Plaz Metaxu: The Place that is Between

Alasdair Forbes

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Chapter 10 Plaz Metaxu: The Place that is Between

In: Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art

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Alasdair Forbes

Alasdair Forbes
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 282–305

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004687387_012

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Abstract

In this paper, I describe how the experience of liminality is central to my garden, and how this permits the garden to testify to the phenomenon of the sacred threshold. The garden’s valley setting was the inspiration for the garden’s name, ‘the place that is between’. Betweenness is the imaginative, spiritual, and topographical raison d’être of the garden. I came to realise the bilaterality of the valley was invested with a numinous liminality which it has been my vocation as a gardener to serve and explore ever since. For the last 30 years, I have tried to approximate my way of life to a practice of ‘liminal dwelling’, which for me has been inseparable from the ‘caesural’ style of gardening I have gradually come to adopt. Liminality expresses the experience of ‘being between’ in its most intimate, radical and ineffable moments. I borrow the term caesura, written | |, from the grammar of poetic scansion, where it denotes a metrical pause. In the garden, the caesura becomes a shorthand device for signalling the readiness for receiving numinous interventions within the fabric of daily experience. As such, the caesura is a latent presence throughout the garden, becoming manifest in thresholds, surprise turns, and in gaps, most notably in the central interval of the valley itself. Rather than focus on things, objects, materials, or features, at the heart of betweenness is ‘the space where there is nothing’, which enables connection and transmission. For me, liminality is at its purest when it brings us to a sacred threshold, when it foregrounds our awareness of, and responsibility to, the mystery of reality, the experience of which gives rise to bewilderment, gratitude, and wonder. In numerous experimental ways, sometimes immanental and sometimes apophatic, the garden’s spaces are characteristically, but discreetly, disposed to recollect and propitiate the liminal moment.

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Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004687387

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 06 Mar 2024

Subjects

Front Matter

Part 1 Understanding: Universal Presence

Part 2 Blessing: Devotional Practices

Part 3 Belief: Sacred Manifestations

Part 4 Retrospection: The Mind and the Heart

Part 5 Rediscovery: Modern Reflections

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Chapter 10 Plaz Metaxu: The Place that is Between

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Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art

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