Poetic Paradox

a brief reflection before departure

I feel so alive traveling in an airplane. Something about being suspended between the weight of gravity and the freedom of velocity, the glimpse into the sublime shapes of wispy white clouds, the strangeness of being carried into the ethereal by cold, gray metal. Air planes are liminal spaces—undefined places that mark the transition from one boundary to another. In the air, so much is marked by this state of in-betweenness. I am between departure and arrival, between land and space, between awe and the ordinary. The plane heightens my sense of all else that is liminal, highlighting the liminality of life itself: our time as the in-betweenness of our first breath and death. Like suddenly seeing a certain word or color everywhere when it becomes more relevant to you, liminality becomes more salient to me when I’m in the air.

Flying is the longest stretch of time I exist in physical liminality. Between boarding and exiting an aircraft, I’ve usually had at least two hours to realize what it is to be in this state. Other liminal spaces like elevators, staircases, or hallways don’t offer nearly enough time for contemplation. Train rides are closer to the ground, my thoughts closer to the ordinary. Experiences of psychological liminality, like time between jobs or the years between childhood and adulthood, tend to stretch over weeks, months, or years. The taste of liminality is diluted with so much time, but the few hours of air travel offer the perfect opportunity to taste the liminal. In this state of being suspended in the unfamiliar, a space within me opens. I am reminded of how little I know about where I’m going at the end of my journey of life, and I feel small against a vast unknown. I realize that everyone around me shares in this experience. I soften toward them. From this state, I find it easier to write poetry.

Airplanes offer me the perfect space for poems to emerge. The softening of liminality inspires me. The realization that any error or mishap on the journey could be catastrophic awakens my sense of my mortality. I remember my time here is limited, and I sense more urgency. I write from this state, between inspiration and urgency. I pause often. I sense then articulate, examine and feel, then translate. The experience is a taste of aliveness. There’s a rush to writing poems while pulled by inspiration and pushed by urgency. Without inspiration, my words feel forced. I feel like a meaning mechanic, putting words together with tools that fit with the machinery of language. Without urgency, my words float, unmoored from the force that fastens them on the page.

Writing poetry is being in a liminal space: between grasping and expressing, prose and music, clarity and subtlety, writer and reader. I love poetry. And yet, writing a poem can be an immensely frustrating experience. When I contrast what I know to what I can articulate, it feels like an impossible distance to cross. Perhaps this is why “ineffable” is one of my favorite words: it captures the inevitability of paradox.

In my everyday life, I find paradoxes all around me: in my journey of seeking, my experience with religion, the practice of reading. As a seeker, I sometimes wonder what exactly I’m seeking. Unlike searching, which implies a physical location, seeking is often a quest to experience something intangible. It seems strange that I would go to great lengths just to experience what’s emerging from inside me all along. The external experiences of life inform the internal experiences of meaning. There is no outside without an inside. I used to struggle to believe in God before because “God” didn’t meet the high standards I held for God. To find answers to my existential questions, my eyes scanned ink on paper or words on a digital screen. Through material and physical sensation, I experienced meaning. I tasted transcendence. And when I got tired from reading too much, I closed my eyes. I was reminded that to improve my vision, I needed to cease experiencing it for a while.

Unlike liminal spaces, paradoxes can’t be resolved. There is a word to describe the undescribable. Ineffable. The spiritual is experienced through the material. Paradox is a fact of reality that humanity’s greatest physicists, poets, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have exalted.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

-Soren Kierkegaard

To encounter a paradox, to recognize it as such, is to embrace two opposites into a greater whole. It’s an act of expansion. And like many forms of stretching, it can be uncomfortable. In our everyday lives, paradox can feel too complicated of a concept to fully embody. But in liminal spaces, time slows. There is nowhere to be but here. And, here, it turns out, is a gateway to everywhere.

In an airplane, suspended at 30-something-thousand feet, between earth and the cosmos beyond, I come into contact with Truth as paradox. I respond in poetry. I find it easier to smile at strangers as I depart.

I love this instance of Being 
manifesting in my breath
I forgive the brokenness 
of these channels of Truth
What do we know about Infinity?

Can you blame a mushroom
for forgetting to reveal all her dangers?
Can you fault her 
for loving the soil,
for metabolism,
or whatever else we call this magic?

I want to curse my search 
for the tools to fix this
mystery that defies containment
this unfolding, uncontrollable
dizzying dance

If you see me searching still
turn my gaze to the stars
remind me we will all return to dust
tell me about something you love
walk me home

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Parts of this essay were written in response to a prompt in the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life application process. The poem above was written on a window seat in an airplane, somewhere between Chicago and NYC, on Friday, September 19, 2025.