LIMINALITY | Thresholds

March 2020. The whole world hit pause. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. None of us were going anywhere any time soon. But, we did know that big change was at the door.
I was teaching at Webster University. My students scattered all over the world. They never came back from spring break. Instead, we stepped into online classrooms and curriculum. We did find new ways of being accountable virtually while meeting real-time challenges of sharing space and WI-FI, temptations to eat or go back to bed or play a game or walk the dog. Or just do nothing…

This fill-in-the-blank phrase came to me during a sleepless night. It was a way for us to meditate, to listen, then gravitate towards gratitude, indirectly and individually.
I created a Facebook page with it and asked students to respond with their words to me and to others .

After this first poster in the window at Red Chair, there was a second and then a third. The series caught the attention of my friend, David Brinker, director of MOCRA [Museum of Contemporary Visual Art]. I would put up a new one each week or so. He turned them into memes and combined the lot into a a series on the MOCRA website. It was a distanced but doable collaboration that kept both of us thinking and engaging community.

As COVID began to ease, one more:
What was lost? What is found?
Here we go.
Over the threshold, through the same door.
What do we question?
What is important?
How do we listen?

[The entire series of memes called Con-Texts available at:
https://mocra.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/con-texts-for-reflection-nos-6-10/ ]