The stories of this season are full of transitional language:
Travel
Arrival
Seek
Enter into
Birth
Journey
The seasonal mythologies suggest movement from one known place into a new, unknown space. In the mythologies, in religious practice and in the secular world, we spend a lot of time in this space in-between knowing and not knowing – traveling and seeking.
A dancer enters the space, breaking the threshold from offstage and onstage. He stands still, but his presence charges the room. There’s a new space/ energy that now exists between me and him. More dancers cross the threshold. The soloist is not alone, and neither am I. The dancers’ feet create a rhythm – a knocking on the floor. The rhythm is comforting, allowing me to exist in this unfamiliar world without apprehension.
The working title for Faith Project has been “The Door.” By definition, a door is a barrier. In watching the rehearsal for Faith Project, talking with Kun-Yang, and reflecting on the journey this process has taken over the past few months, I realize more that we’ve been exploring the process of the threshold – the process of existing in the space in-between the known and unknown.
Taken literally, walking through a door lasts mere seconds. Faith Project transcends that moment in time. It breaks open and magnifies the tension between choices and decisions co-existing in that moment and drawing our awareness to existence in that space in-between the past and the present, the leaving and the arriving, the known and the unknown.
How do we move forward (in spiritual practice, in dance, and/or in life) with this new awareness?
Here’s a reader challenge for this week: Walk through a door. Stop in the middle. Spend some time in that space between where you came from and where you’re going. What do you experience? Of what do you become more aware?
As you visit family and friends, places of worship, and public spaces I invite you to open your awareness to the moments of transition. How does your increased awareness inform the way you move forward in your world?
“You suppose that you are the lock on the door. But you are the key that opens it.” ~Rumi
Happy Holidays!
~ Jessica Warchal-King
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Major support for the Faith project has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
