Portals & Thresholds

I have chosen to walk through a portal; other times, I have crossed a threshold without knowing it until I was on the other side.

One of my favorite solo activities as a kid was wandering the woods off the trail to find hallows, alters, ancient wonders, and a good stick. I would get poison oak every summer from my sorties into the wildernesses. 

I think the threshold has to be refused to be crossed. Joseph Campbell says, “Sometimes the predicament following an obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release.” Without the initial refusal to cross onto the other side, there is no challenge and a mundane threshold with no meaning.

When I walk through a door, my mind radically changes, and I can’t remember why I entered the room in the first place.

There is power and strong energy that goes into choosing the song that will start the second side of an album.

Liminal spaces are places where we can transition. There are physical spaces, such as doorways, but then there are the spiritual, emotional, and magical spaces where we change internally. Sometimes, it is the passing of time or an event, or we wittingly or unwittingly walk through a threshold.

When the blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil to become a great guitar player, he had to meet the demon at a crossroad.

I loved walking down the Oregon coast and watching the Pacific tide ebb and flow on the shoreline. There was a danger walking that line, the angry ocean.

My youth was murdered by cancer. Walking through the emergency room doors was a portal I could never exit. My body turned on me, and the only cure was to be poisoned. I had to go into the belly of the beast willingly. This was one of the first times that the threshold I crossed wasn’t from my own decision, a mistake I made, just the fact that I am in a flesh prison that is prone to diseases. When I came out the other side, I was old.

There is this very short period in late summer right after dusk when it is twilight and still hot. There is a greenish-blue line across the horizon, but you can see the stars, hear all the bugs and the night birds. Then it is night.

Can’t talk about thresholds without talking about death, which, other than birth, is the most significant and sacred threshold there is. Most of our rituals on death are to let the living grieve.

While crossing thresholds in the spiritual wilderness, remember that when we open these portals, we could let something into our side that we don’t want.

What is the key?

Before I could claim I was a man, I crossed my first significant threshold: I got sober. It was not a threshold that I wanted to cross or even stay on the sober side for very long, but the journey kept going and I kept going.

I probably kept thinking the cancer was a hallway that looped; it would finally end where it started, and I would get back to my life the way it was. My body would be strong, I would be comfortable, I would know what was happening, and I wouldn’t feel any loss. 

I work from home, so the liminal difference between work and home is as thin as a spider web thread. I power down my computer, and I am home. There is no commuting. My only ritual is going outside with Rufus to let him out.

Janus is the Roman God of Passages, Beginnings, Gates, Transitions, and Endings. A God can be a guardian. Not everyone is ready to cross a threshold, but when they are, the God shows you the way. Not everyone is able to find the end of their journey, and the guardian will guide you to that end and not a minute sooner.

We live in a time when crossing a threshold or going through a portal, an act that has always come with hostility and pain, is seen as too traumatic. So we do everything in our power not to cross any of these liminal boundaries. We refuse the call. We will cross the boundaries whether we like it or not.

I remember walking around in southern Italy and seeing the charms warding off the evil eye and horseshoes hanging on every doorway.

As a kid, I wandered the woods, wishing to find a rabbit hole or secret gateway to take me to a different land. I knew that my weirdness would be better understood in a different dimension. I didn’t belong here.

Even more alien about cancer is how much the outside world believes we return to our original form. Are we over our grief? You aren’t going to doctor appointments anymore, so you must be over it. You must be glad that’s over. Even when I have gone through something like cancer, I find myself having the exact expectations of others. Why aren’t they like they used to be? You always come back from a journey changed.

We must remember how sacred rivers are and what it means to cross them.

The spiritual practice of crossing a threshold or entering a portal involves a change of perspective. We can’t see things the way we do, so like the Hanged Man looking at the world upside down, we must have a different view.

Hecate is the Greek Goddess of crossroads. Her domain is in-between—that thin veil between here and there. Like Janus’s two faces, Hecate is often represented by three faces. She has keys to all the different realms. We can’t know magic without praying to Hecate.

Dawn can be a time of peace, watching the light appear on the eastern horizon and listening to the singing of the morning birds, but it can also be a time of great sadness.