Templar Edification

There’s something inherently ethereal, and indeed a bit eerie, about liminal places. Areas of transition—from light to dark, from east to west, from civilization to wilderness—have fascinated every human culture. America is no exception, given our national obsession with “the frontier,” wherever that happens to be in a given generation. Crossroads and doorways, graveyards and twilight, all thrill us with their ambiguity, their in-betweenness. Unseen things, things just beyond the veil, seem that much closer, that much realer. And October is basically one big liminal space. Autumn proves perhaps the most dramatic of the seasons, replete with pungent aromas: spices and woodsmoke and decaying vegetation. Leaves erupt in one last great riot of color before they wither and fall. In comes the harvest, transitioning from summer’s plenty into winter’s scarcity. The winds shift, heralding the frost and ice that, while not yet arrived, are now well and truly on their way. The days grow shorter; ...

I have a melancholic disposition. I don’t mean that in the modern sense of sad and vaguely depressing, but in the medieval sense of melancholic as introverted and thoughtful. Rowling readers might term it Ravenclaw. Books have been my portals to worlds of endless learning ever since my youth, and when silence seeps into my bones it provides to me a wondrous rejuvenation. My grandparents’ property abutted an old church and graveyard, ancient by American standards, with headstones dating back to the 1600s. We used to take walks amongst the monuments, deciphering their weathered engravings, some fallen over like loosened teeth. We would read the inscriptions and imagine their stories. My grandparents rest there now too. I’ve always been drawn to liminal spaces, those borderlands betwixt past and present, man and nature, Christian and pagan, life and death. Autumn of course is perfect for that, with holidays like Halloween. I never was much of a hunter myself, but I understand why people l...