We all compartmentalize our life experiences and place them in the nooks and crannies of our neural pathways. I am no different than any other in this regard. A preference has grown within me over the years to think of my life contemplations as being behind four doors marked Family, Spirituality, Friends and Teachers. They are in no particular order of importance, as said order ebbs and flows throughout our lives based on guess what … life experience. My theory may appear simplistic because we all know there are countless other things that make the mind go around … and around. For those of you needing a greater level of order in the filing cabinet of the mind, let’s just say there are plenty of long hallways with smaller doors representing gazillions of subsets under each of the four master doors. Let me introduce you to my doors and bring you to a level of understanding that may turn out to touch the soft underbelly of me.

Family:
Waiting in my mind is a door to an older home with a screen door overlay … so necessary toward “bangin’ that baby” on the ingress or egress. Here rest memories of joy and abandon, love and distrust, new life and too soon gone, baking bread and burning water, embraces and arguments, commitment and deceit, welcoming and letting go. It is the place of all things family, and includes those special few who are family beyond friends.

Spirituality:
There is an immediate olfactory quality when nearing this door; old growth forest and the crisp healing quality of well-oxygenated air. It is heavy carved wood and covered with symbols of all faiths. Many glyphs upon it are without association to anything known. This door never looks the same way twice as the metamorphosis of my soul changes with every passing moment. It represents the reason of my existence, the honing of the real me … that which stands at the windows of my eyes and looks out upon the world. Here you will find respect and judgment, light and dark, empathy and disdain, love and hate, giving and receiving, forgiveness and heart hardening, ritual and nature experience. The list is endless and everlasting. It is difficult to touch upon both sides of our nature; to recognize them, and then manifest the follow through of acceptance and embrace. Here it must be done. Behind this door, down in your deepest well, hold the child that waits for you there … it is the universe.

Friends:
Ahhh … the comfort of friends and tender environments in which one is welcomed without question. This door is ordinary and leads to an inviting apartment where friends gather in wild abandon. It is a sacred place of listening and being with, walking alongside and bringin’ it, gut-grabbing laughter and free-wheeling tears, emotional bonding and accepted disagreement, love and the hot sting of rejection, lifelong relationships and never forgotten friendships of a single day. Life is not fully complete without the dear ones behind this door. Those who have not been blessed by friends and/or the opportunities in life to nurture or find them … it brings tears to think of a life so difficult. Perhaps their soul is honed in other ways, such that it becomes pure gold.

Teachers:
The large oaken door of life-academia, holding those things that have taught and branded the spirit … leading to those true teachers in the traditional sense that left their indelible mark and the kid next door who engendered realization not everyone has food on the table; the mirror warning not to wear that “slutty” dress (a judgment of society) and said dress that taught me how to wield “it” … and it was good; moments of unjustified temper leaving shame in the air and megaphones of demonstration bringing attention to injustices that abound without resolution; the lover that brings a heart to open without restraint and the flaming pain experienced when the last kiss fades; kind and loving souls of those who give to others in a balanced yet never ending stream and embittered hearts of those burned out by having given beyond their sanity. We teach ourselves and are taught by everything else there is. For some this is a difficult acceptance and for others it is a welcome relief. My personhood will serve to teach others in spite of itself along the way in my day-to-day; I will be taught and I will learn … always. My gratitude is endless.

—

Each door is a complexity indescribable. My words are lost in the din of it. There is a common thread behind each of the four doors discussed above. Did you notice? Weaving its way into all avenues of life … it is our purpose.  Simply love.  Be it.

~ Eve ~
The Walking Owl
For the love of stones … and more …