There are those who come into the world to bring light, to open doors, to remind others of what they have forgotten. And there are those who, upon seeing this light, try to fix it in place—to name it, to worship it, to build walls around it and call it a temple.
But the ones who truly carry the fire are not meant to be tethered.
This is the paradox of the liminal ones, the wanderers, the threshold dwellers, the ones who belong equally to the seen and the unseen. They are called forward to awaken something, to stir embers, to remind people of what already lives inside them. But they are not meant to become the altar where others kneel, mistaking devotion for their own awakening.
And yet—the world loves to build shrines and pedestals. It loves to take a luminous thread and pin it to the sky like a fixed celestial object, demanding that it remain in the place where others found it, never shifting, never slipping beyond reach.
For those who have spent their lives learning to listen at the threshold of mystery, who have devoted themselves to honing their ability to step into the unseen, there comes a moment of reckoning: What happens when people stop seeing you as a traveler and start seeing you as a destination?
The role of the spiritual teacher, the guide, the one who sees—it can become a binding, a constriction, a slow erosion of freedom.
Because what was meant to be fluid, what was meant to move, what was meant to come and go like the changing tides, is now expected to remain. To mire itself in consistency, to be legible, to be available for consumption.
To be placed on a pedestal is to be made into an object.
To be named a teacher is to be trapped inside the name.
To be revered is to be confined.
And the moment a person stops being perceived as a participant in the great unfolding and is instead turned into a keeper of truth, something is lost. Because truth is not meant to be kept—it is meant to be discovered, rediscovered, lived, breathed, danced with, unraveled, found again.
Why does the world do this? Why does it struggle to let the liminal ones remain in their movement, their paradox, their wildness?
Because to the world, fluidity is terrifying—it unmoors the fixed, blurs the edges, queers the certainty that power depends upon. It refuses the singular, the binary, the ordained and orthodox path. It is the lover who will not be named, the current that will not be dammed, the presence that slips between definitions and asks: What if there was never one way, one truth, one shape to hold us all?
Because a teacher who does not stay in one place cannot be controlled.
Because a fire that moves cannot be claimed.
And yet, the world is hungry for certainty. It is hungry for figures who will remain stable, who will give clear answers, who will stand still long enough to be followed.
But those who dwell in the liminal do not offer certainty. They offer fire. And fire is not meant to be contained.
There is a danger in believing that wisdom belongs only to those who hold the role of teacher, sage, mystic, prophet. There is a danger in believing that those who bear the torch of remembering are meant to carry it for others indefinitely. The role of the teacher can be a beautiful offering, but when it becomes a demand, it ceases to be free.
There is another way. A way in which one can step into the role but not be trapped inside it. A way in which one can bring wisdom without being fossilized into a relic. A way in which one can light the fire and then walk away, knowing that the fire will remain.
The truest teachers are the ones who do not demand devotion. The ones who do not ask to be followed. The ones who do not mistake their own insights for immutable truth. The ones who say: “I will give you everything I have. And then I will leave. And you will still have it.”
These are the ones who move between, who belong to the road as much as to any place of return. They do not stay to be worshipped. They move so that others might follow—not after them, but after their own remembering.
Because the world does not need more idols cast in stone, more gatekeepers of brittle certainty, more voices claiming to be the final answer, demanding worship instead of wonder.
What the world needs are the ones who refuse to be tethered. The ones who come, awaken, burn bright—and then disappear into the horizon, leaving the embers behind to catch and spread.
The ones who remind us that we were never meant to worship the fire.
We were meant to become it.
