Occasional dispatches from an artist and writer about making things, noticing things, and following strange threads through art, story, landscape, and the creative life. Sometimes I'll leave you an image to carry away.
🕯️ Haunted Lantern #7 - The Thin Places
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Hi there Reader, There are some nights where sleep is a threshold that refuses to be crossed. You might find yourself drifting ever closer to the edge of that liminal space where waking thoughts dissipate into the strangeness of dreams - and then suddenly you jolt back towards wakefulness. You can circle back again, perhaps looking for another way to cross into the land of twilight. Some nights you may find yourself there. On others, you may find yourself haunting those darkest hours, eyelids and limbs heavy, while the sweetness of sleep refuses to embrace you and let you cross over. In case you can’t tell, there have been times in my life where I have become intimately familiar with the lonely hours of the night. In my youth, I courted the solitude of the night. I felt as though it was a time where my thoughts became clearest - less buffeted by the expectations and indoctrination of the world I had been raised in. But after I crossed the veil out of that world, nights often became times where my imagination could get the better of me. Sometimes a camera helps. Other times the written word is solace or a pressure release valve. In many ways I've spent much of my life preoccupied with thresholds. Some, like leaving my childhood religion, I've longed to cross. Others have seemed determined to keep me on one side. And perhaps that's why I've always been drawn to places where boundaries thin or become difficult to discern. Many of us were raised with stories of veils: looking glasses, wardrobes, twisters and the spirits of youth who will guide you to another world if you take a turn at the right star. As someone who grew up in a high control religion, I was raised - quite literally - on one side of a veil. And, even from a young age, I've been somewhat obsessed with the permeability of the thing that separates us from Other. Old sketchbooks and embarrassing middle-school poetry reveal that preoccupation - my worrying at the question like a dog with a bone looking for the rich marrow. Even twenty years after crossing my own personal veil into the greater world, I still ponder that core question of liminality. It's not necessarily a question of what separates us, of what lies on the other side. It's more a question of what exists in that in-between space. What do we discover about ourselves when separated from our context? What do we understand about our world, about those around us? In fact, I've found that crossing is rarely a simple process. Sometimes, like crossing into sleep, things can get messy. Sometimes we can get stuck. Even when we successfully find ourselves through to the other side, questions remain:
Perhaps it's these very questions that keep drawing me in, in both my photographs and stories. The crossing itself is only one part of the journey. There is also the question of what happens to us while we're caught between worlds, and who we might become on the other side. Lately these preoccupations have found their way into my writing. I’ve found myself curled up at night with a gray cardigan that swallows me whole, a cup of lemon balm tea plucked from the garden, two reformed street cats of questionable parentage and a cranky old typewriter. We sit and I write about liminality. About getting caught between worlds sometimes. And about what we discover in those in-between places. So now I give you this: a veil. A fog. A liminal place and a questionable path through the worlds. Here. Take this. 🕯️ See what you make with it. See who and what you discover as you wander there. Haunted Lanterns are occasional dispatches from my Wayward Cottage — notes on making things, noticing things, and following strange threads through art, story, landscape, and the creative life. Subscribers sometimes receive a little something to carry away. ​If you’d like the next Lantern delivered to you, you can join me here. ​
Happy wandering, Jen |
Jen Kiaba
Occasional dispatches from an artist and writer about making things, noticing things, and following strange threads through art, story, landscape, and the creative life. Sometimes I'll leave you an image to carry away.
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