In this spoken monologue, the presenter explores the significance of thresholds—doorways, entrances, and liminal spaces—through the lenses of folklore, witchcraft, and cultural symbolism. She explains traditional protective practices such as avoiding welcome mats, using salt, sigils, or cinnamon to bless or repel what passes a threshold. Drawing on personal experience from a four‑month stay in Vietnam, she describes guardian lion statues (derived from an ancient Chinese dog‑lion hybrid) that are placed in pairs to protect entrances, illustrating how different cultures recognize the power of thresholds. The speaker then shifts to a reflective guide on how to navigate these liminal moments: rather than rushing through discomfort, one can pause at the threshold, gaining a dual perspective that reveals what can be let go, preserved, grieved, or anticipated. She invokes the Roman god Janus as a metaphor for simultaneously looking to the past and future, encouraging listeners to balance goodbye and hello, and to consciously design new beginnings while honoring what remains valuable.
Chapters
And we do that in this threshold space. When we look back on old folklore and witchcraft, the threshold, the entrance, the mat as you go into a home in particular is really important. In folklore and in witchcraft, you never have a welcome mat because you don't want to welcome everything into your home. You have to protect your home. So some people will protect that entrance, that threshold, with salt, or they'll put a sigil underneath, or they blow cinnamon into the house over the threshold to bring blessings. So there's a lot that you can do around the space to indicate what can come into the threshold space or not. What do you want to have pass over or repel? My husband and I just spent 4 months in Vietnam. And one of the things that I loved doing was going on these long walks and finding these lions, an ancient Chinese dog creature that has kind of been reimagined as a lion. And it's there to protect the threshold, to protect the entrance into buildings. And you almost always see them in pairs. And so I'd walk around and take photographs, and sometimes I'd take a photograph of one like, oh, this was a beautiful example of this lion. And then I feel kind of uncomfortable, like, where is his partner? And the one time I'm like, I'm looking up and down this road and it's a corner shop and I can only see the one lion. And as I walk around the corner, I see his partner on the other side because the two of them are there to protect this particular entrance. So it's in lots of different cultures, lots of different ways that we know that this entrance, this threshold, this liminal space is important. And how do we actually navigate it? What are we going to do? We don't always have to cross immediately. Remember, we don't have to resolve our discomfort immediately. We can pause in threshold. We can, we can stand there for a minute. And when you're standing there, you're seeing both sides. So what is it that you can see from the threshold that you can't see when you're in one room looking through to the other, or vice versa? What perspective can the threshold give to you? And that's what, what Janus invites you to do. So when you're, when you're thinking as Janus about the past and the future, you're thinking at the same time, what are you letting go and what are you learning at the same time? What are you preserving and what are you replacing? What are you grieving and what are you anticipating? What can you maintain from the past and what do you need to design that is new? And you're doing both those things at the same time. You're saying goodbye to some things and hello to others.
