The Threshold

Before I begin

I haven’t published anything for a number of months now on Substack and there is a reason for that.

There is something I have been carrying for a while now that I have told almost no one.

Not because I lacked the courage. Because I lacked the language to explain it. And because there is a kind of responsibility in saying certain things out loud, a sense that the container has to be ready, there has to be some structure or form before the contents can be safely poured into it.

I think the container is ready now.

I want to tell you about a journey. Not a metaphorical one, though it is that too. A journey that began in a hospital room in October 2023, where I lay watching the opening hours of a war on a screen, while something much quieter was beginning inside me. A journey that moved through the slow dismantling of a life I had spent twenty years carefully constructing. Through a period of darkness, I didn’t have a name for at the time. Through a night, not long ago, when I consciously accepted what I believed was my death and discovered something on the other side of that acceptance that I am still, carefully, learning to describe.

This writing is my attempt at that description.

It will move across what might seem like very different territories: ancient history, contemporary politics, personal experience, cosmology, music, the texture of ordinary days in the west of Scotland. But these are not different subjects. They are the same subject seen from different angles. The thread connecting them is what I’m here to trace.

I should tell you what this isn’t. It isn’t a spiritual memoir in the conventional sense. I have no interest in presenting myself as someone who has arrived anywhere. It isn’t political analysis, though politics will appear throughout, with greater specificity than most spiritual writing allows. It isn’t self-help. I have nothing to sell you and no programme to offer.

What it is, as best I can name it: a witness account. From someone who went somewhere, came back changed, and has spent the time since trying to be responsible about what they were shown.

If any part of that resonates, if you have had your own experience of something that broke your existing framework and left you needing to build a new one, then this is probably for you.

If you’ve ever felt that the world as officially described doesn’t quite match the world as you’ve actually experienced it, then this is probably for you.

If you’re simply curious about what happens to a person when the life they built turns out to be suddenly insufficient, then this is probably for you too.

What comes next is where it starts.