The Liminal Compass: On Exploration

The shape of exploration is a parabola. Its beginning takes the form of a long arc, pacing out over familiar roads before spinning wide, out into the white noise of undiscovered land. Its curve gathers around new shores, curling its spine tight around new discoveries; gathering focus but never stopping.

Instead, the explorer keeps on moving, orbiting, gathering sights and sounds and smells, feelings and memories of touch; gathering stories. An explorer is always carried by momentum in the same direction; onward. Following that arcing line, which leads steadily, inexorably, inevitably back in the direction of home.

Because exploration isn’t ever just about the outward journey. Exploration is about the hope of return; laden with new stories, in possession of a fresh language with which to describe our place in the world, and in turn, reshape it.

To explore is to commit to leaving expectations behind; to leave instead an open space for the unknown to make itself felt, seen and heard. When an explorer rounds the arc and faces homeward, their footsteps no longer fit into the tracks of their outward trail, and in many ways, this is the purpose of exploration in the first place. A new route home has to be found; for Here, is no longer where it was before but is now set, forever more, within the knowledge and the coordinates of There.

The world we know is wound from the yarns of that parabolic pattern; arcing back and forth, forming the warp into which we weave the threads of what we know and what we are. Back and forth, in and out. Outward and homeward and outward again. All humans are storytellers. We weave stories of plants and animals, people and weather systems, oceans and seasons, money and meaning into a great tale that wraps around the earth’s surface; a rippling fabric that says ‘this is what this is’.

Under the tent formed by that fabric, between the reality of the earth, its ecosystems, climate and physical laws and the lofty canopy of the stories we’ve woven, lies the space in which we play out our lives. A liminal space full of the decisions we make, the patterns and processes we build our identities from, the myths we manifest and the frames we draw around possibilities. It’s the space where all the seeds of humanity; our politics, our spirituality, our society, our science, our community, are held. Every time we say ‘it’s not possible’ it’s the weave of storytelling that we graze up against. Every time we gather to share in something beautiful, it’s the canvas of our commonly held stories which wraps around our backs, that holds us close together.

The compass I followed; my wayfinder for noticing, wove a story shaped by the sound of the swift, silty Coangas river, by the motion of rivulets of ants over bark, by the deep blue of the night sky over a village clearing; bare earth islanded by green, tamped down by heat and bare soles. The curvature; the arc and apex of my journey was formed by the black, watchful eye of a cave threshold. Your journey will no doubt follow a different curve. What shapes are formed by what you explore and what you pass along the way? Every exploration is unique. But if you explore, then you too are a weaver of new stories.

And the world needs weavers. The dance between the reality of the world and our story of it depends on the fabric of our storytelling being supple enough to follow the undulations of the world on which it is based. It needs a constant process of exploring, noticing and re-weaving; fresh threads to skim the tops of the mountains and to billow down to drift over the hollows of the earth. A shifting fabric to ripple over all the facets of our identities that form the smooth, approximate, changing outline of the thing each of us call ‘me’. The dance depends on the warp of exploration’s parabolas winding back and forth out into the future. And sometimes, on the weft of storytelling threads being unpicked and woven anew.

Because without the suppleness of new language and new voices with which to describe the world, the fabric of what we understand and think possible becomes tighter and tighter. We tamp down the same old threads into the warp we know. The weave becomes stiffer, less giving, more taught. Only the sturdiest yarn can hold its place in this type of weave. Rare and delicate threads are discarded. Quieter voices are pushed out of the tale. Storytelling loses its ripples and flow and becomes instead a cat’s cradle of knots so tight that we can’t see how to unpick them. When the swaddling of our storytelling is wound too tight, what is there for the world we’ve wrapped it around to do but pierce through?

Both tents and tree canopies alike find their resilience in suppleness. Shaping themselves as an echo of the wind they withstand the reality of its force. But too brittle and the tree topples. Too rigid a weave and the tent rips. Our recent times are littered with fallen trees and punctured by realities too pressurised to contain any longer.

Through the tears formed in the swaddling we’ve spun we glimpse the shape of the world we’ve wrapped up in familiar tales. We’re taken aback by the roaring of voices that were always there but which we failed to notice. The world turns out to be different to the tale we’ve spun. What we see through those tears in the fabric isn’t a change. It is just a reality we failed to see clearly through the density of old stories.

Lands we thought made of permanent ice melt. Forests become deserts. Winters become summers. Viruses slip through porous borders our politics can’t plug. We look in the mirror held up by those whose voices we silenced or ignored and don’t recognise our reflections. But through the rifts torn open we also see: new possibilities, redrawn alliances, a kaleidoscope of alternative realities. Threads that tie the chemicals in our bodies to the pull and swell of the ocean. Gossamer that draws slow, looping links between the clarity of our thoughts and the silent conversations our bodies share with the trees, water and hills. In a new light we see all the barely there silky connections that join the highs and lows of our mood to the world around us and to one another.

We are used to patching these tears in the fabric, stitching over the truths that the world sometimes throws up through the canopy. We make do and mend. But the seams remain faultlines, ever ready to open again and through the years, so slowly that we barely notice, our storytelling cloak becomes, rougher, denser, more restrictive. It itches. It pinches. Eventually it falls apart.

The stories I share of the journey to Tayos have come to mean many things to me but most of all they are a reminder to myself to explore. To become an explorer. To learn again the habit of noticing more. To pick up voices to weave together into a new story of being in the world and the world that is you. One that takes a parabola and repeats it as a sine wave; a dialogue with the world and one another that spins a diaphanous, shifting, growing and changing story supple enough to ripple in the winds.