There are always liminal lands, out beyond the predictions of common sense or myth, where the mind encounters places strangely common to human experience. Jungians would call them archetypal, perhaps; they crop up, for instance – often in passing – in fantastic fiction. A few examples might be CS Lewis’ Narnia (the Shribble Marshes), Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea (Osskil), Michael Moorcock’s other London (Jerry Cornelius’ Notting Hill), the American Southwest of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger sequence.

But sometimes they exist in everyday time and space. Lucy Pollock (the emphasis is mine):

At the pumping station, far out on the liminal land through which the river flows, the dog and I turn for home. The fields now are lush with flowering grasses, but for weeks in the winter they will be submerged and this track will become a narrow causeway across the floodplain.

My rage abates. Of course we need science and biotechnology and billions of data points, as we seek to improve the lives of older people, our future selves. But side by side with the science we need a deep and abiding understanding of what it means to be human.

I have encountered such places myself. Much of my earlier writing had to do with them, and their strange coexistence between mind and place: the Wye Valley, the worked-out coal country along the River Browney, Western Park in Leicester. There have been darker places too, since then; like the high grounds above Kimmeridge Bay, home to PD James’ The Black Tower, or the post-UKAEA wasteland of Winfrith Heath. But yours will be different again, like Lucy Pollock’s: places between, times that do not quite align.

Contemplative practice has, in itself, nothing to do with such things. And yet the deep instincts – I’m tempted to call them mystical, even though the word has so many unhelpful connotations – that draw people to the contemplative life – as to the methodologies of psychonautics – are human instincts. Might it not be that these same instincts are themselves the door to this fundamental way of being human – to the liminal lands – since they are themselves in a way reflections of, or reflected in, the silent illumination of the contemplative condition itself?