Between Worlds: The Liminal Body, the Thinning Veil, and a Reimagining of Reality
Between Worlds: The Liminal Body, the Thinning Veil, and a Reimagining of Reality
This is a special time of year for many of us. At the end of October, as the days grow shorter and the nights stretch longer, something happens that marks a breaking in our usual ways of being and doing and understanding just a little, allowing access to other dimensions of information and intimacy, loosening the clutch of normative habituation. It’s as if the very fabric of reality itself begins to thin, becoming more translucent and permeable. What is real? What do I believe and more importantly, how do I come to believe what I believe? What separates and what can come close in? People speak of it almost as if it’s a whisper between conversations — this notion of the "thinning of the veil." In folklore and tradition, the veil is imagined as a boundary that separates the world we inhabit from other realms: those of spirits, ancestors, and mystical dimensions. Lately I've been curious - what if this veil isn’t reserved for seasonal phenomenon or one thinned during portals of grief? What if it is a constant fluctuation that some bodies and brains, in their very transgressive being, already perceive and experience?
The idea of the veil reaching its thinnest on October 31st has a rich history in various cultural traditions. It is thought to be a time when the boundaries between this reality and other worlds and dimensions are most porous, allowing for greater connection with ancestors and spirits, the life force of that which animates all things. During this period, some of us gather in ritual and some attend in quiet observance as the unseen and the seen touch — a brush of cold air that comes like a secret message, a shadow that whispers, a vivid dream that lingers upon waking like a half-remembered truth.
But this thinning of the veil is not simply about the supernatural. It is also about the ways in which the familiar divisions we take for granted in our polarities and dichotomized ways of being — body and spirit, self and other, present and past — dissolve and intermingle. The veil is more than a boundary between life and death; it is the membrane that separates one dimension of experience from another, one layer of awareness from the next. In its unraveling, it invites us to perceive the continuity between disparate realms, revealing that separation is perhaps only an illusion maintained by the structures of our lives and ways of thinking and relating.
For some, these glimpses into the “other side” are a yearly occurrence, a ritual tied to the season. But for others, particularly those of us living with chronic illness, disability and neurodivergence, the veil is never firmly in place. It is always fluttering, slipping, and shifting. Our bodies, already estranged from the normative narratives of health and productivity, inhabit a liminal space where the distinctions between worlds are more tenuous. These brain bodies defy the conventional script, creating rifts in the fabric of reality that allow for access to other worlds of experience.
Chronically ill and disabled people often exist outside of the normative temporal rhythms of life and socialized expectations of physical boundaries as to the "meaning" of the body's place in this world. In place of a linear progression from birth to death, from health to sickness to cure to health, we live in what might be described as “crip time.” Crip time challenges the conventional understanding of time as a steady, uniform passage. It is time that bends, slows down, speeds up, or even stops altogether. It is a temporal mode that mirrors the unpredictability and flux of bodies that do not conform to typical patterns of movement, sensation, and capability.
Crip time is a kind of thinning veil in itself, one that disrupts the ordinary flow of life and demands a different kind of engagement. In this temporal state, the boundaries between self and other, present and past, become more malleable. Us chronically ill and neurodivergent folks are often made acutely aware of own permeability — a susceptibility not only to physical states of being but also to intangible forces. Pain, fatigue, and neurological symptoms can evoke altered states of consciousness, where the body feels as though it is both intensely present and yet strangely absent, hovering at the edges of reality. Some describe what almost seems to be mystical or otherworldly visions, a kind of access to altered states, and some describe the knowing that is born from the inability to escape corporeal form where one is heightened in awareness of that which is inarguable, where message and messenger merge in the realm of the flesh. It is in these moments that the veil between the physical and the mystical, between worlds, becomes almost unbearably thin. This liminality can bring forth a heightened awareness of being in multiple spaces at once. The ill or disabled body becomes a medium, a site of negotiation between the corporeal and the ineffable. We are time travelers and holders of all possibilities in existence and the truth of the body in this life.
To live in a body that defies expectations and refuses normative assumptions is to be in constant conversation with one’s own limits and possibilities. I think it is also to be in dialogue with history and ancestry in a specifically embodied way. The thinning of the veil between self and ancestors is not merely about the metaphysical meeting of spirits; it is about how these histories are carried within and through the very real and physical body we inhabit. We carry our ancestors' stories in our dna, our skin, our body's memory. The body becomes a repository of stories — not just personal narratives, but the collective memories of those who came before. Ancestral knowledge, once thought to reside outside the body, reveals itself within it. The ache in one’s bones, the tremor of hands, or the sudden clarity of insight in the midst of a pain flare are not merely physical symptoms; they are echoes of ancestral voices, a thin veil through which wisdom and memory pass. The chronically ill and disabled body, marked as it often is by stigma and marginalization, carries with it a legacy of our disabled ancestors and their resistance, wisdom, and knowledge that spans generations.
What if this resonance between body and ancestry is, in itself, a form of otherworldly connection to which we have access? It transcends the separation between self and history, between the present moment and the lineage of lives that have contributed to it. The veil thins, and the body becomes a site where self and ancestor coalesce, where the boundary between “I” and “we” blurs. For here, the chronically ill and disabled body and neurodivergent brain are known as a powerful medium, one that connects disparate realms of experience and knowledge.
As connectors, we daily walk between worlds. Often when "the thinning veil" is spoken of iit is as an external phenomenon — something that happens to the world around us, affecting our perception of it. But for those of us who live in bodies that already defy the normative codes of conduct, the veil is internal as much as it is external. The boundary between body and mystical, between constructs of self and the natural world, between pain states and satisfaction states is not a solid line but a permeable, shifting membrane that allows for fluid exchange.
In these bodies, normative reality itself unravels. Time ceases to be linear; space ceases to be rigid. The veil thins between dimensions, allowing for glimpses of realities that are otherwise hidden. It is in these moments that the body becomes a site of revelation — a place where the seen and unseen meet, where the boundary between mundane and magical dissolves. This capacity for experiencing multiple layers of reality simultaneously is not an aberration but a different way of being, one that is deserving of recognition and respect.
As I move toward October 31st and the thinning of the veil, I grow in my own anticipation and sense of possibility and reverence and wonder, because it is a time which offers portals to other possibilities. Cracks in business as usual where there is the possibility of entering into the dark of night to wake up to how alive this world is in its many worlds and dimensions, so much deeper and wilder and intimate than the day to day lets on. And as I begin my own sense of descent toward this time I am thrust back into my own body with its pain and need and language and reality, so different from the worlds around me. I follow the thread connecting these, move the needle in and out, back and forth, stitch by stitch. In a world that privileges normative ways of being — of moving through time and space, of separating body and spirit — I believe the experiences of chronically ill and disabled individuals offer a radical reimagining of reality itself. We live in bodies that refuse to conform, that bend time and space, that dissolve boundaries and blur distinctions. Our very existence thins the veil between worlds, this experience a conduit of knowledge that what lies beyond it is not merely a different world but a deeper understanding of the one we already inhabit. The veil, after all, is not something that separates us; it is something that connects us.
Spectacular exploration, reflection and writing Isabel. Thank you!