ISSUE No. 69 | May 2026
WELCOME
If you’re new to CULTIVARE we welcome you! CULTIVARE is a monthly field guide for life and faith, brought to you by TEND. Each month we explore a specific “field” – a topic or theme through which we seek to cultivate contemplation, engagement, and deeper understanding. Our guiding questions are:
What are you cultivating in your life?
What fruit do you want your life to bear?
Each issue of CULTIVARE is structured into three parts:
Cultivate: Examines a specific “Field” or facet of life and offers questions to unearth and challenge our held perspective; along with concise kernels of truth which we call “Seeds.”
Irrigate: Explores the ways we nurture our understanding, which varies from individual to individual. We offer six means of irrigation: Art, Poetry, Profile, Film, Essay, and Books.
Germinate: Encourages practical ways to engage in becoming more fruitful and free in our lives.
Our name, CULTIVARE, in Spanish means “I will cultivate.” We hope each issue of our field guide will encourage you to do just that – cultivate new thoughts, actions, faith, hope, and fruitful living. We invite you to dig in and DIG DEEP!
FIELD
For we are partners working together for God, and you are God's field.
(I Corinthians 3:9)
Our theme this month is LIMINALITY. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term, liminality is not an abstract or distant idea—it is something most of us encounter at various points in our lives. Whether in our physical, emotional, or spiritual journeys, liminal seasons are both common and deeply formative. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "liminal" means:
-
relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold: barely perceptible, and
-
relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition: in-between, transitional.
The word itself comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.” Liminality, then, is the experience of standing at that threshold—poised between what has been and what is yet to come.
All of us pass through liminal spaces. One of the most familiar examples in our physical lives is adolescence, that in-between season bridging childhood and adulthood. For many, it is marked by awkwardness, uncertainty, longing, and self-discovery. Few would wish to relive it, yet it remains a powerful illustration of what it means to inhabit a space that is neither here nor there. At any age, liminality invites us into similar terrain: we have not fully released the past, yet the future has not fully taken shape. We find ourselves standing at the threshold, holding both memory and possibility.
Liminality also unfolds within our spiritual lives. Some may recognize it in what has been called the “dark night of the soul,” a season of questioning, distance, or deep interior work. Others may experience it as a quiet emptiness, a pause, or a sense of living at the margins. These in-between spaces can feel paradoxical—both energizing and unsettling, inviting and disorienting. They are often necessary, even when they are unclear. To be in a liminal state is to know that returning to what once was is no longer possible, while the path forward has yet to be revealed.
In this issue, we explore liminality through a variety of voices and stories. We feature an essay by Athena Gorospe, Hearing God’s Voice: From Marginality to Liminality, in which she reflects on her experience as a migrant graduate student in the United States and her subsequent return home. We highlight the work of Anselm Kiefer, whose art is deeply shaped by his birth at the threshold between World War II and the Cold War. We revisit the life of Harriet Tubman, who lived courageously within the tension between oppression and freedom, guiding many others toward liberation. And we spotlight the book Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad, a poignant account of living between illness and health, vulnerability and resilience.
Whether you find yourself in a liminal space now, or walking alongside someone who is, we hope this issue offers reassurance and perspective. Liminal seasons, though often challenging, are not without purpose. They can be meaningful, navigable, and even sacred. For spiritual directors, therapists, and pastors, we hope this theme provides a helpful lens through which to support and encourage those in your care. As Vince L. Bantu reminds us, “While it can be disorienting to be placed in the space in between, it can also be a helpful reminder to love that which is the Lord’s rather than the world’s (I John 2:15–17).” (DG)
***
Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.
