Crossing the Threshold

"Thresholds are shorelines of new worlds."- John O' Donahue

It’s a warm summer morning. I’m sitting in my favorite thrifted $10 wingback from Goodwill. The washing machine is providing a rhythmic soundtrack to my writing. My husband just zipped past me to run upstairs while I sit here and write. There are boxes scattered in our new-to-us townhouse.

I am waking up, literally and metaphorically, in a new world. My marriage is eighteen days old, its changes glaringly obvious and still hidden in plain sight.

Priest and poet John O’ Donohue’s book, To Bless the Space Between Us, continues to be a companion of mine. In this book of blessings for life’s offerings, he writes about thresholds—those transitions in our lives that arrive with (and without) warning and bring change to the deepest part of us. Something about the word threshold has captured most accurately the rearranging of my world as of late:

A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.

In these early infancy days of our brand new marriage, my heart is being engaged and woken up.

It might be obvious to all, but as I am looking face on at this beautiful gift in the form of a very particular and perfect-for-me man, I am realizing that I have to let go of my singleness in order to embrace us with fullness and integrity. (Important note: I am not letting go of myself.)

I assumed that marrying closer to 40 than 20 would set me up for ‘good riddance to singleness’ vibes. (Also thought I’d be more prepared for this change. Alas! Turns out you can only live one day a time.)

There is a deep, squealing kind of glee in leaving so much of singleness behind: goodnight sleeping alone, goodnight grocery shopping for one, goodnight dating. Good riddance indeed.

And also: there is a grief I feel at the change of it all, the beauty of it, the lightning fast way joy seems to buzz around. (Why does sorrow feel like our feet are stuck in molasses and joy a powdered sugar?)

When the heart is woken up, a complexity of feelings swooshes in, too: excitement, fear, sadness, joy, hope, confusion. All of it. All of it is good and right and necessary.

The life I have lived so far has been whole and complete and infused with purpose. It has also been infused with longing. My love story and brand new baby marriage has not erased the longing but expanded it, opened it up, calling it good and right and blessed.

For this, I give thanks.

Photos by Laura Griffith

To acknowledge and cross a new threshold is always a challenge. It demands courage and also a sense of trust in whatever is emerging. -John O’Donahue