My woods walk today taught me about portals. They appeared like little natural occurrences that reminded me of the way we try to see things about times and places that we aren’t currently inhabiting. To me, portals are symbols of what could be, or maybe what was, or maybe what could be again. They are conceptions. And, if we investigate them, they can help us in the present.
“Portal One: Egg and 3 Wisdoms”
Cross posted on EMWe Art
star, half moon overhead
a mother fawns
belly empty
3 pillars, 3 people
wise men maybe?
visiting. An unwanted slug
of sex, slime, and death
may be there a lifetime.
so what.
________
This phone portal markup art I’m calling an egg. Eggs are thresholds between life and non-life. Emerging stuffs like children, chickens, and projects make the times called “before” and “after” very clear. There is a threshold, and it exists in the past. I think symbolic portals show up when life has already won: things have hatched. There’s no going back.
Portals in Pop Culture
Portals are a familiar science fiction device that gives characters knowledge and control over the swirling soup of life: jump through this way and fix the future. Jump through that way and meet an ancestor. Jump over there, explore far from home. Then, jump back1 because that’s what you are meant to do.
The thing is, jumping “back” isn’t backward in time, it’s back to the place we are now, where we can see all the possibility, and see the portal as itself.
It’s hard to completely pin portals down, they are mysterious and intriguing devices, like in Star Trek “The City on the Edge of Forever” (an episode where Kirk romances Joan Collins to bring his friend McCoy back to the present). The questions they beget are fun too: who places a portal? Who could?
An actual portal would need to exist outside of time and space, in a greater dimension than all times and spaces, yet still be visible here and now— so you’d know where to leap, and could return again.
A portal would also need to simplify entering and exiting the “everything,” and still be inside a “something.” If you could actually control what happens as you enter in and out of such a magic machine, than perhaps it was you who put it there in the first place? This is what I wonder while I’m on this side of the portal (IE home).
An idea whose time had come?
I think of portals as ideas: ideas that helps us feel another life we could be having, feel the dreams we have at night, and conceptions of alternate futures— the “or “could be’s”. The very notion of a portal helps us feel like we have control over our lives. If we think we can see things that will happen in the future, we feel security. If we think we can see things that happened in the past, we feel understanding2.
And, if we choose to leap, we feel like we have free will.
A portal is an answer, a looking glass into the “I know.”
More portal symbol works & phone markup art
practicum: your earliest ‘what if’s’
I wonder if our earliest questions about the nature of reality power our experiences for a lifetime. It makes sense that these questions could color our experiences today. My first big questions were spurned by Star Trek and refined by reading and observation, and some outstanding teachers. And as I hit middle age, I find myself wondering how much free will we actually have in this most complex, intertwined wild of sentient beings and their infinite creations. I still wonder a lot too.
What were the big “what if” questions you remember having as a kid?
What big ideas baffled you when you were young, and still make you think?
What TV shows, books, movies or other media intrigued you the most? What made you experience wonder first?
- In Carl Jung’s Hero Journey, the hero of any story always must come “back” to tell the story of his journey. The journey is not completed without this return. Portals are a great literary device to shortcut the return. But the important thing is: what happened while you were there? ↩︎
- P.S. not to lecture, but this is why accurate history is so important. It is a portal into what was, and could be again. Accurate, journalistic history is super handy for deciding what to do today. I say this as the November 5, 2024 election is coming. I’ll be writing postcards to democrats in swing states, encouraging them to vote like their future depended on it. It does. ↩︎
