The Liminal Compass: Weaving Ariadne's Threads

Fear is seldom a solid thing. It is a trickster. An illusionist. A master of camouflage. It fools us into looking the other way; distracting us in a hall of mirrors of our own anxieties. It calls to us. ‘Look over here’: a sight to make your heart race, a thought to make the sweat rise cold and damp to the surface of your skin. And all the while fear weaves its threads into the hidden places, the dark corners, the shadow places of our bodies and minds. It wraps a skein of tension ready to close around our throats. It sews its way through the valves of our hearts, stitches itself deep into the muscles of our limbs and our memories. It slides in, under cover of the things we expect to fear and buries in to the heart of us.

There are of course moments where this subterfuge is abandoned. Instances where the highway between ourselves and a threat runs clear and uncomplicated; an open thoroughfare for fear to barrel along in plain sight. But more often than not fear calls itself one name at the forefront of our conscious thought and keeps its real identity hidden deep down in the holes and hollows of the subconscious mind. 

By the time we reached the threshold of the Cave, fear had called out a dozen names to me. It had named itself the dark, the drop, the unknown, the creatures of the deep places. It had barked out thoughts of falling, of being trapped in an unyielding embrace of rock, of bottleneck passages permitting movement in only one direction. But the conjurer’s illusion relies heavily on the shock of the moment, of catching us unawares. And between the day that a decision had been made (this choice to head into Tayos’s pitch dark testing ground) and the day I stood at the mouth of the cave I’d watched the trick performed more times than I could remember. I’d begun to catch the sleight of hand in the corner of my eye, to see beneath the disguise, to catch a glimpse of the honest truth of what really, truly scared me.

Standing at the cave’s mouth; the sheer backdrop of striated rock rising out of the chasm, horizontal seams glinting wetly in the forest light, I’d already begun to make acquaintance with the fears that lay beneath my surface. I looked at the narrow ledge that jutted out over the abyss; the point of departure where air would replace solid ground beneath my feet. I followed the markings of the petrified curtain that hung before me across the void; a tapestry of green and black, and light that ran like seams of gold across the cliff face. I listened to the metallic, percussive song of the clinking hooks and harnesses that adorned us and would hold us close and safe. At my feet lush vegetation kissed the lips of the cave’s yawning mouth; its black throat swallowing the sunlight. I’d been looking to this moment for months and I understood that what scared me was none of these things I saw. I had questions to take into the earth. Questions whose answers scared me. Four days later (although I didn’t know it then) I would emerge to stand in that same spot once more, with the seeds of answers in my mind and my relationship with fear would never be the same again. 

On that day of descent I didn’t yet see the shift that lay ahead but I knew enough to understand that this was a threshold in more ways than one.  As the days ticked down to this moment I’d been studying the tricks that fear had been playing with me. I’d begun to notice that underneath the obvious archetypal fears that were being called out by descent into an underworld, there were threads that ran much closer to home. I’d started to notice that all the fears of ‘out there’ had loose ends that when tugged were answered by a twitching pull somewhere deep within the dusty, forgotten and unquestioned parts of my self. There had been ten months between that day of decision and the fading evening light that I stood in now. Ten months to consider my fears. And I’d been busy with the business of unpicking those loose ends, following them to where they ran beneath the surface of my skin, from thought to thought, untangling the knots they formed around tendons, chasing down the twisting path they took within my guts; unstitching those deep woven strands of fear and slowly, carefully pulling them out of me to look at them in the light and call them by their name.

A wild and unfamiliar landscape. Why was this fear suddenly ambushing me after a lifetime of finding solace in the non human world, out on the far edges? I pulled the thread from me inch by inch to reveal an unexpected horror of the idea of heat and sweat and mud, a newfound preoccupation with cleanliness, a sense of losing control, and lurking beneath it all a tussle between the joy of being animal and the outside expectation of a sweet, scented femininity I hadn’t realised I’d been carrying.

Another thread, this one called fear of the ascent. My mind worrying at the details of re-emergence from the cave, counting fussily through the rosary beads technicalities of hauling my way up the 65m chasm. But the fear wasn’t falling or gear failing. My lack of faith was in my own strength; the nagging worry that self-sufficiency would betray me, that I would be unable to do this on my own, that I would be a burden to be lifted. 