(Exodus 14: 21-22 NIV)
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the winds of dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. (Psalm 139:8-10 NIV)
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. (Isaiah 43:19 NIV)
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (Matthew 12:40 NIV)
***
TEND CAN HELP! If you would like to take tangible steps working toward a new chapter in your life TEND can help. Explore our offerings by clicking here:
SEEDS
A handful of quotes to contemplate and cultivate into your life
Liminality is essentially and always a middle. It is the moment of in-between-ness where what has been is gone, but what will be has not yet arrived. In Christian spirituality, it is the moment of Holy Saturday, when Christ has died but is not yet risen. There is nothing to be done on Holy Saturday except to learn how to die with Christ, in the hope that one day—but not today—life will be restored by resurrection. (Michelle Trebilcock)
In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors. (William Blake)
We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light. (Hildegard of Bingen)
The experience of liminality is feeling a loss of steady and familiar landmarks, the kind of security that accompanied past structure, even as the future has not yet materialized. With everything in flux, angst becomes the predominant mood. Very often action seems fruitless because some transitions cannot be hurried. One has entered an incubation period in which time shifts. The liminal person does not necessarily know that transformation is occurring at the time it is happening. Does a caterpillar have any idea that metamorphosis is about to take place as it enters the cocoon? (Timothy Carson)
The stories that we tell to make sense of our world and our lives simultaneously open up certain possibilities for action and close others off. They define and limit the options we think exist. The danger is that we become so enamored with our own narrative that we shut ourselves from the narratives of the “other.” What if each of us needs both the presence and the narratives of the other to navigate the ambiguities of liminality? (John Eliastam)
Adoptees exist between families for their entire lives. They are products of legal and biological families, but not fully either. This liminal space is their reality, and from it comes complex identity work. The extent to which adoptees engage with the liminality of their adoption status emerges as a product of individual, contextual, and familial characteristics. (Colleen Warner Colaner)
Cancer is the quintessential liminal experience as it includes all the stages—pre-liminal, liminal, reintegration—and all the classic elements of the liminal journey: end of one way of life, loss of identity and status, bewilderment, confusion, ambiguity, reversal of hierarchy, uncertainty. Patients are between life as they once knew it and an uncertain future.
(Debra Jarvis)
I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
I’ve realized that my identity as a Mexican American, as a philosopher, as a father, as a human being, is defined by in-betweenness, by being always in the middle, or in-between commitments, obligations, identities and expectations. I’ve also learned that my being-torn-between obligations, or worlds, is not a struggle unique to me. Indeed, Mexican and Latinx philosophers have a word for it: nepantla. (Carlos Alberto Sanchez)
The liminal space is where all transformation takes place, if we learn to wait and trust the process. (Richard Rohr)
ART
The Painter of Thresholds:
Anselm Kiefer and the Art of the In-Between
By Greg Ehlert
Anselm Kiefer was born in March 1945, in the final struggles of World War II. His first breath was drawn in ruins while Germany was suspended between the death of one world and the terrifying uncertainty of what would come next. That initial threshold has never left him. In fact, it became his studio.
Liminality—from the Latin limen, threshold—describes the unpredictable space between what was and what has yet to arrive. It is the wilderness after Egypt and before Canaan, the Saturday between the cross and the empty tomb. No artist of the modern era has inhabited or represented that space more faithfully, or more ferociously, than Kiefer.
His work perpetually teeters on the edge between abstraction and shape, using a poetic, psychological style to convey complex social and political issues without ever resolving the tension to either side. His paintings employ a wide range of materials including paint, terra-cotta, fabric, rope, wire, found objects, and metal, mixing the abject and the exalted, imbued with gesture and a sense of metamorphosis. The surfaces themselves enact liminality: neither painting nor sculpture, neither document nor dream.
The materials are not merely formal choices. Natural materials such as straw, earth, and tree roots reference both time and patterns of life, death, and decay. Lead—heavy, dull, alchemically charged, and toxic—appears throughout his work because, as Kiefer has said, it is the only substance heavy enough to carry the weight of the past. To stand before one of his canvases is to sense something geological: the pressure of centuries compressed into a surface that still trembles.
