When the press of humans and our panicked frailty
are just too much to bear
and it feels as though nothing could break through
the chatter and commotion we cause,
there are portals quietly waiting for us to enter.
They take many forms, these openings,
these passages that take us beyond our usual understandings.
Portals are not free of charge
they ask us, first, to see, to notice them.
Then to shed our protective layers
and enter in, willing to be moved…
be that to tears or to action, to awe or perhaps to stillness.
For me, today, it was the pelicans.
I couldn’t have said how much I needed it
so far in the tangles was I.
But hundreds of these graceful beings circling,
then landing together in the river
took my breath, inviting me in, to see, to feel, to fully love.
As far as I can tell, portals reside in experiences,
in opportunities to lose ourselves
and join with something bigger, more expansive
than our individual skin could hold.
We won’t get out of the many troubles of our time
by trying to do it ‘right,’
from should’s or shame or withholding.
Portals suggest a different approach,
one that opens our hearts and all of our senses
to the Wild beauty of this world.
One that dares you not to give up,
but to let yourself love with knee-buckling abandon.
It’s risky, to be sure.
It will hurt sometimes.
But it allows for hope and the Wild possibilities
that we cannot see in our separateness.
