Pick a Portal

“I wish you lived closer, Aunt Marian. I wish you weren’t so far away.”

I tucked those words in my heart as I boarded the airplane to leave my niece and nephews behind and fly back to my husband and my children. I packed them away to look at later just as I had packed away the painting that had hung above my grandmother’s dresser.

It’s a simple painting…a forest of trees through which can be seen an opening…mountains…light. It has always reminded me of a portal, a doorway where one can walk from one thing to another.

I wish there was a portal that could carry me back and forth from Tennessee to California (or from California to Chad) as easily as I can open a door or a book. My children ask me what super power I would pick if I could have just one and it is always (always) teleportation. I imagine what it could be like to see my sisters whenever I want.

I hang my grandmother’s painting on the wall when I get home, and I think about my niece and nephews, their growth and maturation mirroring that of my own children. The “if only”’s crouch in the corner, waiting to pounce.

But today I opened the door to my own home—a real live portal cloaked in normalcy.

I walked out through the door and got to be teacher, musician, scientist. I explored a world of learning and service and expression. I got to see a coyote, eat a picnic, explore a park.

Then, I walked back through it, into the safety of my own home, and welcomed in friends. They came with their children and their stories, their grace and their listening ears. Their children came with their appetites, their joyful voices, their sense of fun. We made roasted pumpkin seeds and played soccer and laughed together.

The door of my home is not always the portal I’m dreaming of, but again and again, it’s the portal I’m given. And if I could magically teleport to see the ones I love whenever I want, what would I be bringing with me if I didn’t live first and fully where I actually am?

My newly hung painting speaks of whispering trees, cool shade, moss covered slopes…and the hope of one day seeing open skies and blue mountains. It reminds me that there is another world waiting (one with no separation, no unmet longing, no tearful goodbyes), but that it is not yet.

In the meantime, we open the small portals that ground us here: the doors of our homes (so we can go out into the world as well as invite others into the safety of a haven), good books that welcome in beautiful thoughts, sometimes airplanes that take us to see the ones we love, the dreams we slip away to at night.

We don’t always get to pick the portals available to us or the worlds we cross into, but may we at least recognize them as a shadow of what is to come. And know that there is far more beauty, wholeness, love waiting on the other side.