Common Good Podcast x The Liminal Space Episode 1: Welcome to the Liminal Space with Tristan and Rashid

What happens when imagination meets reality? In this pilot episode, we kick off a special miniseries in collaboration with The Liminal Space Podcast, bringing voices from Cape Town, South Africa to the Common Good conversation. Hosts Tristan Pringle and Rashid Adams introduce themselves, share what drew them to the idea of liminality, and explore the stories that ground them right now, from earth as a shared garden to the liberating power of intuition. The episode closes with a collectively written poem on imagination, storytelling, and the search for glimpses of a better world.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Over seven episodes, this miniseries brings a Global South perspective to the Common Good Podcast’s core themes: the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation, and the structure of belonging. Through conversations with guests in Cape Town, from yoga practitioners in Khayelitsha to musicians, educators, and community organisers, we explore what it looks like to rebuild belonging in the wake of extraction and inherited inequality.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Tristan Pringle is a life and executive coach, facilitator, and poet based in Cape Town. He works across faith-based, corporate, and grassroots organisations to hold space for dreams of a better world, and to make them real.

Rashid Adams is a musician, songwriter, music producer, and researcher based in Cape Town. His academic work explores how indigenous music-making within decolonial Christian frameworks functions as a form of sacred resistance.

CREDITS

 | Produced by | Rashid Adams
 | Music by | Arkenstone
 | A collaboration between | Common Good Podcast & The Liminal Space Podcast

LINKS

| Podcast | linktr.ee/theliminalspacepod
| Substack | theliminalspacepodcast.substack.com
| Instagram | @theliminalspacepod

Transcript

Introduction

Joey: Welcome to the special collaboration between the Common Good Podcast and the Liminal Space Podcast. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to have our friends from South Africa share a few stories from their neck of the woods. We’d like to introduce you to Tristan Pringle and Rashid Adams, who host the Liminal Space Podcast. Their podcast explores themes like identity, justice, belonging, and the power of storytelling. We wanted to partner on this miniseries because expanding the Common Good conversation means listening beyond our own context, especially to voices from the Global South. This series is an invitation to widen our imagination and learn from stories shaped by different histories, struggles, and hopes. Across these episodes, we’ll explore what it means to live in liminal spaces, places where beauty and injustice, crisis and possibility coexist. From a city shaped by spatial apartheid to community spaces built on dignity and belonging, these conversations ask, what would it look like to eliminate economic isolation? What if rest is revolutionary? What if imagination is not escapism, but a form of embodied hope? This is not about promotion. It’s about illumination, about learning how shared stories, shared resources, and shared humanity can reshape the way we belong to one another. We’re grateful you’re here. Let’s begin.

Who We Are

Tristan: Thanks, Joey, and thank you to the Common Good Collective for having us. That was a great introduction. And we are sending our greetings and love from Cape Town, South Africa, which is apparently the southwestern-most tip of the continent of Africa. And this is an exciting opportunity for us to collaborate. So this is the voice of Tristan, and I’m here with…

Rashid: Rashid. Hi, everyone.

Tristan: And together we host a podcast called The Liminal Space Podcast. But we thought we’d introduce ourselves first so you get an idea of who we are. So, Rashid, who are you?

Rashid: My name is Rashid, and I’m primarily a human who’s living amongst other humans on this planet. I’m grateful to be blessed to come from a lineage of people with quite different ethnicities and belief systems. And I guess as I’ve gotten older, they affect in a positive way the way I position myself in my own context here in Cape Town and also in the world. It’s my great privilege to be a husband and a father to a sweet doggie. We don’t have human children just yet. Maybe at some point. God willing, we’ll see.

Rashid: And I also consider myself to be a creative person, although at 34 years old, I still can’t come to call myself an artist or a creative. I don’t know. I just… I find it a bit cheesy to use those labels. But my creative work, it comes out in my roles as a musician, songwriter, music producer, and yeah, a few other things. And then finally, I’m also a reluctant academic who’s exploring at the moment in my studies how indigenous music making within the context of decolonial Christian frameworks is a form of what I like to call sacred resistance. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me. If you ask me in six months, it’ll probably be different. So that’s how life is.

Tristan: I don’t see “I am a friend of Tristan” on that list, but that’s fine.

Rashid: It’s not one of my main things. Yeah. And you, Tristan, tell us who you are.

Tristan: So these intros are always awkward because you have to talk about yourself, but so we will give it a go.

Rashid: Which you love doing.

