The Crossing Point

Reflections on Thresholds, Ruptures, and the Work of Reorientation

Some years ago I read Centering, a book by ceramicist and author M. C. Richards. What’s stayed with me most is the idea of the “crossing point.” Richards was taken with the term when she first encountered it and defines it as:

“When seeds sprout… the root goes down and the seedling leaves go up… there is a layer of cells, sometimes only a cell wide, where this differentiation takes place. It is called the crossing point. It is the place where both directions coexist.”

From there, she draws a parallel with the potter’s wheel—that centrifugal center where form is both held and made. She invites us to feel how the clay responds from the inside out, not from external imposition. The potter, like the plant, works in relationship with the tensions at the crossing—pressing down and lifting up, creating stability and emergence.

For years, I’ve been drawing upon this image too when teaching how to find a posture for violin playing: our center is found where the spine is thickest—between the belly button and the back. From here, the body extends both downward and upward—rooting through the legs, reaching through the arms—forming a geometry of grounded uplift. That center is our crossing point, that point of precise tension where downward and upward motion are not opposites but co-arising gestures.

This is a place of dynamic stillness, like the belly of a wave before it crests, or the inhalation pause before exhale. Balanced. Dynamic. Symmetric.

I took my preoccupation with me into a recent trip to Connecticut and New York. This beautiful idea had me wondering: what might it mean to carry this orientation further?

On a personal level, the trip was wonderful: family, friends, art, gardens, great food, great conversation. I came home all filled up with love, attention, and inspiration.

But on the societal level, I found it impossible to tune out the other frequencies. As I took in the world around me, the idea of the crossing point quickly morphed into thresholds of rupture: new levels of sustained heat and humidity. Flash flood warnings and states of emergency declared. ICE agents trolling a wholesale plant nursery for people to deport. Unhealthy air due to wildfire smoke.

And then I listened to a podcast interview between Planet Critical’s Rachel Donald and activist Rowan Tilly that haunts me still. Tilly explains that in her lifetime of non-violent protest and activism, there has always been risk and confrontation. But what you need for non-violent protest to work is at least the pretense of democracy. Non-violent protest requires a society to at least imagine that it values decency and humanity.

This is why the lunch counter protests worked during the Civil Rights movement—there was horrible violence, but it wasn’t on the part of the protestors. The violence of the response to their simple act of sitting was unbearable to witness—so at odds with the myth of who we believed ourselves to be that it forced a collective reckoning.

And now the mask of democracy, along with its claimed values, has slipped off, and we’re in a terrain of post-pretense.
The crossing point here isn’t a place of balance—it’s a rupture.
A death knell for a particular kind of civic illusion.

What now as we slide into this new era where laws and the idea of decency no longer hold any protection against violence and injustice?

I’m actively resisting despair as I long for spaces, postures, and metaphors that help us feel our way into right relation amidst chaos.
I suspect I’m not alone.

What questions are we asking ourselves in this terrain beyond pretense?

I know I’m asking myself what I’m willing to do in the face of injustice, and hoping that fear will not be the final arbiter on that answer¹. Alongside that, I sense that the steadier I can root in that center, the more capacity I’ll have to meet the risks ahead, one step at a time.

Maybe our societal rupture is a crossing point of sorts—a point between illusion and sobriety?

The crossing point is not a static place. We know this.

What if it is a spot of rupture and realignment?
What if it is a place where grief meets grace, structure meets improvisation, humility meets emergence—and, yes, courage gains traction?

We’re all somewhere near a crossing point now—whether personal, political, planetary.
May we learn to hold the tension without collapse.
May we meet the rupture with rooted grace.

1. A nod to the writer with the pen name Tom Joad for naming the caution against fear as the final arbiter of courage in a comment exchange on Substack.