One by one I teased the threads of fear from their tangle, separating and sorting. So that by the time I stood at the lip of the cave, I held a rope in my hand; a cord that I could see was formed not from fear of the spiders, the scorpions, the jungle, the dank dark of the cave or the abyss but from a hundred twisted strands of fear of failure. My fear, it seemed, was an entirely personal creature. The threads always led back to me; to a reckoning of worth, a set of scales on which I measured the weight of my expectations against the fear of falling short. Hidden in a multitude of guises was the simple question of who I was and who I was thought to be. Descending into the unknown and the dark didn’t scare me because of what I might encounter but because of what those encounters might tell me of myself. I looked into the drop, down into a world as alien as another planet, tethered one end of my rope of fears to the world above and tossed the other into the void. 

The wonderful, transformative thing about the threshold to Tayos is that the only way to enter is via fear. There are no shortcuts, no way of avoiding that decisive moment of stepping over the edge and into the liminal. From the mouth of the cave the nature of her spaces cannot be seen; there is only a blackness that must be committed to before it is known. To descend is to follow that thread of fear, holding it close, dangling from it down into the underworld and passing hand over hand on the rope until the bottom is reached. There’s an intimacy to this contact. There’s no space for fear to camouflage. There’s no getting away from it. 

And what did my fear look like stripped of its mask, held close in my hands as I lowered myself down into the dark? What did it feel like as I followed the threads that ran from my body and down into the earth? We all know the sensations of moments when fear grips us. The rolling and roiling of the stomach. The sharp zinging edginess that raises the hairs on our skin. The cold wash. The moth-like fluttering of an agitated heart. The tugging motions manipulated by the puppet-master of fear. But what does it feel like to grip fear right back?

Pushing out from the ledge, from a state of solidity to a state of suspension, felt like pushing a boat out from shore. That sudden shift from the laws of ground to the laws of space and liquid. I was alone in the void with only my fears. Floating. Separate. As if quietened by the steadiness of my grip, as if subdued without an audience, the threads of fear running through my body stilled. I filled my lungs with the breath of the cave; slow, deep breaths that travelled along those threads as if they were water following ghost riverbeds after a drought. I counted the moments; slowed the pace of my heartbeats to a languid rhythm too spacious for the trickster sleight of hand to be performed. 

Its a curious thing that the moments when I’ve held fear closest are also some of the most precious to me. Crossing that threshold was something I could only do in relationship to my fear and for that I am grateful to it. And holding fear so close to me performed a kind of magic trick of its own; as if the power that fear had over me could only be exacted at a distance. Looked at closely in the fading light of the cave’s entrance those fears I’d spent so long unravelling and revealing didn’t feel like fear at all. 

By the time my toes brushed the ground at the foot of the entrance fear had given up all its disguises. The threads didn’t tug. When I followed them down into the labyrinth of Tayos it was curiosity not fear that pulled me along. I was searching not for the threads of fear but for the questions and answers that lay like little bells tied to their ends. I followed through caverns the size of cathedrals, through worming passages twisting through the porous rock, through flooded chambers and underground waterfalls, listening for the ringing of what fear could tell me. And when the time came to leave the sanctuary of the cave, to re-emerge, it was those same threads of fear and the self-discovery they promised that led me back up out of the earth, up and up to finally grip my toes against the lip of the cave once more and land back on the shores of the outside world. 

The person that stood back on that narrow ledge; exhausted, muddy, overwhelmed wasn’t by any means free of fear. But something that changed about how fear and I talked to one another. I was, if not quite a puppet-master, at least a partner, ready to listen when fear tugged at me. What are the questions that lie beneath fear’s camouflage? Because there is always a question of sorts. How can we answer those questions if we don’t follow the threads down below the surface? 

When I feel those sensations now I no longer struggle to break the thread, to get away. My heart races and my throat tightens. My palms become damp with the flood of fear. I can feel the tug and see the easy subject I could pin the blame for this feeling on. But I also remember that this might just be the herald of something worth knowing. I take a slow breath. I still myself and look for the loose end. I follow Ariadne’s thread and listen for the faint sound of bells ringing deep down in the dark.