9 A Secret Chalice

Written by Tamsin Cunningham

Photography by Eoin Carey

Around the mouth of the cave water creeps. Edging closer and closer to the edge. Inch by inch, drawn towards the precipice, as if the Cave were a magnet, a beacon, calling water on a pilgrimage down into the ground from which it once sprang. The droplets lean towards the fall, holding on to leaf, stem and rock; capillary action holding them tighter to the earth the closer they get to the void. They flatten themselves out across the plants and ground, as if by spreading across the surface they could become the earth from which they are about to depart, camouflaging as rooted beings not the creatures of motion that they are.

This is the way of the liminal. At the threshold to the void, the in-between world, is where the tangible grips strongest. Right at the edge of the unknown is the place where the known calls out most clearly. All that has gone before. The stories we tell ourselves. The justifications and the reasonings. The status quo. We cling to the known and the known clings back. Clutching at the droplets as they are drawn towards the chasm.

But thresholds can’t be willed away. And when the unknown comes calling that cascade into liminality is the only direction we can fall. Try as we might to pretend that change is not upon us, the void still swallows us whole.

As the droplets reach the edge they gather themselves. They give up their grip on the earth and become planets of their own. Full globes, suspended like fruit for a rich second before the last contact with the world above is relinquished.

And then they fall. The air of the chasm is charged with their presence. They descend in their thousands through the void, each droplet a discrete and perfect form in a never-ending procession. They are no longer the siblings of stone and tree. They are water alone.

In the liminal, outward connection and relationship disappear. The tethers of the known are loosened. This is the space where new possibilities are seeded. Where we are left alone with the beat of our hearts, the rhythm of our breath and the room to re-imagine.

In the Cave’s entrance as we watch the droplets fall, the laws of the familiar are suspended. Time slows, described without hurry by the path of the heaviest droplets, drifting like feathers down past the ribbons of black and gold that line the gullet of the Cave. They are silent as they fall. They are ghosts of water. Around them the smaller droplets dance, moving like shoals in the currents of air that spin slowly in shafts of light from the forest above. The light seeks out each droplet, the small and the large, impregnating and illuminating to fill the chasm with a thousand glowing seeds; an incandescent veil of gauze that drifts around us as we descend. The water is like air; as amorphous and shape-shifting as the thoughts that swim through us.

This is what liminality feels like; soft, borderless, ungraspable and infinite. In the times of hard decisions, when the battle-cry for action is upon us, what purpose does the liminal possess? How can water that falls like a feather enact change?

The droplets come forth from their fall and drum out their answer on the Cave’s hard floor. They emerge from the void with the power to sculpt, bore and carve. They are the Cave makers, charged by the space between thresholds. They carry boulder and shale before them. They raise up pillars of silica in their name as their sound carries through caverns on their journey through the mountain. And it is the soft, dream-like, floating space of the liminal that lends them their force; a secret chalice that holds the liquid of transformation.

Sometimes the hardest thing to admit is that we don’t know the answer….yet. But in that admission is the admission ticket to the liminal. And in the liminal lie the seeds of possibility. We will carve new worlds. We will shape anew the landscapes in us and around us drop by drop. But first we must have the bravery to step into the void.