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The Door

Doors of Stone

Portal to Narnia

Larkin's Door

Doors of Imagination

Tygrenia - The Gates of Under

Ganesh -Doors as Obstacles

Saint Irony at the Doors

Tygrenia - Coming out under

Pink Double Doors

A Study of Doors
by Edwina Peterson Cross

THE DOOR TO TIR NA OG

The Jungian writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés says that there is a time in a woman’s life, usually in midlife, when she has to make a decision - possibly the most the important psychic decision of her future life - about whether to be bitter or not. Estés goes on to explain that women reach the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've had it. Dreams of the twenties may be lying in a crumple. There are broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises. To cleanse oneself Estés suggests making descansos. To make descansos means taking a look at your life and marking where the small deaths and the big deaths have taken place.

I found that, for me, many of these ‘deaths’ had been the site, not of a clean, complete mourning process, but of many, massive slammed doors. Initially, shutting a door does seem an effective way to end something and if you psychically and metaphorically lock that door and destroy the key, there is a definite feeling of having finished, terminated, consummated and moved on. It just doesn’t always work that way.

The time comes when those old doors, now so ancient that they can sometimes hardly be differentiated from walls, begin to leak. Toxic, virulent gasses begin to creep around cracked door jambs, through keyholes and insinuate through clefs, chinks and fissures in the fabric of the once sturdy wood. Behind those doors were wounds that had been closed unclean, and they had had plenty of time to fester.

Doors slammed shut on pain and presumed forgotten sooner or later, often later, begin to leak black, acrid fumes and without even completely knowing the cause, you begin to choke. Bitter indeed.

For the last two years, as a person with acute claustrophobia, both real and psychic, I have gone deep into the darkest mines of my soul and fought suffocating fears, terrors of the dark, panic at what I might find there, horror at what I might not find. I have moved a lot of slag and downed brace-timber, and begun to open, at last, long sealed shafts and myriads of slammed, locked doors. The keys have indeed vanished . Some doors have swung open like a magical cliché at the touch of my hand, for some I have had to break through layers of thick, splintering old wood until my hands were bruised, slivered and bleeding. I walk in breathless, choked tunnels amid the specter of ghosts.

I have learned things there. Perhaps the most important thing is this: An artist cannot create with selected pieces of their being. You cannot reach inside for the power that moves and say, ‘this I cannot touch’ or ‘here I will not go.’ The seals have to be pried off the doors, the slag mined away before a vein of gold can appear or uncut diamonds burst like sparks of white fire from the dark. But more importantly the closed, choked rooms of phantoms have to be opened so the air can flow through, so the gusts can blow the dust from walls and floor, leaving, not a deep, dark, dirty mine, but a hallowed, hollow cave of washing wind.

For more than two years I have worked in the darkness, with one faithful, patient witness holding a single lantern. I have moved most of a mountain. I am still finding new, deeper and more intricate shafts.

In the end, I hope to come up into the world again having passed that balance point C.P. Estés speaks of; no longer suffering from that bitterness that can rise up like black-lung from the poison vapors of unexamined wounds. The bitterness that can strangle a person’s soul and silence an artist’s voice. I hope to come back to the surface closer to conscious. In the end, each of us is responsible for our self and the long painful work of becoming conscious is, in truth, our only hope in a world that approaches a phase of human history where everything hangs in the balance; where the capacity for destruction may be weighed precisely against our archetypal soul’s capacity for compassion and love. I hope to arise from the dust and find the canary in the cage is still singing.

But I am not there yet. And so I go back into the blackness, back through dark doors that open upon other dark doors. Sometimes all my tools fail me, even my own hands. Sometimes I finally pry open a massive, unwholesome, parturient door only to discover that there is absolutely and utterly nothing inside. Nothing. This is the hardest thing of all.