Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. As always, you are heartily welcome here - thank you for entering this space, however you might have got here!
Today I'm going to write about portals. I'm not quite sure where this is going to go, but it feels somehow necessary. The word just keeps cropping up lately, so I'm following a trail of breadcrumbs to see where they lead. I've spoken about portals obliquely in other posts - perhaps most significantly in last week's - but never head-on.
So, the obvious question is, “what is a portal?”
In one sense, a portal is just a fancy name for a door. It's plausible, by the way, that this entire post is just an excuse for me to show lots of pictures of doors. I bloody love a good door, me, and I have more than a few photos to evidence this. Take this absolute belter for starters…
Exquisite Door - Southport, 2023
A portal is also a very workaday name for a transdimensional, time travelling, transfiguration device; a permanently shapeshifting, narrative-bending technology, through which beings travel, emerge different, and through which there can be no return.
It goes without saying that not all doors are portals. (I'm immediately thinking of every bleakly corporate entrance to shared office spaces I've ever had the misfortune to walk through.) Equally, not all portals are doors, but in our anthropocentric world, I guess it's the easiest association to make. A portal could be a door or gate; it could just as easily be a hole in a fence or a slip of an alleyway; it could be a place or a creature or an encounter. It will be evident to most readers that in my life, Pomona Strand is a significant portal:
I made this just for you, lovely Substackers
Here are a few short lines from a long poem I wrote about Pomona:
Pomona is a portal, a place of precious episodes, magical manifestations, enigmatic experiences...
I share them as an example of what a portal is all about: entry moments into encounters and experiences that leave us changed, permanently, in their wake.
Pomona, as well as being a portal also has a portal. This way in and out has been opened and closed numerous times in the years I've been visiting her. Once I found it draped in red fabric (see below) which felt beautifully significant, even though the reality is probably that it was just something found in a stolen bag and discarded. Pomona is home to a disturbing number of post-mugging fly-tipping incidents. I'm beginning to think I should be collecting all the emptied rucksacks and panniers I find there, and making something from them. Perhaps one day I will…
Pomona’s current portal, see the next image, has been open for nearly five months and counting. There's a very personal story about this particular Opening of the Railings, which I don't feel privy to share here. If you know me but not the story, please feel free to message and ask. All I'll say is that it came at quite a cost.
I feel so entangled in the opening of this latest portal that I have made it my business to perform a small ritual every time I cross in or out, along with making the declaration that “this portal will remain open until such time as Pomona herself declares it closed.” Entry to sacred spaces is an important thing, and I feel deeply woven enough into this particular relationship to have started taking my position of portal guardianship seriously.
Open Portal, Pomona 2024
Let's return to portals in general.
I've been amazed, in recent years, just how many people can't seem to tell the difference between a door and a life-changing opportunity. I'll add right away that this amazement does not equate to a judgment. I’ve spent the greater part of my life in that camp, and I'm still learning a great deal. I'm probably missing portals left, right and centre. But I'm still amazed at the generalised lack of imagination in our society.
This is quite probably caused in large part by a combination of outlandish levels of busyness combined with almost continual communion with these glowing little beasties in our palms. However useful they might be, they do also divert a great deal of attention away from life itself.
Sometimes this inability to discern a portal moment is more than simple distraction: it's a blindness. Oftentimes it's an overriding fear of change, or of encounter, or of being seen-all-the-way-through, which becomes the equivalent of blindness.
Talking on this very subject, mythologist and elder Michael Meade says:
When the world gets troubled, we have to go into these things we fear. Sometimes safety is going to the places we fear most.
Feer Portal - Manchester, 2023
In the same context (I came across it via his Instagram) Meade also stitches together a couple of pieces by Rumi, firstly these extraordinary lines:
I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.
and then this poem:
Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.
