Portal to a New World
The Repast of the Lion by Henri Rousseau ca. 1907
The portal to a new world is always near—the back wall of a wardrobe, the crawl space in a forgotten room, an area on the ceiling overhead. Humans have long been possessed by the idea that there’s a new world shining within or alongside the present one. Hiding in plain sight there’s an escape from pain, turbulence, or mere familiarity. The portal itself is quaint, just wide enough to walk or pull oneself through. It’s unassuming, and reveals nothing about the world that awaits. Why has this imagery permeated our collective folklore for generations? My guess is that it has something to do with us being interdimensional beings composed of spirit and matter and therefore inhabiting both the realms of spirit and matter. Our bodies tether us to this material world and make it the primary mode by which we traverse and settle ourselves. We are subjects living under the “tyranny of the urgent” and thus we constantly bring our attention back to our bodies and all bodies in this world. However, we also experience and interpret the world through spirit. When I use the word spirit, I’m referring to everything other than material which includes emotions, thoughts, and the heart, to name a few. Spirit looks at the material as more than its component parts. The world seems to hint that it's enchanted—it always has. Think of the way children ignore the in of inanimate objects: whispering secrets to dolls that appear to listen, smiling at flowers that smile back, raucously laughing at jokes made by invisible friends, playing king of the castle in a four foot wide wardrobe. The wardrobe itself becomes a symbol of covering, of veils—those thin barriers that Sufi masters tell us separate our ordinary perception from spiritual reality.
For me, the wardrobe harkens back to Adam and Eve’s first awareness of their nakedness and their subsequent hurry to clothe themselves. Their bare bodies were not an inherent problem, because in an environment where all are bare, nakedness is not an idea with weight. The new lens through which they saw themselves as separate and distinct from nature made them feel exposed by their bareness. When we look at indigenous peoples who wear minimal clothing they seem to us to be naked and yet they are covering themselves in much the same way we can imagine Adam would have initially and abruptly dressed himself. This story captivates me because it shows how quickly perspective can shift - in one moment, Adam went from harmony with creation to feeling exposed and separate. The clothing he reached for became both literal covering and metaphor for the veils our consciousness creates between itself and divine reality.
The veil that separates matter from spirit, that distinguishes between opposing perspectives, is thin. One need only pull it from in front of their face to land in a whole new world. Instinctively, we know this to be true–and experientially as well. Likewise in the imagery of a portal, the entry point is always human sized, large enough for us to fit through until it opens into an expanse. A daring question transports you to an entire realm of possibilities; a longer than typical embrace puts down your burdens; a moment alone with your heart bursts open the door to Godly love.