Still Life: Threshold
Words, images and questions for paying attention.
Still Life is a new monthly series on Wu Haus. Each edition is anchored to one word. A single concept that I’ll write into, surround with images I’ve been collecting (archival photography, art, film stills, my own photos) and close with a handful of prompts for you.
The name works in a few ways. A still life is the art of looking closely at what’s right in front of you. Still life is also just... still life. The ongoing, unglamorous, beautiful dailiness of being alive. And then there’s stillness within life. The pause. The noticing.
I’d love for you to come along. And I’d especially love to hear from you in the comments. Everyone sees something different.
Here’s the first one. Sharing with all subscribers. Going forward this series will be for paid subscribers only.
I can still see myself walking out of the immigration office on the US-Mexico border in Laredo. I remember what I was wearing. My sage green knit Cordero pants and matching crop top under my Lauren Manoogian long, belted alpaca cardigan. The kind of outfit that felt like armor and softness at the same time. White heeled boots I’d bought in Santa Fe on the way down, which already felt like they belonged to the new version of me. It was early October. The sun had just risen. The air was crisp, fresh. I was holding my papers, and Tilly was in the car waiting for me, and on the other side of that gate was Mexico. My new life. A country I barely knew, a language I barely spoke, a version of myself that was only beginning to take form.
I remember the light. I remember the feeling. The feeling of crossing.
A threshold is the space between one life and the next. It’s not the life you’re leaving and it’s not the life you’re entering. It’s the in between where you belong to neither. It’s the airport gate and the delivery room and the moment you sign the divorce papers and the two seconds after you say yes or no or I’m done before the world rearranges itself around your decision. It is the most terrifying and the most alive place I know.
I have crossed a lot of thresholds. Some of them I chose. Some of them chose me. But the one that remade me most completely was the move to Mexico. Not just the arrival. The whole passage. The leaving.
I had been in a cocoon. That’s the only way I can describe the years before. Almost a decade in a relationship, a life in Portland that was so beautiful and so loving but had become something I was living inside of rather than building. And then my marriage ended, and there was a heartbreak after that, and I walked through fire after fire until I was standing in my driveway, car packed with the precious things I couldn’t part with, my beloved dog and a plan that was barely a plan at all.
I drove from Portland to Mexico. The roadtrip was planned with someone I thought I knew, someone I loved. That person betrayed me in the most cowardly way a week before we were supposed to embark on the trip and our new life together. I decided to go anyways. I was scared. I felt alone. But I knew it was the only choice.
Two weeks. Just me and Tilly. Down through Idaho, Utah and New Mexico and across the desert through Texas to the border. There were countless miles of tears. Driving too fast and screaming at the top of my lungs. From sadness, from anger. For release. But somewhere along that road (I couldn’t tell you where exactly, maybe Southern Utah), something shifted. I started to feel it. The cocoon dissolving. Not dramatically, not all at once, but in the quiet way things change when you’re moving and there’s no one to perform for and the only voice in the car is yours.
By the time I walked out of that immigration office in Laredo, I was already different. Not yet a butterfly. That came later, in the wild early days of Mexico City, when I was going out too many times a week, meeting people I never would have met, becoming bolder and more confident than I’d ever been. My style changed. My posture changed. Something in me that had been folded up for years finally opened.
I think I can attribute almost all of that to doing it alone. That’s the part that mattered most. Not the destination, not even the courage of the decision. The fact that I walked through every fire by myself. The divorce. The dismantling of a life. The ghosting and the heartbreak. The road trip. The border. I did all of it alone, and it built something in me that I desperately needed. A foundation that was entirely mine. Not shared, not borrowed, not dependent on anyone else’s presence to hold it up. Just mine.
That’s what a threshold gives you, if you let it. Not just a new life on the other side, but the knowledge that you can cross. That you have crossed. That your legs work and your heart works and you can walk through a door not knowing what’s on the other side and survive it. Every threshold after that one gets a little less terrifying. Not because it’s easier, but because you have proof.
The small thresholds are the ones I notice now. The moment Tedros falls asleep and suddenly the apartment goes silent, the crossing from chaos to stillness, from mother to myself, that happens in a single breath. Walking out my front door into the streets of CDMX in the morning and feeling the sunshine and the warmth on my face. That daily threshold where, no matter what is going on inside me, the city tells me: it’s going to be okay.
I live for those small crossings. They remind me that a threshold doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real. Every morning you wake up and choose to get out of bed is a threshold. Every conversation where you say the honest thing instead of the easy thing. Every time you let yourself want something new.
I’m standing in a threshold right now. I can feel it. A chapter is coming to an end and a new one is forming, and I’m on that strip of ground between them where I belong fully to neither. We’ve been talking about leaving Mexico City, not because we don’t love it, but because something in us knows it might be becoming that time. Parts of me feel it clearly. Other parts aren’t ready to let go.
This threshold feels different from the last one. When I left Portland, I was ready. I had a plan, a direction, a fire under me that made the leaving feel urgent and necessary. This time, there’s no fire. There’s no crisis pushing me forward. There’s just a quiet knowing that’s competing with a deep sadness. Because I love this place. I love this life. And the idea of closing this chapter, of crossing another border, brings up every feeling at once. Fear. Excitement. Grief. Freedom. All of them. All at the same time.
We don’t have a clear idea of where we want to be. We’re researching, talking in circles, trying to make a decision that won’t make itself. I’m trying to relax into the not-knowing. To trust that the door will appear when it’s time to walk through. But it’s hard. Thresholds are hard. They ask you to stand still in the most uncomfortable place and not run in either direction.
The thing I keep coming back to is this: even if we don’t decide, even if we stay, I’m in a beautiful spot. That’s uniquely different from every other threshold I’ve stood in. Usually the place I’m leaving has already become unbearable. This time, the place I’m standing in is still good. Still safe. Still full of jacarandas and morning sunshine and my son’s laugh echoing off the terrazzo floors.
Maybe that’s the hardest threshold of all. Not the one where you’re running from something, but the one where you might be walking away from something you love. Toward something you can’t see yet.
I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again.
I just need a minute here, in the doorway, before I step through.
Prompts for your own still life:
1. What threshold are you standing in right now? What are you between?
2. Describe the last door you walked through that you knew you wouldn’t walk back through. What were you carrying?
3. Is there a threshold you’ve been avoiding? What do you think is on the other side, and what are you afraid of losing by crossing it?
4. Name a small, daily threshold. A moment where one version of your day ends and another begins. What does that crossing feel like?
5. When you look back at the biggest threshold of your life, what did it build in you that you didn’t have before?
Still Life is a monthly series on Wu Haus — words, images, and questions for paying attention. If this resonated, I’d love to hear your responses to the prompts in the comments.
I’m a woman on the threshold of 40- and the stillness, the fear I haven’t done enough and don’t have enough time and won’t ever be the things I’ve dreamed is so frightening. And yet each person who has passed this threshold assures me the best is yet to come. Your words found me on an anxious morning and provided such a great reminder of all the thresholds I’ve passed before and soothed this anxious wanderer. Thank you.
Thank you for this beautiful offering. I find myself on many thresholds, sometimes hourly. But perhaps the biggest has been the threshold between who I was before becoming a mother of two (three, depending on who you ask, after a miscarriage) and who I am shaping to be. I feel I am still in the middle of those two identities and not yet fully belonging to my newest version. Just like you, I teeter on the precipice of transformation, of becoming. Shedding and renewing. Perhaps a different kind of birth than the age old miracle of this earth. 🦋