BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… SUNSET DEATH. I was up early in the light rain, walking the dogs on the forest trail before getting to my summer work. There had been no rain on the radar or forecast but the showers came down anyway, even as an early sun peeked through the bright grays of the East. No coffee yet. No time for that. The dogs were three together, straining against their leads. We were down near the old pond and I was watching the trail’s grassy edges, leery of copperheads yet still blinking back sleep. The dogs pulled forward, I stepped forward, again, then again, then… between the three dogs I saw the foot-long copperhead, silent in the center of the trail.
My dogs are not snake dogs. They waggled past, not even seeing the venomous snake between them. I did some sort of silent high jump before realizing I had even done so, landing beyond the copperhead who remained motionless, looking perhaps confused at the sudden crowd of dog and heavy boot and tall human that had materialized over him. No harm done, dogs were unaware of the danger. The snake presumably slithered into the grass after we passed. If anyone sees the parts of my soul which detached due to the experience, please let me know. I have not yet recovered.
The year is halfway over, the days subtly shortening, nights slowly lengthening. We have plenty of summer left but these are the dog days indeed, a time when the wine-dark seas were said to boil, and the dogs go mad. It’s also the time for the copperheads to be all-too active in the early morning and the late evening… liminal spaces all.
“Liminal” is just a fancy word for threshold, the in-between space between rooms, and the in-between space between other things too. Some say there’s extra magic in the liminal, the spell having more power when cast in between one place and another. Perhaps without realizing it, the liminal whispers for our attention.
Authority figures like simple realities in which the answers have been previously submitted. Objective data all, just the facts beneath the artificial, florescent light of day, walls painted in subdued but equally objective colors. Royal blue, perhaps, or mauve. The artificial constructs of modern life cast a spell of their own, one that drains the mysterious and enchanted from the day-to-day. Hard to cause a ruckus that way. We are too banal, too domesticated by our surroundings to rebel.
Art might surround us but the deep purposes, the enchantment of the soul, is relegated to the corner, called extracurricular, degraded, downplayed, genuinely marginalized. Such art stays appropriate, safe, and safely away from impacting the everyday. Simultaneously, art is stripped of purpose, post-modernized into blandness, with prizes given simply for doing, not thinking, not purposing, not driving art forward to truly say something, not just flinging color toward paper.
Wheel in time and space, the Ozarks might be littered with modernity but something ancient, resonating, still remains. Look at the big map and the Ozarks Plateau is a strange — and strangely shaped — wheel connecting North America’s north and south, east and west. Not surprisingly, the teeming life here reflects the wheel. The grass prairies, the southwestern glades, the dark coves of the eastern mountains, here all converge, as do the whitetail deer and the red-tail hawks, the scorpions and tarantulas, and a bevy of venomous snakes — the timber rattler, the copperhead, the cottonmouth. Crossroads in time and space.
The writers are sharing, quietly, fitfully, gratefully, on Friday night at Vintage Paris Coffee during Art Walk Market. We have begun a Writers’ Round, a small, organic opportunity to bring writers from the shadows. In my turn, I also share but am uncharacteristically shy. My public persona demands extroversion and so that’s exactly what I have given for some eight years when I turned my talents toward social media and video.
“Interviews and videos are so natural for you,” people sometimes say. It isn’t true, or at least wasn’t true. I am, weirdly, a very shy person. But I can put myself into the public eye in order to showcase, to advocate, others for whom I care. I’m still shy about my own work. It’s an uncomfortable place of vulnerability. And vulnerability leads to death. “Never show the soft underbelly, never let them see you cry.” But writing — good writing — is the opposite. Truth is unveiled in the words, words then spoken at Writers’ Round.
Nearly every shared piece on Friday night involved death. By the third writer, we were quietly laughing, even amid tears. “I blame it on the Capricorn moon last Wednesday,” I said, and mostly meant it. The moon in all its magic exerts real power. It’s arrogant to believe we are somehow exempt from the tides of time and space.
Liminal space, like magic, makes us uncomfortable. In the threshold, in the twilight, at the crossroads as the clock ticks toward midnight — these are the spaces in the dark we’d rather not know. It is at the moment between sleep and wakefulness when the ghosts visit. It is the moment of sunrise when the muses inspire. The moment at sunset when the green flash occurs. Across lore and time and history, the in-between space gives both life and death, depending sometimes too precipitously upon the one giving and the one taking.
We have become an arrogant people, preaching loudly from behind pulpits of our own making, shouting, rarely listening, often ready for ready answers that often only harm, inflating our own egos, helping no one. We are an ill-disciplined people as well, unwilling to humble ourselves before God. Even now, even in the space between light and dark, between the sacred and the profane, even at the crossroads at midnight, we fool ourselves if we think we are too good for magic. Especially now, at sunset death.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
