Behind Closed Doors

What is behind this door that you want?

Imagine having the key.

What is stopping you from opening the door?

This week’s sandbox writing challenge asks us to picture a door and imagine what is behind it that we want. Also, to think on what may stop us from opening that door.

I always seem to go off on another path with these challenges than I think the intention is but I will trust that I should be following my instincts rather than the rational mind, as my artist son tells me constantly, when we are viewing art. “Mom, it doesn’t matter WHY you like it, you just DO; it is speaking to you for a reason. That is the beauty of art.”

The sight of this door reminded me of William Blake’s quote on the Doors of Perception from The Marriage of Heaven & Hell and how profoundly that impacted me as a teenage girl. It opened my mind to so many ideologies and religions and incredible free-thought. I have always been a voracious reader and can lose myself in books, not even looking up when someone is snapping fingers under my nose.

Reading and dreaming and imagining have been such a huge part of my life since childhood and that moment…remember THAT moment? The first time you read or hear something that makes your spidey-senses tingle. Something that your Catholic parents would never agree with or your teachers would never share with you? Something that perhaps is speaking directly to your own soul and your need to begin organizing your very own belief system? Cataloguing it, if you will? For use at later dates and ages, when life will reign blows down on you and you can pluck it out of your memory and feel it cool the sting as you let it flow through you?

I believe I am infinitely intertwined with all energies around me. I believe that everyone I have had contact with, even in the smallest way, over my entire lifetime up to now, has little pieces of my energy field and matter mingling with their own, as I have theirs.

I see it in my mind’s eye like dust appears in sunshine. Those fluttering silvery specks that dance in the sunlight. I do my utmost best to send out white light to all those I cherish the most and also to strangers who I sense need it/me. My years working in hospice were when I used it the most. So many different energies surrounding me daily. Some dark, but most light. I sat with the dying and held their hands and watched their organs and bodies stop, but the energy, the spirit, the soul. It never stops. It lingers, in fact, at times. One of the  informal and non- policy driven rules where I worked was that you would not put another patient into a room where someone had passed away for 24 hours, if possible. You must allow the spirit or energy time to move and transition without hurry. Peacefully. 

I have also visited places that made me feel physically ill from the energy swirling about. Not all of it was recent, I don’t believe. Ancient energy lingering in cracks in walls and drains of tubs. Walls that have heard cries for help and bars that have had fists clenched around them for so many years, the metal is worn.

A native elder once said to me ” You are the light. Look at how these people are drawn to you. You have never met them, and they come to you immediately. It isn’t your smile or your nature. It is what is within you. You radiate healing energy and they want that. You need to protect yourself from that, as well. But your purpose is to heal and shine.”

My purpose is to heal and shine.

The door I am afraid to open is the one that will show me that I have wasted time worrying and fussing about material matters, and the minutia of survival, when I should have been studying and planning and healing and sharing my light with others that needed it.

I am afraid of the infinite possibilities within me.

Once I open that door, I know in my soul there will be no turning back for me.