Pregnant with Miracles
A door is a mystery.
A door is a journey, an adventure.
A door is a permeable barrier.
A door is hope--a way out.
A door is terror--a way in.
A book is a door to another world, and as a writer, I have an unhealthy fascination with doors and thresholds.
When I was younger, I was enamored of the sciences. I liked knowing. It seemed there was plenty of uncertainty. Knowledge was an island in dark, raging seas. But as I get older, I chafe under the fascism of Truth. If an island is a refuge, it is also a prison. Just ask any castaway.
I prefer not to know. I prefer to discover.
It's at borders where tangents play and disrupt the sine wave, where people and ideas mate and make mutants. Most theories of the origin of life suggest it emerged through a threshold, at the margins of the land perhaps, or in a crack in the crust deep below the waves, like the labia of mother earth, where her vital energy of pours forth.
A crystal grows from the edge. Light emerges from the tips of the Sun. A womb is an occult barrier pregnant with miracles.
So much called knowledge passes just as each of us, at every moment, stands on the threshold of the future. Wisdom is not facts but understanding. It is meta-knowledge--an unmeasured appreciation of fluid properties.
If the past is another country, one checks one's passport at the border of history. It's not so much knowledge of the past as the journey through it that brings wisdom.
The transition -- the experience -- is where growth occurs, where new yous are born. Knowledge, or what passes for it, is a monotonous limestone sediment distilled from the ocean of others' experiences. It is not your own.
But the crossing of a threshold IS experience.
The opening of a door is not life. It is living.
The art of life then is whether and when to open it.
Thresholds (an escapist's daydream)
