Dancing on the threshold

An invitation to begin again, together

✨ Join me for The Art of Beginnings, an online workshop about exploring liminal spaces. RSVP here. ✨

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Hello, hello,

It’s been a moment since the last time we met up here in your inbox. Over a year!

[If you don’t remember me, Hi, I’m Marina, a Museum Studies PhD candidate and writer living in Québec who creates spaces for people to cultivate new relationships with their attention and embodied experience.]

I imagine that you, like me, have lived into significant questions and challenges in the past year. When I think back to the version of myself who last pressed ‘send’ on a newsletter, the day after an election in November 2024, I feel overwhelmed by the weight of all that she had to carry to get to January 2026. (Not the least being the submission of a doctoral dissertation, but that’s a story for another letter…)

So coming back here, to this public space—after so much time and transformation, while the world continues to burn—is intimidating. I have resisted writing here for weeks, hesitating on the threshold of beginning again. Each time I thought about starting a new letter, a swirl of uncertainties pinned me down. How do I want to show up here? Has my voice changed? How much do I share about what I’ve lived? What’s the point of this space? What’s the right next step?

And perhaps, most vulnerably,

Will anyone want to stick around with me while I figure this out?

After two months of waffling, feeling frustrated by my creative inertia around starting this newsletter back up—while also, you know, beginning my post-PhD¹ life (!)—I remembered that I literally once developed an entire workshop about navigating beginnings.

Immediately, something clicked, and this murky, uncomfortable feeling registered as familiar territory. Of course I felt destabilized and uncertain and tired, this transition was a liminal space. As I thought more about the material in my beginnings workshop, I remembered that these threshold experiences bring specific challenges and open up particular possibilities—and that they are best entered into with good company.

The (almost) doctor needed to take her own (Museum) medicine.

And so, in that spirit:

You are cordially invited to join me for The Art of Beginnings, a pop-up workshop about exploring the disorientation and potentials of liminal spaces.

One hour | Live on Zoom | Recording included | $25 USD

I’m offering the exact same workshop twice to accommodate different schedules & timezones:

• Saturday, January 17 at 2:30pm EST (Montréal time)

• Tuesday, January 20 at 12:30 EST (Montréal time)

📩 RSVP for your preferred time:

How does it feel to begin something new? How do you hold both where you’ve been and where you are going? What is your relationship with thresholds?

The Art of Beginnings is an online workshop—a pop-up retreat—for coming together to reflect on the sensations of beginning something new. Through a series of creative exercises inspired by museum visits, we’ll play with new ways of paying attention to the moment of crossing a threshold.

Beginnings are liminal spaces, where the past meets the present to weave the future. This can be disorienting. The gift of this disorientation is the invitation to reorient, to figure out where we are and choose the way we want to go.

Let’s welcome in the new year by befriending beginnings, in community.

This retreat might be right for you if:

• You want to cultivate creativity, imagination, and play

• You feel exhausted and need some space to yourself to reflect and dream

• You enjoy museums, or

• You do not enjoy museums

Materials you’ll need:

• A few pieces of blank paper (any kind will do: printer paper, fine watercolor paper, a spiral-bound notebook, the back of pharmacy receipts...)

• Writing instrument(s)

• A room of your own, as much as that may be possible

• ✨ Optional: an idea for something that you’re about to begin that makes you feel big feelings

I hope to see you at one of the workshops. This material has been meaningful in my own life, especially in building tolerance for uncertainty and change. As we face wave after wave of personal and collective crises, we need to imagine sustainable ways of resourcing ourselves to act in the world. Embodiment, meaning-making, and togetherness are more important than ever.

Thanks for sticking around with me through the twists and turns of, well, being human. I’m grateful you’re here.

Warmly,

1. No, I am not technically post-PhD yet. The jury is still (literally) out, with my dissertation in hand. Again, this is a story for another newsletter…