The Liminal Lens: The Hidden Wisdom of Thresholds and Portals
I didn’t set out to photograph thresholds. It just happened. What can I say, I have photographed thousands of doors which are all unique portals. All doors are thresholds marking inside or outside. Public or private spaces. Sacred or mundane.
I’ve photographed many mysterious doors in my travels. A hole in a Manhattan subway platform revealed another floor. A magical tree hollow covered in moss. Fog swallowing the landscape right outside my own front door. Stairs climbing toward nowhere. A manhole cover in multi-color cobblestones as a portal.
It took me decades to understand what I was actually doing.
I was looking for the transitional places where one world becomes another.
I’ve come to call it the Liminal Lens as a way of seeing that finds thresholds everywhere once you’re attuned to them. Not just in doors and gates and archways, but in fog, in graffiti, in the crack of light under a sacred door, in a ship’s window filled with ocean. In your own front doorway on a winter morning with bare footprints in the snow.
A threshold isn’t always a door. Sometimes it’s a path that forks in a forest. Sometimes it’s a staircase that leads nowhere. Sometimes it’s a manhole cover hiding an entire underground world beneath your feet while everyone looks up at the cathedral or other obvious view.
The liminal lens finds them all to inspire, inform and transform the transitions in life.
Nature Portals
The fog that rolled in outside a familiar place one winter morning wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was stopping to photograph it.
The path I walk outside my door every day had become something else entirely uncertain, dissolving, full of possibility. The seasons do this. They remind us that nothing stays the same and that the in-between moments, the ones we usually rush through, are often where the real seeing happens.
The road fades away, yet each step becomes a path. The fog leads the way if you let it.
The tree makes its own door. Or portal. Altar. Fairy house: It always has. Sooner or later.
Urban Thresholds
Cities are full of thresholds we’ve stopped seeing. Stand on a Manhattan subway platform and look down and you might find another level looking back at you, two worlds separated by a few inches of concrete.
The manhole cover outside across the street from the Cathedral Helsinki’s National Library is ornate, almost floral, set in red cobblestones that have been there for centuries. Nobody stops. Nobody looks down. But the threshold is there regardless, patient and permanent. Portals comes in every size and shape. Expect the unexpected.
What looks like an ending may simply be a threshold. Even a blocked staircase remembers the sky.
Sacred and Transient Spaces
I’ve taken three transatlantic crossings and I’m about to take a fourth this fall. There is no more liminal space I know than the open ocean with days between continents, between one life and another, the horizon the only constant.
Ships are temporary homes, sacred in their own way, and the ocean asks something of you that land never quite does. It asks you to let go of where you were and not yet grasp where you’re going.
It’s the ultimate liminal space.
The ocean is everything I want to be. Beautiful, wild and free.
The Royal Doors of an Orthodox church are the most sacred threshold in the liturgy that only the priest may pass through them, and only at specific holy moments. I found these in Helsinki, light glowing through the crack beneath them. Every tradition has a door you’re not supposed to open. The light comes through anyway.
Didn’t Leonard Cohen say, there is a crack in everything. That’s where the light comes in.
Graffiti and Reclaimed Thresholds
This train is still running. The graffiti covering it perhaps it costs more to remove than to leave, so it travels the Finnish rails decorated, alive with color, a moving threshold between the official world and the unofficial one.
Trains, planes and ships are wonderfully literal and metaphorical thresholds.
Graffiti is the liminal lens turned outward, a declaration that this surface still matters, that someone was here, that even a wall or a train car can be a portal if you decide to treat it as one.
The building stayed. The plane kept going. Both knew exactly where they were.
Private and Intimate Thresholds
As a shamanic practitioner I work with Hermes, the god of thresholds, of messengers, of the in-between. He shows up in the most unexpected places.
The museum in Helsinki that was once a private home, wandering alone through gilded rooms full of Roman emperor portraits and ancestral furniture, I photographed my own reflection in an ornate mirror without quite seeing myself. I didn’t notice the small bronze of Hermes on the table until I looked at the image later.
He was there the whole time, a silent trickster with a wink.
This photograph was taken on one of those winter mornings. My footprints going out. My cat Odin going in like two ships passing in that proverbial night.
I have a habit of going barefoot in my garden in all seasons, including winter. Grounding myself in snow is one of my oldest practices: the cold, the contact, the reminder that I have a body and a place on the earth.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll live in this particular house. I know I’ll move again. All homes are transient and beautifully fluid when you hold them lightly enough.
Odin, like most cats understood the unseen mysteries, the thresholds better than most. He’s gone now but his wisdom remain.
The snow with footprints is long gone. The door remains for now. The memory will linger.
My footprints. My door. My cat Odin, who knew something about thresholds that I’m still learning.
The liminal lens isn’t a technique. It’s a permission slip — to slow down enough to notice where one world becomes another. Once you see one threshold, you start seeing them everywhere. That’s the lens. I’ve been doing it with my camera for decades without quite having a name for it.
Now I do.
This post introduces The Liminal Lens Wisdom Oracle (working title) a deck, in development. Welcome to the threshold.
xo,
Layla
