November Letter from the Forests of Arduinna

The Magic in-between

Last week I went to Paris. There was no strike this time, and it was a brilliant little trip.

For a long time, I traveled often and mostly alone. The actual act of traveling—by which I mean the voyaging, not the visiting or arriving, opens a liminal gate, a ritual moment when all the things you are and all things you must be stop gripping for a bit. Thus untethered, you float between selves, between histories and futures, and for a little while can dance among all that.

Of course the harsh government restrictions on human movement for the last few years made travel by myself mostly impossible except by bike. Luxembourg is very small, forty-five minutes by train from my home to three different national borders (Belgium, Germany, and France), and thus there was always another (and often opposite) COVID regime to negotiate.

To give you a sense of what that looked like, consider my trip to Trier a few weeks ago. That was the day I was supposed to go to Paris, but because there was a strike I instead went to see old gods. I rode my bike to a small train station a few kilometers from my home, boarded with a few others, and sat down. I wasn’t wearing a mask, nor was anyone else—including the train conductors. Then, seven stops later there was an announcement that we all needed to put on masks—on pain of fine and ejection from the train—because we’d crossed the Moselle river into Germany. On the return journey later that day it was the opposite. Everyone wore masks, but as soon as we crossed the Moselle again, everyone—again, including the train workers—took them off.

For you American readers for whom traveling to another country is an epic journey, I should point out that this was a train journey of only 45 minutes, and not a high-speed train. It’s a regional commuter train, one workers take in the morning to their jobs and in the evenings back home.

France no longer requires masks, and I saw almost no one wear them in Paris. Previously they had one of the harshest regimes (Justin E. H. Smith’s beautiful article in Harper’s will give you a good idea of what it was like there), so it’s easily understandable that no one would voluntarily wish to go back to those days. Earlier this year, though, I wouldn’t have been able to enter certain regional departments of the country even with vaccination proof, nor would have I been able to pass through some of them back home into Luxembourg. I’d have been stranded, in other words, and I’ve been stranded in France before and would like never to do that again.

That matter is one of the other reasons travel wasn’t really possible. I’d been without legal documentation while living in France a few years ago, and then later without it again in Luxembourg after fleeing an abusive marriage. I have all the right papers now, all the little documents that tell governments I’m allowed to be somewhere instead of somewhere else, especially now that there’s no vaccine passport requirements.

I don’t think I ever disclosed this directly, but I did get one vaccine shot. Not the mRNA ones, but the other sort and I never got the boosters. I got just enough to be “allowed’ to go to the gym and eat at restaurants and to cross borders with my husband for our honeymoon. I never got COVID before nor after, though my husband, my sister, several friends, and my mother-in-law all tested positive, some of them multiple times. They each got all that was required and then some. Of them, the only one who didn’t get extremely sick after testing positive was my 80 year old mother-in-law, who kept working in the garden as if nothing had happened.

I never got sick, despite being initially un-vaccinated around all those people while they were diagnosed positive and also caring for my husband and sleeping in the same bed with him during his diagnosis. What I observed was that it was a rather awful time for him, and the subsequent “brain fog” was really disturbing. Even more disturbing was that he wasn’t aware his cognition was reduced for the few weeks afterwards. He wouldn’t reply to questions I asked immediately, and would lose his train of thought quite often, a bit like when someone is severely sleep deprived.

I try not to think too much about what all this means. I know some readers have reached some strong conclusions in either direction, and I’d ask maybe that you try not to scold me or each other in the comments. My only point here is to describe my experience, what it felt like to navigate the world and personal relations during a time when movement and life itself felt very restricted, fearful, and difficult.

The honeymoon I mentioned was the first real time I’d felt able to enter that liminal space of travel again. Riding in a car with my husband through Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and France gave me a sense that I could still be who I am and what I want to be despite the power of the state to limit us. And then we made a few trips to the Netherlands, and one to Cologne in Germany, but it wasn’t until last week I truly traveled alone again.

I’d been invited to an event hosted by an organization I’ve gotten quite excited about. A few readers already know about that organization and are already a part of it, but I’ll describe it in much more detail later. The short version is that I was attending a kind of salon where people who don’t really know each other—often “important” or “influential” people—tell emotionally vulnerable things to each other.

It was all great, and again I’ll write more about the actual organization later, but what strikes me most is the feeling of being on the trains there and the trains back, the utter freedom to leave for a little while and to then return, to be in-between again.

