Living Between Worlds: The Experience of a Hinge Dweller

Are you a hinge dweller?

This is a story for those who have ever felt torn between duty and desire, between the practical world of responsibility and the deep longing for something more.

If you’ve ever felt caught between who you are and who you must be - between the sacred call of your soul and the unrelenting needs of your reality - I wrote this for you.

To dwell in the hinge is to live at the veil of two worlds. It is to know both the wild darkness of longing and the steady flow of the hearth fire. For me, these worlds are represented by the spiritual realm; the life of the initiate, the seeker, the dreamer - and the physical realm- the undeniable weight of responsibilities, family, marriage, and survival. The challenge lies in navigating both, for sometimes I long to stay in one and forget the other, regardless of which it is. The trick, then, is to learn to dance with both.

There was a time when I stood at a point of no return. My kids were just 2, 4, and 5 when I made the difficult choice to leave my marriage. I had been drowning in misery, courting suicide thoughts, trying to mother three little ones while suffocating inside a home that no longer felt safe. Their father, someone I had once loved, had become a stranger to me - a man whose words cut more than they healed, whose absence within the relationship was louder than his presence. His battles were his own, but they became mine too, and if I had stayed, they would have become my kids’ inheritance.

I had to make a choice: Stay and wither, teaching my daughter that love was endurance and my sons that love was detachment, or leave and carve out a different path, one with no guarantees but at least with the possibility of something better. I hated having to choose. It was no victory; more a necessary severing. But I made the choice, and life unfolded accordingly.

The divorce process was your typical, that is to say brutal, nearly-2-year-long ordeal. In the end, the weight of our kids’ childhood rested almost entirely on me. I worked, I sacrificed, I made promises, kept as many as I could. When they were 12, 14, and 15 I took a job in California - 7 states away - that would set me on a stronger financial path. I uprooted our lives, promising them I’d pay for their college tuition if we took the leap together. I held up my end of the deal. Today, they are 20, 21 and 23. One has graduated and is working, the second is about to graduate from UCLA, and the youngest is halfway through. The first 2 have no college debt, and I’ll make sure the third doesn’t either.

I lived for them. I didn’t always have time to long for the wildness of nights out, but something in me was still missing. Who am I beyond the sacrifices? What is my role once they no longer need me in the same way?

Have you heard the tale of The Selkie Wife?

In the old Celtic story, a lonely fisherman is enchanted by a group of Selkies - mystical seals who can shed their skin and become human women - and decides to rob one of their skin so he can take her home and marry her, forcing her to remain in human form.

She bears him several children, but in her heart, she is never truly his - she belongs to the sea. During the full moon her children would watch her, horrified, as she scratched herself raw while she longingly looked out their hut’s window into the sea. One day one of her kids finds her skin, which the fisherman had hidden away, and brings it to his mother. The Selkie loved her children, but the call of the wild was too loud. With her seal skin back on, she returns to the water abandoning her brood for good.

But once she was on the outside, fully inhabiting her wildness, she could be seen looking into the hut’s window at the hearth - with the same longing. As storyteller Martin Shaw recounts this story, he sees the Selkie wondering if her story could have had a different ending - did she have to choose? The fisherman, unbeknownst to her, wonders too, what he could have done differently. Did he have to keep her prisoner to keep her? Could things have turned out some other way?

Not Either/Or, But Yes/And: The Hinge Dweller’s Truth

The hinge is not simply the space between two realities - it is what allows movement between them. It holds the door, allowing it to swing open or closed. To be the place where the wisdom of the wild informs the hearth fire of home, and where the hearth informs the adventure of the wild. The predictable, steady coalesces with the uncharted, unknown.

The task of the mystic, mother, storyteller, seeker, is not to be torn in two, but to dwell in the hinge itself - to go out into the wild unknown and gather experiences, learn to embody our truth, but to also come back to the wisdom of the village, what has come before. It is in the merging of the worlds where our own voice comes alive. Our purpose revealed.

I am not just one or the other. Neither are you. We don’t have to choose. In fact, we must not choose. Go out and live the wild unknown, then come back and tell us all about it.

If I have learned anything, it is that neither world is enough on its own. The seal woman lost herself when she was forced to stay at the hearth, but in the sea, she was left to wonder, too.

The real task is integration - not escape.

To those who also live between worlds - who hear the call of the deep and the call of home - I ask you:

How do you bring what you know into the life you live?

How do you honor both the calling of your soul and the love that grounds you?

How do you become the hinge, not just someone stuck between?