Tristan: Yeah. No. No, I don’t. This is some things about me. I wear a couple of different hats. Figurative hats because I only have one literal hat. It’s a Batman one. So I trained as an accountant when I was younger and now I practice as a life coach and an executive coach. I also love facilitating conversations and holding space. Holding space for dreams and visions and especially when it involves a better world. So I work with organizations and individuals to dream up and conjure up new things. And then I also work with them to make that a reality. So some of my work involves work with faith-based organizations, some corporate things, and then also some grassroots organizations.

Tristan: Reluctantly, sometimes I am also a poet. I only say reluctantly because I don’t know, sometimes using the word poet…

Rashid: It’s like me with artists. Yeah.

Tristan: Rashid always says I’m a poet. I’m going to take that. I am married and we live with a cat who’s in charge of our house. Yeah. And then I call Cape Town home. I’ve lived here for many years, but I was actually born in a small town called East London in South Africa. Yeah. Which I am proud of. I think because small town values, you know.

Liminality

Tristan: Yeah, that’s a bit about us. Yeah. Beautiful. We started the Liminal Space Podcast as a conversation over many years that you and I have had. Yeah. And long story. But eventually we ended up on the word liminal. And then the podcast became the Liminal Space Podcast. So maybe do you want to say something about why the word liminal? Why we chose that word?

Rashid: Liminality evokes this idea of inbetweeness, spaces and places of inbetween or threshold spaces that kind of idea. We look at the world as it presently exists…I know Tristan in the past used this term called polycrisis which is these multiple overlapping crisisses that we are facing on global but also regional and local levels and in this context we need something to ground us and to lead us toward something better; towards a better world. So we kind of use this idea of liminality to explore these points where imagination and reality become blurry. We try and move away from escapism and rather to seek a sort of embodied imagination and critical hope, which pushes towards the boundary of reality so that we can grasp a more positively imagined world.

Tristan: Our method or the way we get to that or interrogate this or play with it a little is through story. So we find stories as a good gateway to access this liminal space. And so what we’ve thought of is it works in that Cape Town in itself is a liminal space in that it’s between. And sometimes it’s called the best, most visited city in the world, the most beautiful city in the world, those kinds of things. But we also know the reality of some of the neighborhoods in Cape Town is the most dangerous in the country. 

Rashid: In the world as well.

Tristan: And in the world, the most violent places in the world. There’s lots of poverty, inequality. All of these things coexist in a space where we’re also saying it’s the most beautiful place. And so we sit in between. And what we want to imagine is this very hopeful, different version of the city of Cape Town where we are located. And we use stories from people we know who are doing work in that direction or have thought about it. And through story and question, I would say, is the other method that we use in that we ask questions to unveil some truths. And sometimes we go in awkward directions and ask difficult questions. But that seemed to be effective to access this liminal space so that we can imagine a different future. It’s not just a, I always say airy fairy, it’s not just an airy fairy thing. It’s sitting with the reality of where we are, but also having this idea of a hopeful, imagined future that is better than now.

What Story Grounds You?

Tristan: So to enter story, we came up with a question that helps our guests go into their story. So we’re not so much interested in their work. We love what they do, but we’re actually asking about them and how they navigate the world. And sometimes we ask that question of ourself. And the question is something like, what story grounds you or what story is grounding you at the moment? And so we thought, let’s try that now and we’ll see what comes out. So Rashid, if I asked you what story is grounding you at the moment, what would you say?

Rashid: Yeah. So interestingly, we asked this to one another at the end of season two, which was a couple of months ago. And my answer is different now, which I guess is cool because that’s how stories are. You can kind of hold them and they can carry you and ground you for a season or for longer. But yeah, just to say that. So at the moment, the story that grounds me is this idea of earth being a shared garden. I’ve mentioned this to you before, Tristan. Earth being a garden that we share. The first part of that obviously being share. Remembering that as humans, we are just as human as one another and that we have this common reality, this common existence. And that is something that is useful for me and grounding for me.

Rashid: I actually heard a rabbi say once that when you look at the earth and you, you know, if you go in an airplane or whatever and you zoom out and you’re looking at the landmass and obviously there’s the oceans and everything as well. You don’t see the borders, you don’t see, you know, the lines dividing in the 50 plus, if it’s in the US states or 50 plus countries and nations in Africa. You just see one landmass or and then obviously separated by waters and that kind of thing. And yeah, just going back to that memory and that truth is something that’s really grounding to me. I guess the other aspect of it, of earth being a shared garden is the garden aspect as well. I find for us as humans, if we have a garden, it’s something that you want to cultivate, you want to take care of. It’s also something which you share with creatures as well. There’s beautiful birds. That’s kind of one of the signs of a flourishing garden and maybe some other animals. If you have a huge garden or maybe it’s not a privatized garden, we can put it like that because it’s a shared one. So you know what I mean?