Anselm Kiefer, Lot’s Wife (1989) Cleveland, OH, The Cleveland Museum of Art
Kiefer’s often contentious portrayals of Germany's natural and social landscape include themes such as annihilation and resurrection, disgrace and glory, sin and salvation. These are not opposing categories for Kiefer, rather, they are simultaneous. He refuses a clean resolution, insisting we remain in the uncomfortable middle space where history and hope occupy the same wounded ground. His works are metaphysical allegories that meditate on loss and deliverance, dispossession and homecoming.
Kiefer’s engagement with Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and the poetry of Paul Celan deepens this liminal sensibility. He is drawn to traditions that hold catastrophe and transcendence together without collapsing the tension. He inscribes lines of poetry, quotations, and names in his distinctive handwriting on works that pay tribute to predecessors who shaped our knowledge and understanding of the world as if the canvas itself is a palimpsest, a threshold between the living and the dead.
“I think in pictures,” Kiefer has said. “Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost.”
In between. That is where Kiefer lives, and where his art invites us. Not to the comfort of arrival, but to the formative, terrifying, sacred space of passage where identity dissolves before it can be reborn. As he says, this is where ruins condense into new words and contexts. For communities learning to dwell in threshold seasons rather than flee them, Kiefer is not merely an artist to admire but a teacher, a companion, and a witness.
Anselm Kiefer, “Shevirath Ha Kelim” (2009), Kiefer Pavilion, PLANTA project, Fundació Sorigué, Lleida, Spain. Photo: P A Black © 2018
POETRY
just passing through
By Gordon Ebert
It’s late afternoon, and the
moving sidewalk makes me feel
like a winner, like those dreams
where I can fly, or jump
exceedingly high, until
I wake and I’m dropped
at the back of the line
for overpriced coffee
and a sandwich in plastic
ingested at the gate
just in time
to hear the public confession
of delay, to witness
the public display
of rumpus and fuss, full-fledged
toddlers the lot of us –
oh, if we could for a spell but
cry on mother’s shoulder,
run amok among the seats,
snatch up snacks from the floor,
and roll ‘round on the carpet
where the last patch of sunlight
is just passing through.
PROFILE
Harriet Tubman
By Bonnie Fearer
As we focus on the theme of liminality in this issue, we have chosen to profile Harriet Tubman who is famously known for her rescuing of fellow slaves along the Underground Railroad, a feat that historians have marveled at for almost 200 years. Tubman lived her entire life in the shadow regions of liminality–between bondage and freedom, oppression and opportunity, isolation and community, peril and safety. Even geographically, she lived “in-between.” As she rescued slaves, she lived between forest and swamp, open spaces and thickets, between South and North. Above all, most of her life was lived between the evil of the world and her transcendent faith.
Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 on a plantation in Maryland. For the next twenty- five years, she suffered all the deprivations and abuse common among slaves at the time. One owner, “Miss Susan,” ordered Harriet–exhausted from a full day of brutal labor–to stay up all night and rock the cradle of Susan’s sick and fussy child. Harriet fell asleep and was whipped; she bore the scars on her face and neck for the rest of her life. At another point in her life, she received a traumatic blow to the head with a metal weight–an injury that left her with a lifetime of migraines, seizures, and narcolepsy.
Tubman’s story cannot be told without focusing on the central fact of her life: her faith in God. As she and fellow slaves suffered, she became convinced to her core that God hated slavery even more than she did. This conviction fueled her plans to escape. Her initial journey north was with two of her brothers, who decided mid-journey to turn around and go back. She returned with them, but later escaped on her own in 1849, making it to Philadelphia by traveling at night and following the North Star. Now in new territory, her faith upheld her: “I had crossed the line. I was free…I said to the Lord, I’m going to hold steady on to you, and I know you’ll see me through.”
Her first passage to freedom–dangerous, disorienting, identity-dissolving–did not end when she reached Philadelphia. She famously said she felt no joy at her arrival, only a profound loneliness: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person." She had crossed the threshold but had not yet arrived at herself or her purpose. As she worked in hotels in Philadelphia, she felt the insistent voice of God telling her to go back and rescue others, a call she resisted at first. When the call persisted, she finally relented and headed back to the South, back through swamp and forest, open land and danger.