Sometimes the portals are right there in front of us, or inside us, waiting to be opened. But it's much easier to believe that someone else - a god, an inspirational leader, a spiritual guru, a beloved poet, a therapist - has the key and will come along and free us from our anxieties and behaviour patterns. Newsflash: they won't, although they may of course gesture towards the key in your own pocket if they're skilled enough. And you might just hear some gentle whispers of encouragement from the other side of the door if you still your thoughts and feelings enough to listen carefully.
Phwoar, look at the hinge straps on that - Bolton Abbey, 2024
Some years ago I wrote a poem on this subject, about the experience of everyday life changing moments, the threshold ahead of us, and those who keep themselves from crossing it by fixating on the familiarity of past experiences. Here it is:
Threshold Already so familiar with its location, you walk me to the door. Though lacking ornamentation, the wood is rich, the handle smoothly curved. Seeing but one convincing option, I slip through into a world that seems unchanged until I open my eyes. A darker, warmer, harder, brighter, deeper, more broken self. Astonished to find you’re not beside me, I turn back to see you, eyes closed, rambling ceaselessly of the wonders you’ve glimpsed. What precious, cumbersome baggage stops you from crossing over? Keeps you satisfied to circle the doormat on the very threshold of life?
Prayer Garden Door - 2024
One of the most common blocks to welcoming the kind of change that portal-hopping augurs, is religiosity. It is also one of the greatest preventers of mystical experiences. Beware its grip.
One of the very few guaranteed realities of life is that it will change; sometimes hard and fast. The most religious people - and I use the word “religious” in its broadest sense - are often the most resistant to change, however they label their religiosity. It comes in the guise not just of the mainstream faiths, but in many shapes: wellness culture and cancel culture; light workers and blue-light workers; dogmatism and atheism. Beware almost anything with an -ism, unless it's an organism.1
As well as ongoing change, life is also always full of wonder, even - perhaps especially - in the most ordinary of places and situations. The most religious-in-any-sense people are most often blind to such wonder, and the fiercest guardians of everyday portals. Beware those who would stop you from encountering wonder, and from being changed.
I have been the most religious of people. I get it. It's much easier if you think you can predict or control what miracles should look like, what qualifies as mystical. But you can't and you shouldn't, and let no one tell you that the magic you've encountered isn't magical. It fucking is. Hold tight to that magic. It might just save you.
Church door, Withington - 2024
Ritual is a Portal
As I said earlier, not all doors are portals, and not all portals are doors. To some extent we find, or perhaps even make, our own portals. Many of these are in wild and natural spaces. Here's Ian Siddons Heginworth with some wisdom on the matter:
"Ritual invites us back into the present. Every ritual is a gateway, marking a place of transition from one reality to the next...
In the wild places we can find many gateways, both natural and man made. The crook between two boughs of a tree. A hole worn by water in a great stone. A rusty old gate in the woods. These are portals into a new life, waiting to be used. Each invites us to lay down and honour the old, muster our power and step through. The ritual does not in itself reorder the way of things. It simply manifests outwardly and consciously the inner change that is happening anyway. By putting us in touch with our little deaths it welcomes us back to life."
- Ian Siddons Heginworth "Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life"
Portal in nature, with human intervention
Entirely natural portal, Scotland, 2024
This notion of ritual as portal is one of the things that draws me to following and celebrating the Celtic festivals around the wheel of the year. As noted last week (please do read it if you haven't already, it's one of the most powerful stories I have to offer these troubled and disconnected times!) ritual can act as a portal to the most life-affirming encounters, even when the context is embracing difficult change that is hard to face.
Trees really are potent beings when it comes to portal moments. Here's author Nina Lyon with some insights into human cultural history with trees:
Our ancestors were tree-centric: the Celts had their Tree of Life, which symbolised the interconnectedness and harmony of the world... The Anglo-Saxons brought their German gods with them, and even the gods who weren't tree-gods existed in a universe structured around a vast, invisible tree called Yggdrasil.
These grand unified tree theories could be borne out by spiritual endeavour, ideally in the form of going alone into the trees and getting into a place, the Wyrd, in which talking to them was possible. The trees, as well as issuing advice and guidance, worked as portals into other worlds, or other parts of the universe-tree. The trees were a place of both shelter and magic.
