Introducing The Liminal
I know. It’s been a while. More than six months, actually. It’s been a much longer break than I intended, and I’ll be up front with you, it’s not entirely over yet. This post isn’t going to be like my usual posts, but I will get back to regular writing soon. I promise.
Why has it been so long? Well, there are many answers to that question, but the most important of them is that my wife and I welcomed our daughter, Sue, into the world in early February. Being a dad takes a lot of time, and I’m loving every minute of it. She’s been a remarkably “easy” baby so far. She has been sleeping through the night for several months now; I have never heard her cry for longer than ten to fifteen seconds; she smiles and laughs all the time. In these ways, she does not take after her father ;)
As proud as I am of our little one, she is not why I am writing to you after such a long silence. While I have not had much luck making time to write, somehow I have made time to start a podcast. That’s what I want to share with you today. If you’ve enjoyed previous posts from me that touch on the weird (like this one, or this one), I think you’ll like it. But I really mean that. It’s not about design — like, at all.
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The podcast is called The Liminal, and it’s a program about conscious metaphysical speculation and the future of minds. What on Earth does that mean? Let me explain…
I’ve been known to put colleagues on the spot by asking, “what is your life about?” I ask this because no matter what your answer is, I believe life is better lived when you have one. My answer is that I have two passions — first, the pursuit of truth, and second, the pursuit of service. I don’t know who I am if I’m not still searching for a better understanding of our reality — no matter where that takes me — and if I’m not finding ways to serve the people around me. This podcast is part of that picture. It’s a program that gives me structure to that pursuit, and structure for sharing the things I discover with others.
I’ll warn you, though. When I say pursuit of truth, I’m not veiling some particular religious agenda, nor am I sprucing up a vaguely motivational one, either. I’m talking about digging in to the existential weirdness of our world. The Liminal is a place in between. For our purposes, it’s a place in between the reality we know, and the rest of reality: The things we feel, the things we sense, the things we wonder about, the things we’ve heard whispered about, the things we’re afraid to talk about. Not because they’re scary, really. Sure, some of them might be. But because we’re afraid of sounding crazy. I want to make talking about this stuff intellectually safe, and I believe that’s done by letting go of fear and giving all kinds of ideas a hearing.
The first episode of The Liminal is a short introduction to the show and tells the story of Charles Fort, a man who never shied away from investigating anomalous phenomena and speculating on its role in our reality. The second episode is full-length (35min) and takes an exploration of dreams to places I’ll bet you’ve never been before.
You can find the podcast by searching your favorite podcast app for The Liminal, or you can visit theliminal.co and use the links there to find the particular platform you like. There’s much, much more to come on the site, by the way, like full episode transcriptions, articles, etc. I’ll keep you posted as I make more progress there.
In the meantime, I hope you’ll join me in listening. And if you do, please share it with your friends and let me know what you think!