During the ten years before the start of the Civil War, Tubman made more than thirteen harrowing trips back through the Underground Railroad, rescuing at least seventy enslaved people, including her family members. Her missions were strategically planned, always traveling at night, avoiding main roads, and changing routes constantly to avoid being recognized. A reward of $12,000 was offered for her capture, a staggering sum of $500k today. She carried a pistol, partly for protection, but partly to threaten those under her leadership if they waffled and tried to head back. During the Civil war, she joined the Union Army first as a nurse, then as a scout. She used her intimate knowledge of the southern terrain to lead military operations that freed over 700 slaves.
It is hard for us to grasp the danger she undertook with each journey. Aiding in the escape of a slave was considered the ultimate crime. One might compare the peril to those who harbored Jews during the Holocaust, though Tubman’s status as an escaped slave herself made this risk even greater. Her potential capture guaranteed a grim outcome, because it would not only mean death, but certain torture beforehand. And yet, Tubman courageously kept returning and gathering more slaves for the journey to freedom. Where did her confidence come from? Tubman said on many occasions that God not only called her to this work, but gave her specific instructions for each journey, alerting her to dangers and guiding her with last-minute route changes. Because of her faith, courage, and leadership, Harriet was famously referred to as the “Moses” of her people. She was their guide through liminal spaces. What is remarkable is what she did with that liminal knowledge. Rather than settling into her new environment, she went back multiple times to lead others through the same threshold space she had learned to navigate. Her genius was that she never forgot the liminal wilderness. She became its most skilled guide precisely because she had been fully lost in it.
For Cultivare, Tubman's story raises profound questions: How acutely can we attend to God’s voice in our lives such that we know His guidance and confidence-inspiring presence when we are called to unfamiliar liminal spaces? And importantly, what if the liminality of the wilderness is not merely something to survive, but something to befriend for the good of others? Harriet Tubman serves as a most worthy example.
FILM
Each month we recommend films focused on our theme
Feature Film
Minari
(2020)
An award-winning film, Minari is about a family that immigrates from South Korea to rural Arkansas in the early 1980s. The family is in a state of both transition and uncertainty as they attempt to support themselves with their farm work and protect their son who has a heart condition. The film draws us into the experiences of minorities living on the margins of American society. But its deeper value is in showing how the Yi family's circumstances are not just moments of struggle, hard work, or persistence. They are opportunities for growth. Instead of a happy ending, Minari gives us something more complex and more true to life: a lens on the good things that happen during and because of periods of liminality. Available on various streaming services.
Documentary
Russ Taff: I Still Believe
(2018)
This gripping documentary chronicles musician Russ Taff’s multi- GRAMMY® and Dove Award-winning liminal life—a life where he experienced wide musical success and adoration yet all the while battled alcoholism and childhood trauma privately. Re-live Taff’s iconic career, and the childhood trauma he suffered at the hands of an alcoholic father and abusive mother. Featuring interviews with Amy Grant, Bill Gaither, Michael W Smith, Mark Lowry, Chonda Pierce, as well as Russ and Tori Taff. Written and Directed by Rick Altizer. 104 minutes in length. Available to watch for free on YouTube.
Short Films
The House of Small Cubes
(Le Maison en Petits Cubes)
(12 minutes)
This Japanese animated short won the Academy Award and is one of the most purely liminal films ever made in any format. An old man must keep building his house higher as the waters rise around him and periodically dives down through the flooded floors of his past life to retrieve things he has lost. It is a meditation on memory, time, grief, and the threshold between past and present selves. Wordless and extraordinarily moving.
Liminal:
How Wild Swimming Helped with Mental Illness
(9 minutes)
Liminal is a prize-winning short film that explores the transformative power of wild swimming for mental health—where cold water meets clarity, and the in-between spaces become places of healing. Produced by PH Balance, Liminal follows adventurer Jude Palmer as she opens up about her own experiences of illness, and how wild swimming in rivers, lakes and oceans became a vital part of her journey. What begins as a personal coping mechanism evolves into a powerful tool—not only for her own wellbeing but for the many others she now supports in discovering the mental and emotional benefits of nature and open water.
