Magic in the Liminal Spaces

Little Joys Vol. 5: On stillness, wonder, and becoming receptive.

I’ve been intentionally collecting little joys lately. Not big, photographable ones. Tiny, easy to miss ones. And the strangest little joy I’ve collected all year came to me in a dream, wearing the shape of a bald eagle.

He was floating on the wind currents when I first noticed him, effortless and enormous against the morning sky. I was on my patio with my tea, my journal open on the table in front of me, half watching. I didn’t want to stare too openly. It felt like I might jinx the moment.

But he looked at me.

Not in the way a bird looks at something, with that sideways, instinctual flicker. He made eye contact. Deliberately. And then his direction changed.

Not slowly. Not circling. Directly. I had a split second to register he wasn’t slowing down.

He flew straight into my chest. It wasn’t violent exactly, but there was no subtlety. With intention and weight, I felt the impact of his landing. Really felt it. The solid, impossible reality of him. He nuzzled into the crook of my neck, underneath my chin, and it felt unquestionably like a hello. Was I supposed to greet him? Before I could formulate anything coherent, he was immediately absorbed into my chest cavity. I swear I felt a settling, an embodiment, while in the same moment the spirit version of him moved through me and settled on my shoulder.

And then I woke up.

After pondering the strangeness of the dream for over an hour, I could still feel him there.

I have always been a sensational dreamer. Vivid, lifelike dreams. Lucid dreams. I used to keep a dream journal because my dream state shenanigans were so much more interesting than my day-to-day existence.

This dream was different. A bit like meditation. I wasn’t fully asleep but I wasn’t awake, either. It was early morning and I had surfaced from sleep the way you sometimes do, not jarred into consciousness by an alarm, but drifting up slowly, awareness arriving in layers. And instead of reaching for my phone, instead of letting the day’s to-do list rush in, I stayed there. Purposefully lingering in the in-between.

I’ve been experimenting with something lately. Before the world gets a vote, I spend a few minutes mentally mapping my desired day. It’s part Joe Dispenza, part Neville Goddard. Imagination is not separate from reality. It’s a rehearsal for it. So I lay there, partially awake, and I imagined, with intention. The patio. The tea. The journal. The preferred energy I wanted to move through my day with.

And then, sleep claimed me again.

Which is how I ended up on that imagined patio, similar to mine but not exact, watching an eagle dance on wind currents. Fully inside the day I’d been building in my mind. In that liminal, strange space where intention and dreaming blur into something that feels more real than either one alone.

Here’s what I would like to highlight, though, because it’s easy to get swept up in the drama of a dream eagle and overlook the nuance of this gift. The magic didn’t start with him. It started with my small, unremarkable decision to stay still. To not reach for my phone. That’s a little joy tucked away underneath a bigger one. The permission itself. The twenty minutes of nothingness that made room for everything else.

That morning, I was trying. Not with precision. Not with a bullet journal or a four a.m. wake-up or mushroom coffee. Just lying there, in the hazy space between sleeping and waking, choosing, however imperfectly, to be intentional about the hours ahead. When you hold a vivid, felt-sense vision of your desired experience before the conscious mind fully engages, you’re not daydreaming. You’re architecting.

I think it matters enormously, for those of us in the early, tender stages of building a more intentional life, to note that I wasn’t doing anything impressive that morning. I was just lying there, in the in-between, refusing, for a few more minutes, to let the day arrive before I was ready for it.

That’s all it was. And it’s been one of my favorite mornings of the whole year.

Underneath all the neuroscience and the manifestation methodology, here’s what I think the liminal space actually is. It’s the most radical act of refusing autopilot that exists. It’s the moment before the outside world comes rushing in, before your inbox and your responsibilities and the noise of everyone else’s expectations flood the room. Allowing myself twenty minutes in this space is something of a sacred rebellion for me. A little one. The kind nobody claps for.

I wrote all of this an hour or so after the experience, still feeling him there. This bird who is not a bird. This new companion who is entirely imagined. What strikes me most isn’t the spectacularness of it. It’s the sequence. He was already there, riding the currents, magnificent and entirely his own, before he ever noticed me. And when we made eye contact, when that moment of mutual recognition happened, he didn’t circle. He didn’t deliberate. He came directly, with full commitment, like something had already been decided.

I think about the moments that produced him. Basking in bed. The refusal to let the day ahead call the shots. The sleep-fogged, but intentional act of imagining my way into the hours ahead. And I wonder if that’s not exactly what happened, energetically speaking. I created the conditions for something to land. And something did.

I was still enough, present enough, open enough, for something that was always already mine to find its way home. The eagle didn’t come from somewhere outside me. I think he came from somewhere inside me that finally had enough quiet to make itself known.

And now he sits on my shoulder. A reminder that the world is more magical than we give it credit for. I can still feel him there.

But if I’m honest, the eagle isn’t even the little joy I want you to take with you today. He’s just the proof. The evidence that something shifts when we stop demanding our joys arrive big, loud, and photographable. The real little joy was the act of claiming my day. The permission. The twenty minutes in bed.

Consider, for a moment, what’s waiting for you in your liminal spaces. I don’t know what’s been circling, patient, just beyond the edges of your rushed mornings and your grabbed coffees and your phone reached for before your eyes have fully opened and registered a new day. But I suspect something has been there for a while, waiting on you to notice it.

That’s the sacred rebellion, I think. Not the grand gestures. Not the dramatic reinventions. Just the quiet, radical act of being present to yourself before the world comes rushing in.

These days I’m less interested in asking what the eagle meant than I am in protecting the kind of morning where an eagle could find me at all

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