Soulfully, on the Edge

ON THE WAY HOME FROM A WEEKEND GETAWAY, my wife and I chose to drive one of Colorado’s most scenic mountain highways, one the AAA guidebook warns “should be traveled with caution.” During the weekend trip, we also went to see the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. The highway and the dwellings both speak to the soulful character of liminal experience.

To drive U.S. 550 between Silverton and Ouray, Colorado, a stretch of road known as the Million Dollar Highway, is to feel suspended precariously between the heights and the depths. Guardrails are all but non-existent on this serpentine road, as are straightaways. Apparently bottomless drop-offs are everywhere, on one side of the road. On the other side, the mountains rise so steeply that they fill one’s field of vision. The road clings to the sides of these almost vertical slopes, twisting and turning through an endless series of hairpin curves and a handful of switchbacks that almost come full circle.

Looking across the canyon at the cliff dwellings, a few days earlier, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone would choose to live in such inaccessible locations. Photographs don’t give you a real sense of just how high up the steep canyon walls the buildings actually are. Like the highway, however, these multistory structures are tucked into the sides of the cliffs, suspended more or less midway between the mesa top and the canyon floors. One misplaced, sleepy step or careless stumble could easily lead to a fatal fall. The people who built their homes here quite literally chose to live their lives on the edge.

Reaching the edge, taking it to the limit, is the essence of liminal experience. “Land’s End” is both literally and metaphorically the liminal spot on a seacoast, where land gives way to sea (or the sea brings one back to land). On mountain tops, earth reaches heaven. On the outskirts of the city, civilization gives way to wilderness, human society gives way to feral isolation.

Liminal experience, unlike spiritual experience, unites the two realms, holding them together in creative tension. That’s what the human soul does, too. It lives in liminal “space,” uniting material body and ethereal spirit. A step one way, and the soul falls into the depths of matter. A step the other way, and it flies off into thin air. To follow the soulful path, then, is to walk the razor’s edge.

Driving the Million Dollar Highway is not a peak experience, per se. Nor would life in the cliff communities have been. Both remind us, however, how living a life full of soul brings us to the liminal places, to what Celtic people called “the thin places between the worlds.” The soulful challenge is to hold these opposing worlds together without losing oneself in either.

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