Thresholds
Have you felt the pull of the far horizon? That threshold of your vision, your hearing, your taste, your smell, your touch, your ability to measure or predict, the threshold of your dreams and ambitions, beyond which lies that of which you cannot be at all sure, not even of existence.
And have you felt the invitation of the near horizon? The blanket that wraps around you and brings your attention to a deeper, inner horizon, the threshold of your emotions and intuition, your ideas and imagination about the world and yourself, the line between your conscious mind and whatever lies below it, waiting for expression.
Horizons, the most apparent of the infinite and sometimes invisible thresholds that surround us, remind us: there is more to our world, and to us, than meets the eye. What’s more, there are more worlds and us-es than meets the eye. These are truths our senses cannot show us, truths our senses may even cause us to forget.
We can know everything, our senses tell us. Just give us enough time to take it all in. Look at this, and that, and oh! this! And look here, and there. Everywhere we turn, something for us to name, to organize, to understand. All we have to do is look, carefully, attentively, and all will become clear. Look with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, our hands, our feet, all our perceptual capacities, sensing our way into everything around us and within us. Our minds sketch maps of it all, and maps of us, so we can know where we are and what we are and who we are and what will happen and if we’re curious enough, and smart enough, maybe even what this and we and all of it are for.
And then we come to a doorway, or a darkness, or a shore, or a line of trees, or a fork in the road we’ve been walking, or the phone rings and we remember: there is more to our world than what is in this particular place, than what we have been able to see in the daylight, than what lives in this land, than where any one road can take us, than the things we thought we knew. There is more to us than the person we have been until now. More to our lives than the life we have lived, or even imagined. And what lies beyond the door, the darkness, the shore, the trees, the road less traveled, the conversation we are about to have, we cannot know until cross that threshold and enter that wild unknown. Or until the wild unknown that wants to enter, enters and, like a seed, sends its shoots searching for water and sunlight in every direction, entangling itself in everything.
Maybe we want to keep the door closed. Maybe we want to turn on the lights to keep out the night. Turn back from the shore. Stay out of the woods. Sit down at the fork, set up camp, wait it out and deny the choosing. Ignore the call, leave the message thread unopened.
No matter. The threshold has already done its first work, regardless of our response. The simple fact that we’ve responded at all is what matters. The threshold has gotten our attention, even if only for a moment. In offering resistance, some parts of us have begun to remember what all the parts of us have always known, deep down: all that we’ve thought we’ve known, all of our naming, our organizing, our understanding has been illusory and incomplete. Where we are, and what we are, and who we are, and what this is and what it and we are for are still, fundamentally, mystery whose unfolding has only just begun.
The time will come, as it always does, time being what it is, when we will encounter a threshold we cannot turn away from, no matter how hard we try.
Perhaps the far horizon presses in close, becoming almost one with the near horizon, the usual comfort of the near horizon swallowed up in a far horizon that has abandoned its vastness and traded it for immanence. We can’t see beyond the third or fourth line of waves pounding the shore, the cliffs shrouded in mist rise up behind us, to our left and our right the shore disappears into the fog, and there is no demarcation between water and sky. The known and knowable are fewer, and farther between. The unknown and unknowable seem to be everywhere, and growing.
This is a fierce gift. Faced with thresholds at every turn, sooner or later we may discover, to our surprise, that we no longer want to turn away, no matter how fearful the other side of the threshold appears to us. An inscrutable courage grows, emerging from some hidden territory within us. Our firm grip on what we’ve known and on who we’ve known ourselves to be loosens, and gives way, and we are engulfed in the mystery. The same mystery we’ve always been engulfed in, as it turns out, but now we’re naked before it, having been stripped of the illusions in which we’d clothed ourselves.
Perhaps the wild unknown beyond that unavoidable threshold will appear to us at first like the thick black of night. Perhaps it will be like a blinding light. Perhaps both, together, a luminous, numinous darkness. As it is in birth, and in death.
I’m reminded of what Gordon taught me about listening. That we listen for two things first in a place - to know if we can feel secure, and if we can prosper there.
Our sense of security, he said, comes from the two main thresholds of our sensory awareness. The far horizon outlined by the furthest sounds we can hear and the near horizon revealed by the quietest sounds we can hear. When we are in truly quiet places, where the far acoustic horizon is far enough and the near acoustic horizon near enough, our bodies relax.
As for prospering, we will know we have found a place that has everything we need to sustain our lives — water, food, shelter — when we can hear birdsong.
Which is interesting, and beautiful, of course, and explains a lot about how unsettled our bodies feel in built environments whose walls and noises compress the horizon and push away the threshold of our awareness.
But more profound than that, perhaps, is what we find ourselves searching for in a place once we’ve settled in one that offers us security and prosperity. A thing that if we find it, we are willing to risk losing everything else, including security and prosperity, to keep it.
That thing is intimacy: the deep awareness that there is another being with whom we are sharing our experience of being alive, and who is sharing their experience with us.
And this perhaps helps explain why the far horizon calls to us the way it does. Why it reduces our cortisol levels when we can see it, why our blood pressure goes down, why our mood improves. Yes, no doubt a far horizon helps us see threats and opportunities, and that feels good to our primitive brains. But surely there is more to it than that? Does that account for the quickening of awe in our hearts, the expansion in our souls?
And this perhaps also helps explain why the near horizon calls to us the way it does. Why it too reduces cortisol levels and our blood pressure goes down, why our mood improves. Yes, no doubt it helps us feel safe and secure, and that feels good to our primitive brains. But surely there is more to it that that? Does that account for the gentle, urgent hunger we have for coziness, for deep conversation, for being known to each other and ourselves?
I wonder if it is because we know that out beyond the far horizon, stirring us with awe, and nearer than the near horizon, beckoning us with hygge (the Danish name for a kind of hug-like well-being, candle-lit, fire-warmed, with steam rising from your mug and an echo of your companions laughter in your heart, so far as I understand it), lies our first love. The love we first noticed a longing for in the womb, a longing that called us out into the cold air of the outside world, and that has kept calling us, out of worlds and selves that are not complete, worlds and selves that are more than knowns separated from unknowns, me’s separated from you’s, further and further into the one wild knowing. Beyond every far threshold, and below every near threshold lies the love that has always known us, and that we have longed for as long as we have been us, and that we cannot know again except by surrendering over and over again to the great pregnant mysteries that lie beyond and below.
This was written on November 27, 2025 while exploring liminal landscapes with Elinna Lenora Stokka in Denmark. Inspired by reading David Whyte’s Consolations one evening, we set a timer to write for 10 minutes on one word, stream of consciousness, not editing ourselves. Thresholds is the word I chose. I don’t remember where I was in the writing when the timer went off, but when I lay in bed later that night, I found myself wanting to pick up where I’d left off. So I did, writing until I felt complete. I then forgot about it entirely until I came across it by accident (whatever that means) today. As I read it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it wanted (whatever that means) to be Quietlings’ first post. So here it is, unedited except for the addition of a parenthetical definition of “hygge”, a Danish word I’d learned that day from Elinna.