Writing at the Threshold, by Dina Gregory

I consciously crossed my first threshold in 2014 when I began my turn through Julie’s Wheel of Initiation. For me such thresholds are both a physical and metaphorical crossing point, a marker of transitions. 

Looking back, I am able to say that since crossing that threshold my life has never been the same. 

My journey through the Wheel of Initiation led me to leave a ten year marriage behind, brought my spiritual and religious life together in unexpected ways, and ultimately led to a remembrance of my inherent wholeness. When I first completed my turn through the Wheel I was hoping that somehow it would lead me to a place where I could kick my feet back and chill out in some enlightened bubble of bliss.

Turns out the spiritual journey is more of a spiral and with each turn of the Wheel we are merely brought to greater depths. The initiatory vow and spiritual principles I agreed to live by were immediately put to the test, and far from feeling like I had arrived at a place of certainty and comfort, I became more adept at swimming in the waters of liminality. Years were spent  “between and betwixt” an outdated identity and the woman I was becoming with each brave step I took towards fulfilling my highest creative potential.  

Writing and publishing my first book  Love at the Threshold was an initiation over another threshold. A long awaited outer expression of an inner transformation that I toiled at for years. Writing this book enabled me to weave back the broken pieces of my heart and stake my claim as an initiated and grown adult. 

When I say that this time period between 2014 and my book being complete brought me to my knees, it would be an understatement. 

The pain of living out of alignment with the truth of my soul, the fear of letting go, the deep wounds of ancestral  trauma that I uncovered during this time, and my inner child that cried out to me from the depths of my psyche, brought me through one hell of a Dark Night.  All this through the process of writing this book. 

I did what Julie writes about in the Wheel of Initiation and held tight to that sacred thread while the life I had planned crumbled before my eyes.  (Making room for what was arriving on the other side of the threshold). 

While Love at the Threshold is not inherently political in nature, I cannot separate it from the landscape in which it was written.

To have released my first book to find myself not even a month later living through a global pandemic, and a threat to our democracy in which all notions of working together for the common good seem to be a relic of a lost past that honestly maybe never even existed shows me that  while some of us will listen to the whispers of the Soul that edge us toward becoming whole and better versions of ourselves, many of us will resist these changes until life creates the necessary circumstances that bring us to the razor’s edge, to our own personal and collective thresholds. 

At this moment in the journey, some  of us will fail to cross the thresholds we find ourselves, preferring a comfort of the known to the unknown, even if the known is utterly toxic and counter to our collective evolution. 

With a global pandemic that has revealed just how interdependent and essential each and every one of us are, and the deep wounds of this nation coming to the surface where they can actually be healed, I can’t help but to imagine how beautiful this world could be if we as a people mustered up the courage to cross the threshold and leave behind everything that is counter to love.  

Writing our way through the darkness and difficulty can be transformative and and initiation -- to cross the threshold within through our writing can bring a transformation without for ourself and our readers.