Border country

Esther de Waal has written a tiny book called To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border. She writes about the experience of living near the border of England and Wales, drawing on her knowledge of Celtic Christian traditions and the Rule of St Benedict. In the chapter "Connecting Inner and Outer," de Waal quotes William Countryman, who uses the image of the border as that which connects what happens on the surface in our outward lives with our deeper, inner lives.

This border country is a place of intense vitality. It does not so much draw us away from the everyday world as it plunges us deeper into a reality of which the everyday world is like the surface. [...] Stay at the border, in active conversation with the holy and the everyday.

From Living on the Border of the Holy: The Human Priesthood and the Church, quoted in To Pause at the Threshold, p. 64.