Ghosts and Liminal Spaces in Autumn

On Sunday, after our trip to the waterfalls and the old Tannery on Trout Creek, we stopped as usual at iPho in New Paltz. Noticing an autumnal display next door, my six-year-old asked me why the corn was brown and dry.

As I struggled to explain the cultural ideas around autumn to her, it hit me: autumn is a liminal state. It's transitional in a way that other seasons aren't. Now that I see that, it makes all the sense in the world that October in general, and Halloween in specific, feels so emotionally profound. The liminal state of autumn is, for me, closely tied to liminal spaces.

October has long been a time for me to wander out into farming fields such as those I walked as a child and chase that feeling of magic and mystery that the young me felt around Halloween. That chase is one of the great enigmas of my life. What was that feeling? Where did it come from? I never believed there were literal ghosts and what not. Looking back, it seems like the core of my devout agnosticism was always there. Church did nothing for me, and I would have found any adult who worried about my being inculcated with demonic influence just as risible. I always understood stories for what they were. But why were the stories and rituals around Halloween puissant? Why did they impress themselves into the wet clay of my mind so that now, still, decades later, I walk out into the dark and the wind and the crickets as though I'm hoping to chance upon some embodiment, likewise wandering, of a feeling I can't begin to articulate?

All of these thoughts coalesced around the feelings that arose as I walked around that liminal space along Trout Creek. Again, I don't believe in literal ghosts, yet something in me yearns to express itself in analogous terms. Nothing but tree litter and water in all its forms has disturbed those stones for a century or more, and because of that, those stones spoke to me in a way that no curated space could. 

Once again, I feel that I'm failing to articulate this feeling. The best I can do is to say that, when I'm scrutinizing those stones, I sense an impulse: a coalescence of intent reaching out from the past. In my mind's eye I see ripples or deformations suspended in the air—like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pond! Ha! I just landed on the most tired simile. But it's apt. All the people who toiled with every iota of craft that successive generations had bundled into their brains and their muscle memory made their impressions on this space. They had no notions of me specifically. Still, they reach out to me specifically, by virtue of serendipity. Their messages of toiling against entropy reach me.

Ghosts speak to me through stones.