Rashid: So there’s kind of this idea of this cosmic connection between humans and animals and creatures. There’s other stories behind that, especially like indigenous stories of kinship with creation. I know from North America, which I like to call Turtle Island because of some indigenous stories. And I know some of the worldviews there, it’s about kinship with creation. So that created things, animals and plants and rivers and oceans are not things to be subdued by us as humans in the sense of like dominating and overpowering and extracting from them. But that they, we are their kin. So, you know, we share that. So, yeah, this idea of a shared garden is something that’s helpful for me.

Tristan: That’s brilliant.

Rashid: And on your side, what story grounds you?

Tristan: So I think, I mean, at the moment, what I’ve been thinking about since the end of last year into this year, similar but different. And some of it has to do with intuition. So part of what I’m thinking about at the moment is how do I get in touch more with my intuition and using my intuition to make decisions. And it’s based on this book I was reading where the author was making the point about what we have access to beyond our mind and even questioning whether our mind is a physiological structure or whether we exist as part of more a collective consciousness. And it’s almost not important whether that’s true or not. It’s just the concept. If I imagine that, if I were to assume that is real, what does that allow or what does that open up for me? And I found that to be quite liberating because what it has meant is that I’m open to my senses and experiencing things like more like so touch and sight and feel and all of those kinds of things. For sure. But even more than that, like when you feel something in your gut, when someone says something or when you’re close to something, sometimes there’s like a vibe you feel that either is not good or is good.

Tristan: And so, you know, I like going for my cold swims on a Sunday morning, especially. And something about being in the salt water and connected often with people. So I go swimming not by myself. It’s a communal event. Tapping into that collective has just opened up new things for me. Like I feel like I think better. I feel better. I feel grounded, actually. And from that point, it feels like I can take on the week and imagine new things. And I love that.

Rashid: Beautiful. Yeah.

Closing

Tristan: Over the next couple of episodes here on the Common Good Podcast, we’ll share some conversations we’ve been having. And we look forward to bringing that to this audience. And so to end this first pilot episode, we wanted to leave you with a poem that we wrote collectively a while back. And we’ll see you in the next one.

Poem

Rashid: I’m someone who’s always found liberation in my imagination and in the imagination of others. I love fantasy worlds that exist between imagination and reality, particularly due to the imaginative possibilities they open up. I love that we live in a world in which an author, whether they be a writer, filmmaker, poet or even musician, is able to create and invent a whole new world of stories. And that they are able to invite others like you and I into those stories.

Tristan: When I was younger, I spent a lot of time by myself daydreaming or watching TV or imagining other worlds. I had this recurring dream where I could fly. As a result, in my waking hours, I would get on the roof and jump in the hopes of liftoff. But gravity had its way every time. I’ve always wondered what happens to our childhood dreams. When is it that we let them go? When is it that we are too adult to believe the fantastical? I dream less now than I did then. At times I’ve accepted the world as it is. Throwing my hands up and just let it be.

Rashid: I think there’s a misunderstanding that imagination and fantasy is just for children and that adults must be rooted in reality. Perhaps it’s a misconception of the power of imagination as a tool for inventing the future. To me though, imagination and storytelling isn’t something that simply exists for escapism. It’s not about escaping my present reality and going somewhere else. But it’s about staying in my body and allowing my mind to expand and grow in capacity for new possibilities and new realities in our world.

Tristan: For a brief moment there appears a crack in reality. Just enough to allow the light of imagination in. Like the steam dancing in the sun on a morning coffee. Or a shooting star at night. Or the smell of the forest after rain. Something hopeful and beautiful. A glimpse. And that makes me wonder again. In some ways a world of love, liberty, justice and freedom seems like that fantastical truth I held onto as a child.

Rashid: Perhaps we can seek a kind of embodied imagination. Imagination which is not just a form of escapism to escape our current realities from the systems of injustices and oppression which our cosmos and so many humans living in it faces.

Tristan: What we are living through in this moment of the world is polycrisis to use a hip word. Multiple and compounding crises of planetary proportions. And that makes dreaming feel almost futile. But if we extend the metaphor, perhaps we can look for gaps in reality that allow just a glimpse of a better world.

Rashid: I wonder what would happen if we went searching for glimpses of those gaps in reality which enable us to dream.

Tristan: I wonder if those gaps appear more frequently in storytelling.

Rashid: And what would happen if we actively cultivated rehumanizing spaces for both telling and hearing such stories.

Tristan: Would it inspire hope that a better and more beautiful world is not just possible but that we can be part of making it so.