Everyday Portals

I live in a far more urban area than I ever thought I would, especially having worked in places where I led people through the woods & hiked much of the time. I feel off sometimes without that.

That said, there is a tree that hangs beside (and over) my apartment. I sat outside last night, with a candle, and it felt like I was camping somewhere with a small fire. Of course, that was somewhat of an illusion, because the city lay right beyond me... though that's also an illusion, because the curve of the world lay right beyond that & beyond that... mystery... wonder. 

This reminds me of studies in which people stared at Jackson Pollock's paintings. Brainwaves indicated their relaxation states, and the patterns, in those paintings, had the same fractal patterns folded into them as clouds.

The tree twists, with its branches, into a pattern that is like a key (for the person encountering it,) and the person is changed, or transported, or taken back to ground state.

There are portals everywhere, should they be given attention, even in a crazy, congested town like this. Remember the wardrobe to Narnia, the mushrooms from Alice and wonderland, the hidden tokens in a video game (that infuse the creature with some kind of special ability?)

Here we are toiling around, in an organic video game world, where right at our feet--or in the sky--there are secrets waiting there (or hanging there) for us.

Let's say the whole world, then, is a key or a portal, but, sometimes, even the sky is obscured by some modern box we are in. Then there is the mind (which is a sort of key within.)

Olympic athletes practice races in their minds, and the same muscle groups fire (that fire when they are actually  running.) Their 'real world' performance is shown to improve. The brain doesn't know the difference.  

Now we're talking of the journeys that shamanic healers go on & sometimes take people on. Even if the journey is only through the mind (whatever that means,) the mind doesn't know the difference, and it registers the experience as real (on some level,) and we return to the state of wonder.

Then there is the story (I think told by Mark Nepo) of an astronaut who visited an indigenous tribe/band out in the middle of nowhere. She thought she was bringing them something profound (and far outside their experience,) having, after all, been to the moon. 

When she told them, they merely nodded and brought to her their shaman, who, they said, had also been to the moon. The two traded stories, perhaps having been on equivalent adventures--by different means--to different aspects of the same place. 

Perhaps the next place we visit will be the secret place, right outside the door, that is so easily missed as we sleep walk through a perfectly good slice of infinity.  

Here we are, in the company of the world, surrounded by beings of equal depth and mystery. One can throw away time in a highest quality way. Hmmmm.