The boundary is a meeting place
Instead of only viewing a boundary as a limit, what if we also view it as a meeting place? Therefore the boundary is doubly necessary—to meet people where they are, we must be where we are, not overextending ourselves into places we don’t belong.
This happens internally too. If we consist of many parts, there are myriad of meeting places too.
The image asks us to consider that as much as a boundary is a limit, it’s also a meeting place. A place where we identify and name what we can and cannot bring, and where we locate our edges in relationships with others. That edge, where personal limits are seen and accounted for, makes way for the emergence of something that is uniquely possible in that particular confluence of energies.
There are boundaries within each of us where different parts of us come together, too. Carl Jung talked about transcendent function, which feels related to Bhabha’s hybridity. Transcendent function has to do with understanding and finding value in what can emerge when conflicting parts within us meet and clash. Perhaps when a person is torn between obligation and desire, for instance, something new can emerge, a third thing that braids together what we should do and what we want to do. In making a space for that tension, what once felt like a hard knot may begin to loosen a bit.
Space needs to be made not only for what we think and what we feel—and what others think and feel—but also for the stuff that arises in the spaces where these different energies conflict. It is in holding this tension that Jung says “a third thing in which opposites can unite” emerges. —Jessica Dore, *Tarot for Change
- see also: we exist only in relationship to others
- see also: the limits of the individual are porous — that boundary is a wiggly line between us