Locus amoenus
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Locus amoenus is a literary topos involving an idealized place of safety or comfort. A locus amoenus is usually a beautiful, shady lawn or open woodland, or a group of idyllic islands, sometimes with connotations of Eden or Elysium.
John Constable's Wivenhoe Park, Essex: An idyllic scene featuring trees, grass, and water
Maerten Ryckaert, Rocky Pastoral Landscape
Modern-day Arcadia
Characters in the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's As You Like It
Liminality
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In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way.
Initiation ritual of boys in Malawi. The ritual marks the passage from child to adult male, a liminal stage in the context of their lives.
Destruction, from The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836)
Liminal phase of a rite of passage: Albert Anker's Die Ziviltrauung ("The Civil Marriage"), 1887
A painting depicting Jacob's Ladder to heaven