The Threshold

February 18. The Threshold.

The beginning of spring always arrives with this peculiar, almost painful indistinctness, which is not merely a lack of light, but rather the eye's inability to endure its new quality. I look through the window and see the world blurred into a grey, pulsating indeterminacy—a state of spirit where old forms have already disintegrated, yet the new ones do not yet have the courage to name themselves. This is the season of confusion, that psychoanalytic "intermediate object" in which the Ego loses its clear outlines and merges with the damp, heavy matter of being. There is something profoundly humble in this chaos; it is not aggressive, but rather weary of its own complexity, like a soul that has worn the armor of winter for too long and now, stripped bare, wonders how to proceed without it.

Beneath my feet is mud. But it is not mere dirt; it is the primal matter, the prima materia of the alchemists, from which everything sacred is born. In mud, there is a honesty that the white, sterile snow lacks. Snow is an illusion of purity, a mechanism of denial—a white canvas covering the earth’s imperfections—whereas mud is its unveiling. To step into it, to feel it envelop your feet, is an act of radical acceptance of our human nature. We are made of dust, and at this time of year, God seems to remind us of this union, kneading us once more into the rhythm of creation. Slush, meanwhile, is a metaphor for the transition itself; it is neither solid nor liquid; it is the resistance of ice against warmth, the last clinging of the ego to its frozen, predictable structure. In this state of semi-decay lies the great secret of transformation: nothing can bloom without first softening into unrecognizability.

In the silence of the room, my thoughts slide toward the concept of Divine Silence. We often mistake this silence for absence, but in early spring, it is more of an overflowing presence—God holding His breath before pronouncing the First Word of the new cycle. My confusion is an echo of this silence. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the moment of the "depressive position," where we learn to endure the ambivalence of love and ruin. Do I love this muddied earth? Can I see in it the womb rather than the grave? Faith is not about knowing where you are going, but about standing still in the slush and believing that the invisible roots beneath the surface have already begun their secret conversation with eternity.

I remember the old prayers that did not seek answers but simply offered presence. Now, in this beginning that looks like an end, I am learning surrender. To surrender to indistinctness means to stop forcing meaning. We spend our lives trying to tidy the gardens of our souls, to clear the paths, to pave over our emotions so we don't get dirty. But true growth requires getting dirty. It requires admitting that your indistinctness is sacred, for it is the space in which the Holy Spirit can move undisturbed by your plans. When you do not know who you are, you finally become accessible to what you are called to be.

I gaze into the grey sky and feel memory seeping through the cracks of the present. Last year’s pains stand there in the slush, half-melted, half-frozen. Our psyche discards nothing; it simply reprocesses it, turning it into humus for our future joys. There is a quiet, melancholic beauty in this process of decay, which is actually a process of liberation. How many things must go for a single snowdrop to appear? How many illusions must drown in the mud for the eye to glimpse the true light?

Today I feel a longing that has no name. It is not for somewhere or someone; it is a longing for wholeness itself, which always eludes us exactly at the moment of touch. This longing is the rhythm of my breathing—inhaling uncertainty, exhaling fear. In spiritual practice, this is the "Dark Night of the Soul," but transposed onto the landscape of the everyday. It isn't necessarily black; it can be exactly like this—grey, damp, sticky, and endlessly long. But it is precisely in this "indistinctness" that the sacred transference occurs—from the external to the internal, from sight to faith.

I often ask myself if my confusion isn't a form of prayer that my body utters when words prove too narrow. Confusion is an admission of limitation, and in that admission lies the deepest form of humility. To say "I do not understand" is the beginning of all true knowledge of God. We are children of light, but we are conceived in darkness and born in pain. Why then do we expect spring to be only sun and fragrance? It is first blood and mud, the effort of matter to break through the weight of sleep.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that behind every "I don't know" stands something we are afraid to find out. Perhaps I am afraid of my own power to be reborn? Perhaps the slush is comfortable because I can hide in it, remain obscure to myself, and postpone the responsibility of blossoming? Because to blossom means to dissolve, to become vulnerable to the wind and the bees, to give away your color and eventually lose it. In the mud, it is safer. It is the maternal embrace that requires no form. But my spirit knows this is only a stopover.

I look at my hands—they are clean, but in my soul, I feel the clinging mud of so many unsaid words and unshared tears. And there is nothing wrong in that. This is the grace of incompletion. We are in process; we are unfinished sentences in the diary of God. This spring, with its mud and slush, is merely the comma, followed by something so vast that our current confusion is the only adequate reaction.

Time flows slowly, almost stagnant. I hear the eaves-drip measuring the seconds of this liminal space. Every drop is a reminder of the heart thawing. I pray for the courage to remain in this indistinctness without reaching for cheap comforts or quick answers. I pray to love the mud beneath my feet as much as I love the blue sky that is to come. For God is in both. He is in the invisible transformation happening right now, while I feel most lost.

Perhaps the purpose of this beginning is not to take us somewhere, but to teach us how to be here. In the slush. In the bewilderment. In the silence of our own pulsating existence. There, where the human and the divine meet in a single shared breath—damp and cold, yet carrying within it the promise of inevitable light.

At the end of the day, only a quiet presence remains—like the light of a candle in a foggy room. Confusion begins to feel not like a weight, but like expanse. If I do not know where I am going, then every direction is possible. If everything is mud, then everything is potential. I close my eyes and surrender to this rhythm, to this slow, muddy, indistinct arrival of life. Blessed be the indistinctness, for it is the womb of the miracle.

I will stay here, on the threshold, until the slush turns into a path. Until the indistinctness becomes vision. Until I myself become spring—not through effort, but through surrender.