Doorways and windows have always been intriguing portals for me. Usually I stand outside looking in, curious about what the lives inside are like. Skittish about being thought a peeping Thomasina, I nevertheless peer sideways into lighted windows at dusk and walk my dog through neighborhoods with lovely gardens that offer clues about their gardeners' lives. I most enjoy passing houses in Central America where the doorway on the street opens into a cool courtyard with wooden chairs and hammocks shaded by plants. Fascinating are the hints they give about family and relationships. Doorways are thresholds that give glimpses into the lives of others.

Glancing into courtyards
Beyond the open doors of Latin houses,
I spy lush gardens
And grandmothers rocking
In cared teak chairs
As babies crawl in the home's heart.

Traffic on the street
Compels my ear but not my eye.
Do the grandmothers see
This traveler at the door
With open sky behind her,
Back pack her only burden?

In some cultures, one bows, prostrates, or touches the hand to the doorway in passing. Doorways or gates are traditional places of sacrifice and judgment. Jacob wrestled with the angel at "the gate of Heaven," and the Gospel admonishes us to "enter by the narrow gate." Jews attach a mezuzah to the doorpost, and Catholics place a holy water font nearby. Windows hold similar spiritual significance. They speak of possibility, penetration, consciousness. Paintings of the Annunciation of the angel to Mary often feature a window, a doorway, or a portico symbolizing the coming of the divine into our human space. At the basilica in Assisi, Viterbo's Annunciation shows Mary sitting on a porch and the angel spanning two windows opening into a starry night sky. Grace is flowing both ways!

Thresholds of all kinds lie between two modes of being, inside and outside, past and future, sleeping and waking, conscious and unconscious, sacred and profane. The prime liminal moment is the one between sleeping and waking, a time that artists prefer for the access it gives to the unconscious. Thomas Merton understood dawn to be this point vierge, the threshold between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. He noted carefully the woods and birds at dawn when creation in its innocence asks permission "to be" once again. For humans, the point vierge is the nothingness at our center that belongs entirely to God.

I live surrounded by woods and sleep near a large double window framing a darkness that usually shows some light from moon or stars. In the night, I wake to total silence and the pregnant woods beyond the window. Or do I wake? Perhaps I am still dreaming in the elemental presence of the woods and the quiet.

My midnight window frames ebony
until the stars puncture the sky
and the moon, half full or more, lightens
the aisles between the winter trees.

Falling to sleep in the dark, I hear
only stirrings from the dog's dream,
the hum of the refrigerator,
and green wood crackling in the stove.

Meanwhile the snow flings its flimsy veil
across the land, and the veil clings
'til day. In the light, I see the tracks
deep and cloven from the night deer,

syllabary from the birds' fingers,
and ovals brushed by belly hair
of the low-slung foxes on their way.
Some other tracks I do not know,

But what I can name says enough.
The dark beyond our sleeping
is full beyond our knowing
and not the emptiness we think.

 

Evelyn Mattern, sfcc