Walking through Doors

It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love.

There are many such doorways in our lives. Some are small and hidden in the ordinary. Others are gaping and obvious, like the car wreck we walk away from, meeting someone and falling in love, or an earthquake followed by a tsunami. When we walk through them to the other side, everything changes.

Joy Harjo (Crazy Brave, A Memoir)

I feel like there are a lot of "gaping and obvious" doors everywhere I look right now. Some make the news headlines; most don't. Many are unwelcome; I can think of a few I'm sorry to have encountered. Some were clear off their hinges. Of course there were doors full of magic too - openings to wide-open places, happy experiences, all light and sweetness.

It's often easy for me to point to these obvious doors, to articulate a before and after - getting married, my sons' births, the death of loved ones, travels abroad. I can trace shifts and turns in my thinking, my way of moving through the world, to these moments and seasons.

But I love Harjo's reference to the doors "small and hidden in the ordinary". I wonder how many of these doors I've walked through without even knowing. I think now about how the accumulation of such crossings has shaped me: the crunch of ice under my boots, on our flat roof on a winter's morning, slowing me down so that I notice the shimmer of frost in the early morning sun; the kind word from a friend that soothes a rising tide of anxiety; the beautiful words in a poem that open my heart again to the world; an unexpected illness that offers me a day to rest and reflect.

There are so many of these doorways - people, books, little flowers, sunsets, smiles - and also difficult ones, like unkind words and challenging interactions, coffee spills, the dog's muddy footprints on a freshly-cleaned carpet. Each is an invitation to move into the next moment with a deepened awareness and curiosity.

So everything does change, in Harjo's words, but (at least most of the time) not all at once. I hope to pay more attention, to notice when I am gifted the opportunity to step through another door, be it one of delight or of struggle.

What are your doorways, and in what ordinary moments have you found change? I'd love to hear from you.