Of Portals and Passageways

My forest therapy guide training finished at a Vermont retreat called Basecamp at Beaver Falls. The four-day immersive experience culminated in a three-hour solo walk, a rite of passage marking the transition from student to guide.

We all gathered around a giant golden rod circle in the meadow and were told that once we stepped inside this portal, our individual journeys had begun. No one could see us during this time, nor could they interact with us. We had the magic of invisibility and the freedom to explore the woods, stream and meadows without worry of being disturbed. We would signal our completion of this solo time by returning to the golden rod circle and stepping inside once more; only then would they know it was OK to interact with us, as we had returned.

When I returned to Cazenovia, New York, I re-created the portal in my backyard, marking my own space that could transform an ordinary experience into whatever I needed it to be.

Often, time spent in the portal was still pretty ordinary-morning coffee with my dog, cats or chickens-but mostly, it felt pretty awesome. Afterall, I was in the portal, and it linked me with Basecamp, friends and time spent there. (My home portal also offered my family the permission to ignore me, for many times I was reminded they couldn’t hear me, because I was in the portal. Ha!)

What really are portals? Essentially, they’re gateways, doors or passageways. Humans have been creating special portals for millennia, often to facilitate the transition of the everyday experience to the extraordinary. In 2024, my daughter and I visited Newgrange, a 5,200-year old passage tomb in Ireland’s Ancient East. Built before the pyramids and Stonehenge, Newgrange is a World Heritage Site, and is just one of hundreds of portal tombs built by Stone Age peoples throughout Ireland. (We were also convinced they were the birthplaces of Teletubbies.)

We were lucky to be able to go inside and found that as large as Newgrange is, to go in is to enter a dark, tight, 62-ft long stone passageway leading to a round, center chamber. There, with our tour group, we experienced a recreation of how the rising sun on the Winter Solstice illuminates the chamber with a brilliant beam of light. It was fantastic-to be in absolute darkness, immersed in the solid quiet of stone upon stone, and then to have this beam of sunlight shine through.

The Stone Age farming people who built Newgrange were intimately connected with nature. I don’t think our modern culture can really understand this, as living with and in and a part of nature-the movement of the stars across the sky, the cycles of birth and death-was woven into every part of their existence.

Yet, they, too, needed to create a place and space where humans could experience the extraordinaryness of life. Sunrise on the Winter Solstice at Newgrange marks the shortest day of the year and the beginning of the upcoming harvest, the coming of light and life. It is darkness and light. It is more than this singular moment and marks a precise moment.

As cold late autumn winds blew my dried golden rod stalks away, I abandoned my backyard portal for the comfort of being inside. I drew spirals in notebooks that reminded me of being here, and more than here, and played with the idea that they could transport me anywhere, particularly as sunlight waned and more darkness settled in.

When the first thick, fluffy snow arrived after Thanksgiving, I visited my parents to make large, spiralling portals in their fields. Their property sits on a wide expanse of open land, and somehow the fields with spirals lifted my attention to the sky, clouds and distant glow of the sun. When my partner and I traveled to Coastal California in early December (our first real trip without the kids-a portal in and of itself), I was eager to get to the beach and create another giant spiral; it could be my antidote to March in upstate New York. And there, we made a remarkable discovery….

At Pescadaro State Beach, just north of Santa Cruz, someone had created a huge curving, expansive portal. The tide was out, and we had been exploring pools filled with starfish, hermit crabs and sea anemones. Then we climbed over a giant rock, and there the spiralling portal was.

Darkness and light. East Coast and West Coast. Land and sea. Here and more than here.

Perhaps, as I had walked the snowy field portal alive in Cazenovia just days before, this sand spiral emerged beneath the waves, to be revealed as the tide inched out.

More likely, though, a person, maybe an hour before our arrival, danced the spiral awake on the sand. And they did so knowing that as the ocean crept back ashore, their design would wash away, and the beach would soon again be water, sea life, waves and wind.

With this first Inspire e-letter, I invite you to consider how we each are more than this one moment. We are here and more than here. We are connected to the movement of the sun and stars, and to our individual, yet collective, human experiences. We are more than what we know and who we think we are.

What portals or passageways exist for you in your life? What can you create to remind yourself that you, like all of us, are not alone, even if you feel alone? You are here, and more than here, and this grounded expansiveness is inexplicably entwined in our everyday lives.

Wishing you peace, light and an experience of transformation and connection.