A womb, not a tomb.

Been thinking a bit about the idea of liminal space for the last few days. It seems that one spends a great deal of time during renovations in this difficult space. It is difficult because we are not socially conditioned to deal with in-between spaces. Yet we spend a great deal of time in them. I guess I am not the only one who wishes I had Samantha's gift and could simply wiggle my nose and go from one space to the next without spending the time in the transition when nothing actually appears to be happening.

However, I was reading some more of my Rohr, and realise that these times of transition are actually really important because this is actually when the bulk of the work is being done. It doesn't look like it. It just looks like a mess. Stripper and paint tins everywhere, ladders to get to hard to reach places, drop cloths to try and contain the mess, bits and pieces everywhere without any clear indications of how it is going to look in the end. Yet if we think about it, we would lose a great deal if we were able to skip this step.

One of the things we would lose, and I hadn't thought of it before, would be the chance to grieve over what we are saying goodbye to. Now most of us renovate because we want things to be better and that is fair, but we are still changing the place where we live. The place where hopefully we feel safe and secure. And as yet we are unsure of what the new space is going to feel like. So it is important to be able to take time to say goodbye to the familiar because it has shaped the place up until now. Time to farewell the cramped rooms that housed our precious infants as newborns, the laundry that always appeared to be groaning under the weight of endless loads of family washing, that often became a soggy mess when the tubs overflowed. To remember what has gone before and why it is we are going through the renovation process. And to look forward with excitement to our new and improved space.

The other major loss would be a deep understanding and appreciation of the new space. Much like the house in Brisbane I mentioned in an earlier post, we would have no sense of the character of the place, how it had got to where it was. There would be no appreciation of the finer trimmings and the little bits that we do which make the renovation personal and the final outcome intimately ours. When I look at my beautiful lime-washed mantelpiece I want to remember the layers and layers and layers......of varnishes and paints and mess that I had to remove to find the lovely wood underneath. Otherwise I may be foolish enough to let someone paint it again. I want to grow into this new abode, slowly and incrementally so that I can fully appreciate just how much I belong in it.

So while I may often think that I am going to be stuck in this chaotic state for the rest of my natural life and that it will become a tomb of my own making, this is not true. Liminal spaces are essential and temporary. So rather than a tomb I am going to try and think of it as a womb. A nurturing and growing place that I can inhabit until the new state that the architect envisioned is finally realised.