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, those 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, demanding that it remain in the place where others found it—never shifting, never slipping beyond reach (despite the gradual, cyclic wobble of the Earth's rotation, known as the precession of equinoxes...which will always cause the seemingly constant stars to shift and drift over time).
For those who have spent their lives learning to listen at the threshold of mystery, who have honed their ability to step into the unseen, there comes a moment of reckoning: when others stop seeing them as a traveler and start seeing them as a destination.
The role of the spiritual teacher, the guide, the seer, 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 accessible, to be available for consumption.
The truth we seldom name, because it feels so counterintuitive, is that being pedestalized is synonymous with being objectified. To be named a teacher is to be trapped inside a title that leaves no space for evolution and uncertainty.
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 calcified into a keeper of truth, something is lost. Truth is not meant to be kept—it is meant to be discovered, lost, then rediscovered. It is meant to be lived, breathed, danced with, unraveled, dispersed.
Why does the world 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?
A teacher who does not stay in one place cannot be controlled. A fire that moves cannot be claimed.
And yet, the world is ravenous for certainty—for anchors in the quicksand, for figures who hold their shape when everything else dissolves. It hungers for those who speak in declaratives, who make the fog seem like a curtain rather than a climate. We long for voices that say, "This is the way." We are not passive fools thirsty for salvation...but we are weary. Because the tectonics of modern life—ecological collapse, social fragmentation, digital deluge—have left us dizzy with options and stumbling for sacred ground.
We reach, then, for those who do not flinch, who offer blueprints instead of excruciatingly clear mirrors. We yearn for the ones who promise clarity, even if it costs us our complexity. We canonize stillness not for its truth, but for its comfort. And yet, what we call stability is often just a refusal to dance. The soul, by contrast, is a moving target. So is truth. Still, who can blame the seeker for wanting someone to hold the lantern steady while the path vanishes beneath their feet?
Those who dwell in the liminal do not offer certainty. They offer fire—volatile, illuminating, alive. Fire doesn’t stay where it’s placed. It moves, devours, reshapes. Those who walk with it often vanish before anyone can decide what they were.
The trouble begins when wisdom becomes confused with a role. When the mystic is expected to be a mystic at all times, when the teacher is asked to stand still so the lesson doesn’t waver, something essential is misplaced. The figure becomes a function. The offering becomes a requirement.
Those who remember—the ones who touch the edge of the veil and return—may speak, but their value doesn’t rest in being followed. Holding the torch can be beautiful, but when asked to hold it endlessly, the hand begins to burn. Wisdom resists possession. It flares up in one, then another. It wants movement, transmission, relinquishment. It doesn't mean to be elusive, but it does mean to be alive.
The truest teachers are the ones who do not demand devotion, for they do not mistake their own insights for immutable truth. They will be the first to 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—sojourners of the threshold, tethered not to arrival but to the rhythm of return. They belong to the road as much as to any resting place, and even their pauses carry the scent of departure. Reverence slips off their shoulders; they never linger long enough to be turned into idols. Their movement is not a summons to follow them, but a quiet invitation to trace the thread of one’s own remembering.
What we don’t need are more idols cast in algorithmic stone—more self-appointed oracles mistaking performance for presence. In a time when every platform turns opinion into doctrine, we are flooded with voices offering closure instead of inquiry, allegiance instead of attention. The hunger for certainty has made gatekeepers of many, but few know how to kneel at the threshold of real mystery. In an age where everyone performs wisdom, shouting over the silence that births it, what’s rare is the one who invites wonder without demanding attention. Certainty makes noise. Gnosis listens.
The ones the world calls down arrive in motion. They stir the air and vanish before the story settles. No monument marks their passing, but a trace of them lingers—a tension in the chest, a phrase that won’t let go. Their gift lives in the residue as a kind of permission, quiet but electric. Armor loosens. The voice grows honest. Movement begins in the body long before it finds a name.
These aren’t leaders to follow or flames to circle around. Their presence leaves a different quality—an opening, a rhythm, a question.
The ember waits in you now. The memory breathes through your ribs. The next gesture is yours to make.
