I am thinking of the world threshold. To thresh means to separate the grain from the plant with a circular movement or by tossing it up and down in a basket.

My friend Ray tells me it meant to take the chaff, the light part of a plant that is not nourishing, and place it on the mud or dirt floor of a house. So threshold marks a portal — it can be a piece of stone or wood that keeps the chaff from being tracked outside.

A threshold is the amount of intensity we must create for something to begin. It is a pivot point. It is dawn. It is where transformation happens.

On Saturday, January 21st, 2017, the threshold was the cold pavement in front of City Hall in downtown Santa Cruz, California. We are gathering for a march organized and choreographed by women. The words going through my head are those of Winston Churchill, “When you are going through hell, keep going.” Those were an inspiration in World War II to the citizens of London.

My legs and my feet are cold and cramped. Standing here, for what seemed like hours, I feel the building impatience of my friends, family, neighbors. The body language says it all — the fidgeting, zigzagging, texting, sighing, pacing seem to go on for an eternity. My eyes are tired of searching for the signs to move vertically in the hands of those in front of us, indicating that we, the crowd, will march as one.

We are at the threshold. It feels incredibly difficult. Our torsos bend forward, we are standing interminably on the threshold, that cement pavement, moving our weight from one foot to another. The human need is shifting us with the urge to do anything other than acknowledge the agony of where we stand. This portal is where we hover, wait, teeter, about to emerge into the vast sea of motion, of the unknown. At this moment, the urge to control, to organize, to dominate is of no use.

For on the other side of the threshold, we will move together. And it comes to me that the place where I can contribute will be here. The place where I can stand is here. My home at the threshold. I worry more about what will happen when I am held back like this, held in place by my own personal issues.

Once the signs sway from side to side as well as up and down, I know I will cross over one dimension of the threshold. I am relaxed and my steps lengthen fluidly— I become a part of something greater than myself.

So the threshold I face daily is this — the terror of ego death, the letting go of any certainty of authority. I sense the disintegration of my lesser self. Yet there is momentum. These times require this. As our ancestors did so long ago, we winnow out that which is no longer needed and retain that which is true and significant. We waste nothing.

This is what is needed to give birth to a movement. To step over the threshold alone, and together, dance and sing, marching despair into resistance.