath between the inhale and exhale / is the sky You have grazed the space between things / you have touched what has no name Between the worlds is not a destination / it's a flame
[Chorus] Between the worlds / between the worlds Where the visible dissolves to light Between the worlds / between the worlds Where you know before you know you're right Between the worlds / this is where the sacred lives Between the worlds / this is what the mystery gives
[Bridge - shamanic mantra build] Ayahuasca visions / plant medicine dreams Nothing is as solid / as the solid world seems Between the worlds / the ancestors speak Between the worlds / the ones we seek Between the worlds / between the worlds
[Outro] Between the worlds / I have been here before / between the worlds
Short Story
*The threshold is not empty. It is the most alive place.*
The door had been there for as long as she could remember.
At the end of the garden, in the wall, a wooden door that her parents had always kept locked. She'd asked about it as a child and been told: it's just a wall, it doesn't go anywhere. She'd accepted this and grown up and left and come back only occasionally, until her parents died and she was clearing the house and found, in a drawer, the key.
It was a Saturday in October. She unlocked the door.
It opened into an alley behind the houses — an ordinary alley, slightly overgrown, used for nothing much. Not a secret garden. Not a passage to another world. Just an alley.
She stood in the doorway between the two spaces.
And then she stood there for a while longer.
Not because of what was on the other side — the other side was ordinary. But because of the doorway itself. The particular quality of being between the two places. One foot in the garden of her childhood and one foot in the alley of the wider world.
She thought about all the thresholds she'd stood in. The endings and the beginnings. The moments of not-yet-one-thing and not-yet-another. She'd spent her life wanting to get through the doorways as fast as possible, to be on one side or the other.
She stood in this one for a long time.
The between is not empty.
She'd been wrong about that.
The between is where you actually are, most of the time, if you're honest about it. Between the old thing and the new one. Between who you were and who you are becoming.
She left the door open when she went back in.
It seemed right.
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*The threshold is not nothing. The threshold is where you live.*
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