Into the Wood
Recently, I have being reading and thinking a lot about the edges of things: the borders and boundaries that restrict, hold and order pretty much every aspect of our lives. My thinking started with traditional stories, where borders, boundaries and thresholds abound. There are the literal ones: walls, hedges, doorways and bridges, usually well protected by guardians (“who’s trip trapping over my bridge?”). But these are not only physical. They represent other, mythical, thresholds: the borders between the known and the unknown; between the ‘village’ (order/familiarity/safety) and the ‘forest’ (wildness/unpredictability/getting lost); between the ‘real world’ and the ‘fairy world’.
In stories, only some characters can pass from one side to the other; only some understand the dangers and rules of the new place they find themselves in; and the price of crossing over can be high (I see you, Little Red Riding Hood). Things tend to get particularly interesting at the liminal spaces in between: at dusk and dawn, at the edge of the forest and at the moment of stepping off the path. If you want to read more about this, I send you over to Terri Wildling, who writes beautifully about the role of borders, boundaries and thresholds in stories here.
The Ancient Romans knew just how important borders, boundaries and thresholds were, so they didn’t just leave them up to one god: Portunus kept the keys and minded the doors, alongside Janus (doorways, gateways and passages), Cardea (thresholds, door hinges and handles) and Forculus, Lima, and Limentinus who were minor deities of doorways. Cardea was associated not just with thresholds in walls, but with thresholds of the body, and so it’s not a surprise then that she also looked after childbirth – the ultimate thresholded, liminal state.
The Romans needed so many gods because borders, boundaries and thresholds were, and remain, so culturally important. My thoughts have been crossing their own threshold from the world of story, to the world of my work – in healthcare organisations. I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens when we start to ask questions about the borders and boundaries that surround us in maternity services, and the thresholds that some can use to pass across them.
I have more to explore on this, but in the meantime, what happens when you start to ask:
Who crosses and who does not? Who guards the threshold? Are the rules one side the same as the rules on the other? And if not, why not? Who lives in this space? Who lives in that space? Who visits? How do newcomers and visitors learn the rules in this new place? What is that border doing?