The Ordinary Liminalities explores the quiet spaces we rarely notice—the pause between thought and speech, the moment before leaving, the overlooked corners of daily life. These intimate meditations emerge from a life marked by psycho-emotional exclusion, where subtle griefs and fractured identity create a perpetual sense of multiplicity, creative friction, and quiet resistance.

Through half-remembered truths and the accumulation of small displacements, these stories trace the contours of what it means to exist between worlds—neither fully belonging nor entirely estranged. They reveal how the profound lives within the mundane, offering quiet revelations about the human condition that may illuminate not just one narrator's experience, but perhaps something essential about what it means to be human.

Part essay, part diary. These are my personal reflections on contemporary life.

Author’s Note:

I write from a liminal space I call The In-between—a space I have inhabited since birth. Life in this liminality gives me a mindset and perspective of cultural multiplicity and dispossession, systemic alienation, and civilizational disenfranchisement. This endless friction motivates and empowers me to write my truth despite the uncertainty, arrogance, ignorance, and cruelty of the human world. 

—Dean Bowman
Saturday, 31 May 2025

The Ordinary Liminalities

Table of Contents

Contents are in descending order.
Chapter 6: The Black Square
Our Presence is Optional | From The Ordinary Liminalities
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman
Chapter 5: Corporate Inheritance
And the Fiction of Possession | From The Ordinary Liminalities
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman
Chapter 4: The Vanishing Mark
On the Fading of Small Traces | From The Ordinary Liminalities
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman
Chapter 3: The Reluctant Drawer
Knowing and Unknowing | From The Ordinary Liminalities
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman
Chapter 2: The Flickering Light
On the Enduring Unnoticed | From The Ordinary Liminalities
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman
Chapter 1: The Disappearing Spoon
And Other Small Disappearances | From The Ordinary Liminalities
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman
Introduction: The Ordinary Liminalities
About Nothing in Particular (and Everything In-Between)
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman

Category

The Ordinary Liminalities | Short Literary Reflections by Dean Bowman
Quiet reflections about nothing in particular, and everything in-between.
Silence & SubstanceDean Bowman

The Ordinary Liminalities. Copyright © 2025 Dean Bowman. All rights reserved.