Threshold Magic and Housing Justice
I've been calling the hotel where I stay during work trips "home" for weeks now, and I need to tell you why that matters—both mystically and materially.
It started as a mistake. "Heading home," I'd text, meaning the hotel. At first I'd laugh it off, correct myself. But the more it happened, the less it felt like an error. This room—with its industrial carpet and the hum of the ice machine next door—is home right now. Not metaphorically. Actually.
Here's what my week looks like: 60 hours at the call center, helping people navigate Marketplace insurance and HIPAA compliance. Weekend obligations bleeding into what should be rest days. One day to recover before it all starts again. The hotel isn't a luxury—it's the place where I survive this. Where I collapse. Where I dream. Where I practice the spiritual discipline of dwelling when everything in my body is screaming to run.
And here's the shamanic truth I'm learning in this threshold space:
Liminality isn't just theory. It's the hotel room between "housed" and "houseless," between survival mode and something sustainable. In indigenous wisdom, the threshold is where you meet the spirits, where transformation happens—because you're vulnerable, undefended, between worlds. That's where I am. That's where millions of us are.
Buddhism calls it anicca—impermanence. Nothing stays. Even our most "permanent" addresses are just longer leases on borrowed time. But Western culture has this death grip on the idea of THE HOME: owned, stable, permanent, yours. And if you don't have that? You've failed. You're not really living. You're in some liminal hell-state until you "get back on your feet."
Except I'm standing just fine. I'm working 60-hour weeks. I'm creating. I'm dwelling—not in the way capitalism recognizes, but in the way my soul knows how.
Kabbalah offers me a framework for this that feels like prophecy:
Tzimtzum—divine contraction. God had to contract, pull back, make space for creation to exist. What if we need to contract our death-grip definitions of "home" to make space for new possibilities? Homes that move. Homes that are shared, communal, fluid. Homes that don't require perfect credit scores or six-figure down payments or playing by rules designed to keep most of us locked out.
I'm not romanticizing this hotel. The exhaustion is real. The injustice of working this hard and still being in threshold space? That's structural violence. But I'm also refusing to accept the narrative that this isn't "real" dwelling, that I'm somehow less-than because my home is impermanent.
Here's where it gets radical, and why I'm sharing this with you specifically:
This isn't just personal spiritual practice. This is housing justice work. Every time I sacralize this threshold, every time I practice dwelling in impermanence, I'm doing tikkun olam—repair of the world. I'm refusing the shame. I'm saying: the system is broken, not me. And once we stop accepting their definition of home, we can build something that actually serves people in motion, in transition, in survival mode.
What would housing look like if we designed it for actual human lives instead of capitalist fantasies? What if we honored threshold spaces? What if "home" could be as fluid as we are?
I'm writing this from the hotel. From home. From the threshold between what was and what's coming. And I'm inviting you into this work—not as spectators, but as co-conspirators. Because the mystic and the material aren't separate. The spiritual practice of dwelling in impermanence is connected to the political work of reimagining housing altogether.
That's the alchemy. That's the honest becoming.
Thank you for supporting this work. For holding space while I figure out how to live—and write—from the in-between.
If this piece resonates, or if you have your own threshold stories, drop a comment. I'm building something here, and your voices matter.
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