crossing the threshold of liminality

to discover a world in full technicolor

i crafted this collage before curating my written pieces ~ foresight: funny thing, that

joining a group of friends to write 7 posts in 7 days is clearly an aggressive aspiration. so aggressive, it became laughably impossible, and our host jon extended the writing experiment to 14 days. still! 7 posts in 14 days: what a haul.

i took the opportunity to pull some half-completed pieces out of the piles of written detritus i keep strewn across my digital archives. “one woman’s trash, is another’s treasure,” i tell myself. that woman is me, taking what my past self cast off and publishing into the future (or however long Substack maintains its servers). a technical-image that transcends space-time, if you will. no biggie.

in participating in this round of the blogchain club, i unwittingly discovered thematic elements of freedom and thresholds. wrt the latter, i’ve crossed the literal threshold into the world of burning man (barring any force majeure) and explored the thresholds of doors in the fictional solar-punk city of Kyklos. what better way to travel through these portals of experiential transformation than aboard my own private railroad car?

and freedom. what does it mean? freedom from and freedom to…

• from the oppressive austin heat, to sunning topless at barton springs

• from the prior generation of media, to the whatever this mess of future media portends

• from the shackles of the disembodied, industrial world, to a shared collective embodiment of being human

what i’m endeavoring to understand on a deeper level is—it’s not enough to walk up to the door. i have to go through it. it’s not enough to be free from, i also need to find the freedom to.

i’ll part ways with you here, leaving you with a mental quest: what threshold do you find yourself approaching? what freedoms are you negotiating?

~~

perhaps you didn’t read the above because you wanted to skip to the meat of the matter. you saw the neatly stacked list of items and thought, yes. this is where i should feast my eyes. well, here it is—a straightforward, no bells and whistles /table of contents/ of my writing for the 7 post challenge:

1 - when the time is right, burning man finds you

2 - from night to day in Kyklos

3 - seduction by private rail car

4 - what is weakness, anyways?

5 - culture, collective memory, and blockchains

6 - collective phenomenology - or: how to be human

/where’s the 7th post? you may be thinking.
a-ha! hidden in plain view,
it is this post right here that you’ve only just read through!/

~~

xoxo,

K