- from “Uprooted - On the Trail of the Green Man”
Lighting Tree Portal, Prestwich, 2021
There are plenty of portals within purely human experience as well. Here's Franciscan mystic and teacher, Richard Rohr:
Love and suffering are the main portals that open the mind space and the heart space... breaking us into breadth and depth and communion. Almost without exception, great spiritual teachers will have strong and direct guidance about love and suffering. If we never go there, we will not know these essentials.
Portal of suffering, Manchester 2023
If I've learned one lesson over and over again in the last five years, it's the truth of these words. Love and suffering are about as universal as it gets, and I agree with Rohr - they really can open the heart and mind like nothing else. If I were to tweak it, I might add grief as well as suffering. While related, they’re not the same. Opening to grief has certainly opened me to a world of other phenomena, all of them places I'm glad to have entered and dwelled in.
Sadly we are conditioned to flee or resist both grief and suffering in our modern western context, rather than moving through them communally, as is common in indigenous cultures. Feeling all of the nuances and marvels of grief - the overwhelming sense that it must surely crush and kill us, and then realising it can't - creates incredible space in the heart. The same is true for love, though we humans seem to have developed some pretty wild ideas about what it is lately.
Portal of Love, Cruggleton Old Church, 2023
So then. Doors are portals, but not all doors. Trees can be portals, as can rituals. Places can be portals, as can poems. Love, grief and suffering are portals. Surely myths, good stories and good art are portals. They are moments of transformation and encounters with wonder. Almost anything can be a portal, if it elicits a an internal change of enough significance.
Portals are both inside us and without. But the key to these doors, as Rumi suggests in the lines I shared earlier, is always on the inside. So whether or not we recognise a portal, whether or not we open it, whether or not we choose to pass through it, is all determined entirely within ourselves. This is crucial, because it brings me to the notion that I've been circling with this post, but as yet haven't named. Imagination.
Regular listeners / readers here will know that imagination is my word of the year for 2025, and it's something I've been exploring pretty deeply since the turn of the calendar year. Imagination, and the imaginal realm is something I wish to write much more about here, but I don't quite feel ready yet. However, I'd like to honour the reality that I've been discussing it already for much of this piece. Because it is generally only through the use of our imagination - and the very Real places that it takes us - that we pass through portals and into the deep changes that they present to us.
In keeping with the idea of inner prisons, as articulated earlier in those lines from Rumi, here's a final quote to whet your appetite for future posts that will dig more into the imaginal realms. This is taken from "The Poetics of Space" by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard:
A prisoner paints a landscape on the wall of his cell showing a miniature train entering a tunnel. When his jailers come to get him, he asks them politely to 'wait a moment, to allow me to verify something in the little train in my picture.' As usual, they started to laugh, because they considered me to be weak-minded... I made myself very tiny, entered into my picture and climbed into the little train, which started moving, then disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel. For a few seconds longer, a bit of flaky smoke could be seen coming out of the round hole. Then this smoke blew away, and with it the picture, and with the picture, my person ...' How many times poet-painters, in their prisons, have broken through walls, by way of a tunnel! How many times, as they painted their dreams, they have escaped through a crack in the wall! And to get out of prison all means are good ones. If need be, mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.
I've dabbled only a little in Bachelard’s work, and I find it dense and difficult, but I adore this passage. I'm not going to comment further on it, but I hope it stirs something deep within you as it does for me.
My own little painted train is running out of steam here, so I'll draw to a close. But I'm left feeling like I've not posted a picture of a good door for a while, so here's another beauty to finish with. So many doors I haven't shown you. Maybe another time…
Peveril of the Peak - pub door, Manchester, 2023. Such glorious greens!
Thanks for reading. As always, the comments are open and I'd love to hear what spoke to you today? What has roused your curiosity? What portals have you crossed lately? Where did they take you? How have you been changed? Please tell us about it!
Feel free to come at me in the comments with all your -isms-that-are-good jibes.
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