The Heart is a Door
The heart is a door.
This is what I hear, what I continue to hear, as I find ephemera for a spread in my art journal.
The heart is a door.
It makes me think of Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
If you have a deep scar, that is a door. If you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane like, that is a door.
I rip the zine from Mandy Steward, grabbing the phrase I need for a specific area of the page. It reads I am a maven for finding portals. And there, on the next page, resting on top of a picture of a door blooming with greenery and snatched from a travel magazine, reads another phrase: Here was a doorway to climb into a place that held everything I needed inside.
All of these things are why my mind is on another thing—a wild thing that grows roots and begs to be seen. My mind is circling it as if closing in on an outlaw.
The heart is a door.
And I, ever the Alice, laugh off the concern and push wide the door that opens into a territory in which I am all too familiar. I’ve been down this rabbit hole before, have felt the lure of the glowing red path that leads me to unfettered freedom.
I also am particularly fond of outlaws, having the hum of the wild frontier and the blood of my great grandma Blanche in my veins.
Down we go, I think as I hold my breath and jump.
Very quickly, I am surrounding by the familiar scent of decay. Things have died here. Things were forgotten here. Dreams, long ignored, shrivel and calcify—their bones left along the path.
I avoid those landmarks, knowing they’re not for me. I have my own bones to sing over—dusty and shriveled and isolated in a barren desert—they wait for me.
But first, this.
I have known I would need to return to this space for weeks.
There, to my left, is the redwood. Taller than the breath in my lungs, more robust than the fear of what might come, she waits.
If I look closely, I can see signs of life beginning to bloom along her bristled spine. At some point, she has been chopped—her fossilized branches lay around us but I can still feel the stories they carry.
I sit at her base, my back against hers, and listen.
She appeared for me in another journey—one where I embraced the inner wild and went to see about a woman with defiance in her name. I was shocked to see the decay, and even more so leveled by the way in which this grandmother had been severed. There was still wisdom here, though. Still hints of life.
Which is why I find myself back in this dystopian landscape where I was told that beneath the death—beneath the decay—was a rich underbelly bursting with vibrancy and growth.
I lay my hands in my lap, circling my thumbs together as my mind wanders.
Would she speak?
Would I hear her if she did?
And then, without warning, I feel her move against me—an intake of breath.
I freeze, afraid that any movement might spook her back into stasis.
“You have come to claim your dead.” She tells me.
I turn my head and rest my chin on my shoulder.
So it’s like this, I think.
I did not realize this would be the result, but looking around me, it does make sense. How could I sing over any of my bones unless I allowed myself to claim that which had already died?
Still, I can’t find my voice in order to respond, so I nod.
“Severing happens to us all,” she begins. “It happened to me without warning. One day I was reaching toward the stars and whispering secrets with the clouds. Before I knew it, there were those who laid claim to the pieces of me they wanted, willing to throw away and forget the rest.”
I swallow, recognizing the similarities to our stories.
“Once this started, it was easy for me to pretend it didn’t happen—that the pieces of me weren’t scattered and wasted. But I could hear them, singing the song that only I know. I could feel them like a phantom limb. I had to accept that I had been severed, but I had not been destroyed.”
“I don’t understand,” I whisper.
“Look underneath the branches,” she replies.
I glance around me at the graveyard of what used to be her canopy. Crawling toward piece nearest me, I bend down so my cheek rests against the soil. That’s when I see it.
Life. An entire ecosystem existing within the walls like its own universe.
I gasp.
“How is this possible?” I ask. “There is nothing but death here. You said yourself when I arrived—I am here to claim my dead.”
“I said that’s why you were here,” she admits. “But that was your reason for being here. It’s not why I needed to speak with you—why you were summoned back into this space.”
I run my fingers alongside her grooves, brushing against the tiny leaves bursting through her seams.
“Did you not notice the ways in which life was already showing herself here?” She asks. “Did you not feel my breath when you leaned against me?”
“Well yes, but…”
“You cannot have life without death.” She reminds me. “Every grave, every bit of compost, is a portal. A womb.”
“The heart is a door,” I whisper to myself, beginning to understand. But still…I shake my head, questions continuing to surface. I push my hands against my chest as if I can keep my own heart from cracking in two, the pain of all these pieces of me craving for wholeness and keening for someone to witness.
“How do you walk through the grief though? How do you continue to believe in life when it feels as if everything around you is ash?” I glance around me again, sighing at the desolation. “How do you take these pieces and make them live again? How do you make them whole?”
“You do it by understanding that your magic, your life force, your very existence is not dictated by what others have deemed as true. You run your finger alongside me skin and tell me that you do not feel the exact same hum of life that you feel when you look at all of my pieces?” She pauses. “You stare at my expanse and tell me that you do not see the ways in which I still bend toward the pieces that have been cut from me?”
I look around me, taking in the landscape again through new eyes.
Instead of desolation, I see wild.
Wild growth.
Wild and unencumbered life.
Mossy and earthy and whole in its own right.
All of the pieces, working together, creating something beautifully unique—with her as the center.
“You say you are here to claim your dead so that you may sing life over your bones,” she begins. “But what if there is life already waiting for you to learn your own language of wild? What if all you have to do is walk through that door of creation and bring all of your pieces with you—believing that every single one of them holds meaning and magic?”
“Even the severed pieces?” I ask.
“Especially those.” She replies. “Do not belittle any hint of wild you taste on your tongue—for that is a message from parts of you longing for freedom. Follow their lead. Sit against those liminal spaces just as you rest against me. The answers are there for everything you need to know.”
Her voice begins to quiet, echoing against my skin.
“You are whole, my love—even in the severing. The pieces of you call out not for healing but for you to recognizing them. See them. Love them. That is why you claim them—you are calling back every ounce of magic and power and knowing that you possess. You are walking free and wild with all of your parts in tandem. You are a universe, don’t ever forget that.”
I am about to ask more questions when stillness envelops me. I know then that she’s shifted into slumber and our conversation is over. It’s in that moment a glow appears on the other side of her trunk. I walk over, curious. This wasn’t here before.
But wasn’t it? A thought surfaces.
And then I remember. I did see a glow in her trunk, and nearly walked over to see, but had been distracted by the pieces of women who came before me wailing on their path back to submission. Their grief and fear, too much to bear, pulled my attention toward them and away from the way the light pulsed with mystery. I follow the light, shining in the dark, and come face to face with an entrance to a cave within her walls. I step forward, gingerly, propelled by curiosity. What I see stops me in my tracks, the beauty too much for me to understand.
You are a universe, this grandmother had told me. I didn’t understand what she meant until now.
Because here I stand, in the middle of a cosmic view with nebulas and shooting stars and a galaxy revealing colors I’ve never seen, the hum of her magic and power and life pulsing around me. I laugh out loud, knowing this too is a portal. This too is a door.
And so I jump into her expanse, taking all of my parts with me in the rebirth.
Special thanks to Stephanie Greene for leading me in an Inner Territory Journey where I met this Redwood Grandmother, as well as offering the Wild Soul prompt exploring where outlaws roam.