Ted Talk
Embracing Detours:
Getting Lost on the Way to the Future
by Timothy Carson
(9 minutes)
Not only do we find rich surprises when we cross critical thresholds into liminal transitions, but we are wired to make the trip. Those who are in earnest in finding new solutions for the future dare to go where detours take us: to the edges, borders, and boundaries where so many of the most profound discoveries are made. Dr. Timothy Carson teaches liminal studies in the Honors College of the University of Missouri, is the author/editor of four books on the subject, and is the curator of www.TheLiminalityProject.org.
ESSAY
Hearing God’s Voice:
From Marginality to Liminality
By Athena Gorospe
In this article from Scholar Leaders, author Athene Gorospe writes of her experience as a temporary migrant to the United States to attend graduate school and then migrating back to her home country of the Philippines. She earned her PhD from Fuller Theological Seminary where her dissertation focused on ethnic identity. In this article she reflects:
Returning home from my Ph.D. studies overseas, I had to go through such a liminal experience. Return migration requires a form of dying to some aspect of one’s old self, whether this was the self that existed prior to migration, or the self that has been formed by migration. “You can definitely go home again,” says Eula Grant, an African American who returned to the South after migrating to the North for many years. “You can go home. But you can’t start from where you left. To fit in, you have to create another place in that place you left behind” (quote from Carol Stack, Call to Home, 1996).
The challenge for us is not to be stuck with being marginal. In our transition times, let us move from marginality to liminality. This means that we see this transition period as a place of potentiality, waiting patiently as God transforms us and leads us into new possibilities.
Read the entire article here of a migrant’s experience of liminality here: View Now
BOOKS
Each month we recommend a book (or two) focused on our theme
NON-FICTION
Between Two Kingdoms
by Suleika Jouad
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.
When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.
How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
FICTION
Chasing Francis
by Ian Morgan Cron
Pastor Chase Falson lost his faith in God, the Bible, evangelical Christianity, and his super-sized megachurch. When he fell apart, the church elders told him to go away—as far away as possible. Broken, Chase crossed the Atlantic to Italy to visit his uncle, a Franciscan priest. There, he was introduced to the revolutionary teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi and found an old, but new way of following Jesus that heals and inspires.
Chase Falson's spiritual discontent mirrors the feelings of a growing number of Christians who walk out of church asking, Is this all there is? This book is perfect for believers who are:
-
Weary of celebrity pastors and empty calorie teaching
-
Disappointed by worship services where the emphasis is more on Lights, Camera, Action than on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
-
Tired of the deepest questions of life remaining unaddressed and unanswered
-
Remain hopeful and seek to strengthen their faith
Chasing Francis is a hopeful and moving story with profound implications for those who yearn for a more vital relationship with God and the world.
CHILDREN’S
The Phantom Toll Booth
by Norton Juster
With almost 5 million copies sold 60 years after its original publication, generations of readers have now journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer’s splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster’s offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever.
For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason. Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams!
DIG DEEPER
Practical suggestions to help you go deeper into our theme
1. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Devote some time and thought to these reflective questions on our theme:
a. How can I make myself “at home” in the journey, rather than rushing for certainty?
b. How can I sit with the paradoxical tension of being “betwixt and between”?
c. What is my greatest fear living in liminal space?
d. What qualities of presence (e.g., vulnerability, patience) am I committed to cultivating?
e. How can I use this time for reflection and intentional transformation?
f. What potential for transformation is hidden in this discomfort?
g. What decisions would benefit from discernment rather than immediate action?
2. LIMINALITY AS AN INCUBATOR FOR GROWTH
In this article from Fuller Studio, Professor Jose Abraham writes of living in liminal space during the Covid-19 pandemic. He draws from his life experience with liminality as an Indian man moving to different parts of India and then to Canada and most recently the US. He encourages us to see liminal space as an opportunity for growth, change, and hope.