One of the best days of my life occurred about 8 years ago during my first solitary journey to Europe from the US. It was a spiritual pilgrimage for me, a tour of sacred pagan sites and sites sacred to me. I’d decided I’d end the trip in Berlin, a city I’ve always dearly loved, but before that, I visited a friend in Strasbourg who was kind enough to put up with my hiking backpack and road-worn body odor.

I’d not planned my journey to Berlin from there very well, and realised with panic that I’d not purchased a train ticket. The cost of a normal or a high-speed train would be far too much for my budget, but my friend told me of another way. I could buy an inter-city train day pass for 40 euro instead of a high-speed ticket for 250. It seemed a great plan, provided I didn’t mind the journey taking 15 hours instead of three.

I didn’t mind. In fact, it’s still perhaps the best trip I’ve ever taken.

It required nine trains to get to Berlin. Some were really slow and soon-to-be-retired trains servicing minor routes, the sort that still had curtains and wooden seats. On one of those I sat across the table with a raucous group of older women who were sharing out Rittersport chocolate with each other. They’d bought 8 different varieties, I’d also packed my own, and we were all quite thrilled to find I could share the varieties they hadn’t gotten.

The trains wended their way through thick forests and over low mountains, ending in small cities I’d never otherwise have thought to visit. Each change was at least 30 minutes after my arrival, so I’d stride quickly outside the bahnhof to find something of interest. I always did, and often had to run back to catch my connection.

One of the later trains was quite packed from weekday workers returning home. That train, utterly full, haunts me deeply. A man with wolfish eyes and shocking, rugged beauty sat down facing me. He was wearing construction clothes, and our legs were pressed against each other because he was as tall as I was and the seats were really quite short.

For a very long 45 minutes, I tried not to meet his gaze after the first glance, though we were maybe two feet apart and it felt like he was looking at me. He was really beautiful, and felt oddly familiar though I was certain we’d never met. I tried to look out the window instead, but the train was so crowed that wherever I faced I’d be looking at someone, so I stared instead at my knees.

His stop came, and as he started to get up I finally let myself look at his face again. He was looking back, and smiling with an expression seared forever in my memory. He got up, then left the train, but stood next to the window where we’d been sitting, stared at me, nodded, and then waved goodbye to me as the train departed again.

I don’t know why he did that, and I never will, but I cannot forget it, nor do I ever wish to.

They say magic happens in liminal spaces, but it’s actually I think that magic and liminality are the same thing. Magicians inscribe arcane boundaries, priests consecrate churches and temples, witches cast circles, and shamans of all sorts call in the spirit world specifically to create spaces outside the mundane. Those are liminal spaces where magic can occur because magic in an in-between thing. It’s the fording of a river or the crossing of a bridge, but more so it’s the ford and the bridge itself. There’s no destination, but rather just a threshold or a crossroads. In between one place and another is where magic lives, and also the gods, and also we…for a little while.

I went to Paris and arrived there different from who I was when I departed. I left Paris and arrived back home different from what I was when started the return journey. These words still don’t feel enough to explain what happened, because what happened was in a third place between Paris and home, or rather all the third places between them.

Updates

My collection of essays, The Secret of Crossings, is now at the printer. I’ll do one final check on its formatting before it is distributed on 1 December, but I’m extremely happy with its editing and layout. You can still pre-order it at a lower price than its retail one before then at this link, and paid subscribers here will get a free PDF or EPUB version of it.

Earlier this week I submitted another edit of Here Be Monsters to Repeater Books. Once they’ve posted release and order information, I’ll link to it and do the cover reveal.

I’ve already sent a few copies of it to test readers, and I’m looking for a few more. If you are a paid or founding subscriber and would like to be one of those readers, please send me a direct email (not a reply or comment to this post) to rhyd@abeautifulresistance.com with the subject heading “test reader.” Please know that I cannot reply to every email (but will try!), that this is not compensated, and that I am only looking for 10 people who will give feedback on the general arguments and readability, not copy-editing or corrections.

The first episode of The Re/Al/ign will be made public on Saturday, and another episode will be recorded this weekend and be published first to paid subscribers next week.

Tomorrow, I’ll re-post “Soap Has Always Been With Us, and Longer Still” here for all subscribers (it was first published to paid subscribers only a few months ago).

And I’ve several longer essays coming next week, including the next installment of The Mysteria and also the essay I mentioned, “The Forests of the Dead.”

Be well, all of you. And much love!

—Rhyd