We are standing at the largest threshold any of us will feel in a lifetime,

Gifts and Guidance for crossing unmapped territory ♥️

Jul 14, 2026

Staring out from the Threshold of Kes Tor on Dartmoor , Devon.

“To experience a crisis is to inhabit a world that is temporarily up for grabs”

These words from William Davies, Author of This is Not Normal : The Collapse of Liberal Britain, start us off this week. As today we have a sublime contribution from Angell Deer as we continue our quest into being Threshold Guides.

His writing on the Rituals and Rebellion publication holds me in awe at the beauty of how he weaves words. Often creating a resonance and deepening of my own understandings ; as if a mirror is being shone into my known and unknown places.

Angell is also prolific with his posts and notes often going viral, so I am not alone in this appreciation of what he is offering. He is also exceedingly generous and was one of the first to respond to my two questions …

What does it mean to be a Threshold Guide ?

What does it take to be a Threshold Guide ?

Given what Angell and his wife Rose have currently going on in their lives this is particularly impressive and generous. The following is the gift Angell sent and I am deeply grateful for knowing him ♥️

“Thank you for thinking of me for this. It’s a question I’ve been living inside for so long I almost forgot it was a question. And I’ll be honest, it’s a question I’m standing inside right now, in a way I wasn’t a few months ago.

My wife Rose is moving through cancer care, and the days ask for me at home, at the hearth, in the waiting rooms. Which is maybe the truest place to answer you from. Because a threshold isn’t a theory for us right now. It’s the kitchen. It’s the 3am. It’s the doorway we’re living in.

Here’s what comes up when you ask what it means to be a Threshold Guide in these times.

A threshold is the doorway between one world and another, and we are standing in the largest one most of us will feel in a lifetime. The old world, the one built on extraction and speed and the lie that we are separate from the living Earth, that world is dying. Not as metaphor. The empire is coming apart, and most people feel it in the body before they can name it. The dread. The grief with no obvious cause. The sense that the ground they were promised was solid has started to move.

A Threshold Guide, to me, is simply someone willing to stand in that doorway and not run. Someone who can say, you are not crazy, the ground really is moving, and I will stay here with you while it does. That’s most of the work. Staying. I’m learning it again at Rose’s side, where there is nothing to fix and everything to be present for.

What it takes is harder to say, because so much of it can’t be taught.

You have to have crossed one yourself. You cannot guide a descent you’ve refused to make. So much of what passes for guidance now is people standing safely on the near shore, pointing across, having never gone into their own dark. The ones who can really hold a threshold are the ones who went down, who lost the map and survived the losing. The wound is the doorway. The genius hides there, as Michael Meade keeps reminding us.

And once you’ve been down, the strange skill is staying useful while lost. The guide doesn’t hold the map. There isn’t one for what’s coming, for the world or for a single frightened person in a clinic chair. Anyone selling you a map is selling you a fantasy. The real capacity is to stay grounded inside the not-knowing. To be steady in the dark, not because you know the way out, but because you’ve made some peace with the dark itself.

And the last thing, the one I’d want said out loud, is that we never do it alone. A Threshold Guide is never the only one in the room. The Ancestors are there. The land is there. The Forest, the River, the Deer at the doorway, the dream that comes the night before someone breaks open. We are not the source of the medicine. We are just the ones with a body in the room, paying attention, translating. The more-than-human world has been guiding crossings since long before there were words for it. The guide’s humility is remembering that, and leaning on it, especially now, when I need that help as much as anyone I’ve ever sat with.

So maybe that’s the whole of it. Be initiated. Learn to stay. Surrender the map. And never forget you have help on the other side of the veil.

Avec tout mon cœur, Angell 🦌🔥

After reading this I am sure you will join me in sending prayers and blessings to Angell and Rose for safe passage through their healing journey.

Thank you Angell and everyone who is here, please leave a comment and a ♥️ as these and shares are energies winging out into the cosmos. Do subscribe to Angell Deer as you already know you will not be disappointed.

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