3. SONG – GABRIEL’S OBOE
Composer Ennio Morricone wrote the soundtrack for the 1986 feature film The Mission. The central theme to the soundtrack is the song Gabriel’s Oboe which is featured throughout the film. The soundtrack for the film was well received by critics and audiences alike, as was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and earned Morricone the Golden Globe for Best Original Score. In the film, Gabriel’s Oboe is most prominently used when the protagonist, the Jesuit Father Gabriel, walks up to a waterfall and starts playing his oboe, aiming to befriend the natives with his music so he can carry his missionary work in the New World. The Guarani tribesmen, who have been stalking him from a distance, approach Gabriel for the first time, puzzled by the sounds of the unknown instrument. We believe it is a powerful song of liminality and feature this version played soulfully by YoYo Ma.
4. LIMINAL SPACE: A NARRATIVE SPIRITUALITY OF THE BIBLE
“Liminal space is a place in-between what was and what will be. It is crucial for ongoing Christian formation. However, the Evangelical Church currently has no space for supporting those in liminality. Evangelical theology and practice actively discourage those in liminal space. As a result, Christian maturity is frustrated. Future leaders and contemplatives are endangered. This dissertation explores how the Evangelical Church could acknowledge, support, and educate those in liminal spaces.” For those interested in a deep dive into the Spirituality of Liminality we encourage you to read Thomas J. Rundel’s thought-provoking dissertation.
5. PRAYER & LIMINALITY
Swiss physician and author Paul Tournier argues that a liminal space is “a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, of extraordinary aliveness.” Each of his descriptors can be turned into a prayer:
“Please, mighty God, keep me safe in my feelings of danger.”
“Jesus, you walk with us every day. Help us to expect to see you at work.”
“Help us to trust you in our uncertainty.”
“This exciting transitional time makes me feel fresh and alive. Help me to perceive that aliveness as a gift from you. Help me to serve you with this energy I'm feeling.”
May you be given the words to articulate where you find yourself in this season and trust God’s presence, power, provision, and peace for what’s beyond the threshold.
ROOTED
But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.
(Jeremiah 17:7-8 NIV)
POLLINATE
CULTIVARE is a ministry of TEND and is offered free to our subscribers. We are grateful to our donors who help underwrite our costs. If you would like to support the ongoing work of CULTIVARE, please consider us in your giving. All financial contributions to TEND
(a 501c3 ministry) for CULTIVARE are tax-deductible.
Subscribe to CULTIVARE for free!
FIELD NOTES
Images used in order of appearance:
1. FIELD: Kris Martin, Altar, 2014.
2. SEEDS: Uncredited stock photo, Monarch Caterpillar Cocoon.
3. ART: Photo by Sylvain Heraud, Ansel Kiefer, Smithsonian Magazine, 2022.
4. POETRY: Photo by Farmatin, Dulles International Airport, Wikipedia Commons, 2022, Washington DC.
5. PROFILE: Photo of Harriet Tubman, Photographer Unknown, 1871, Women’s Voice Now.
6. FILM: Antony Gormley, Liminal Field. Installation at Museum San, Wonju, South Korea, 2025.
7. ESSAY: David Barnes, Barbizon Skatepark, 2025.
8. BOOKS: Karl Sas, Fog in the City. https://www.artlimited.net/1058575/art/image-fog-in-the-city/en/12033556
9. DIG DEEPER: Greg King, Everywhere and Nowhere, https://www.gregking.space/
10. ROOTED: Cornelia Konrads, Passage, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire in France, 2015.
TEAM CULTIVARE: Duane Grobman (Editor), Greg Ehlert, Bonnie Fearer, Lisa Hertzog, Shinook Kang, Elizabeth Khorey, Olivia Mather, Andrew Massey, Rita McIntosh, Jason Pearson (Design: Pearpod.com)
WE'RE LISTENING:
We welcome hearing your thoughts on this issue
and suggestions for future issues.
Email us at: info@tendwell.org
