Show Me the Door
Doors fascinate me. I take pictures of them and with them whenever I travel. Even if the various colors, styles, and levels of upkeep give clues to the worlds that lay hidden away inside, it really is impossible to know. Colorful, modern, stark, or ornate, doors feed my curiosity as I walk by. They’re oftentimes inspiring or enigmatic enough in their own right to keep from tempting me to even want to cross the threshold. Daydreams can be enough.
While physical doors remain a source of visual fascination for me, other doors have captured my attention lately. These new doors make me want to walk through them; in fact, they pull me inside before I can say no. They could almost be called portals, but that term makes me feel cold, as if the entryways were laced in metal. The most straightforward term for these new doors of mine is memory, but even that word is too simple and too complex.
Memories can be triggered anywhere and at any time without warning. A scent, a touch, a song, and off the mind goes into the past, connected to the present by one of our senses. This I understand. It’s inescapable. What is less explicable, perhaps, is why new vistas or the sun shining just so on a mossy tree trunk, will take my mind away to places I had forgotten. It isn’t memories I find through these doorways so much as thoughts that had long been forgotten or hopes that became buried through time without my realizing it. Why would the sight of two perfectly balanced Japanese maples on a rainy Napa morning suddenly shoot my mind into the sunshine of a Spanish courtyard? What connection does a kaleidoscope crocheted blanket have with warm stones under bare feet?
Whether I understand or not, the point is, I’m listening. When life gets too busy and I forget to think for myself, getting hit on the head with an acorn, or almost bashed in the face by two quarreling birds, pushes me through a door I never expected. And through the new doors, more often than not I begin to laugh. Through the doors I remember who I am, and then begin to see the future.
While physical doors remain a source of visual fascination for me, other doors have captured my attention lately. These new doors make me want to walk through them; in fact, they pull me inside before I can say no. They could almost be called portals, but that term makes me feel cold, as if the entryways were laced in metal. The most straightforward term for these new doors of mine is memory, but even that word is too simple and too complex.
Memories can be triggered anywhere and at any time without warning. A scent, a touch, a song, and off the mind goes into the past, connected to the present by one of our senses. This I understand. It’s inescapable. What is less explicable, perhaps, is why new vistas or the sun shining just so on a mossy tree trunk, will take my mind away to places I had forgotten. It isn’t memories I find through these doorways so much as thoughts that had long been forgotten or hopes that became buried through time without my realizing it. Why would the sight of two perfectly balanced Japanese maples on a rainy Napa morning suddenly shoot my mind into the sunshine of a Spanish courtyard? What connection does a kaleidoscope crocheted blanket have with warm stones under bare feet?
Whether I understand or not, the point is, I’m listening. When life gets too busy and I forget to think for myself, getting hit on the head with an acorn, or almost bashed in the face by two quarreling birds, pushes me through a door I never expected. And through the new doors, more often than not I begin to laugh. Through the doors I remember who I am, and then begin to see the future.
posted by Tyler Oaks at
3:03 PM
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