I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown. One of my great pleasures as a kid was coming home from school.

One of my great pleasures as a kid was coming home from school and entering the vestibule,

where I dropped my backpack, hung my coat on a rack, then went inside to lay on a sofa beneath my family's grandfather clock

and take a nap before homework.

I watched the clock's pendulum take away the school days bustle. Growing up, that daily ritual of listening

and being lulled into sleep made me keenly aware of thresholds.

The foyer served as a portal into the quiet of the house, and the clock drifted me into the intricacies of time, or rather timelessness.

I continue to take pleasure and find intrigue when I conceptually and physically encounter liminal spaces.

The brain of John Malkovich in the movie Being John Malkovich.

Dante and Virgil entering the circles of the underworld,

the wardrobe and Narnia or the phantom toe booth,

the edge of a pool where I stood thinking about the middle passage, a liminal space if ever there was one.

I even hear thresholds, as when a jazz quartet plays a suspended moment of held notes before

the soloist improvises away from the opening melody and into a freedom of sound.

This is where realms of existence are palpably felt, where physical and spiritual worlds meet.

Recently, upon landing in Ireland, I took a spontaneous drive to New Grange, a 5,000-year-old tomb of mysterious power.

The Celts referred to such thresholds as thin places.

The Bakango people call it the Kalunga line,

a watery boundary between the spiritual and the living.

Thresholds are fundamentally lyrical.

Important transitions in my life prove as much.

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