On portals and symbols

Some imagination

Who hasn’t ever fantasised about such image? Ok, maybe this is only my imaginary-inclined mind… Well I guess I’m not the only one with such a mind that like this powerful symbol of a threshold you pass and land in a different world. The impression that if you just take one step further, everything will change.

Have you ever had this impression while seing ornate portals of big mansions? or cathedrals? They are all so very symbolic. They intend to evoke this feeling: now you’re in a different place. In essence, you’re in a different realm now. And it’s announced by the shape, the arc, and the symbols that are engraved or built around. Add a lantern and you have, by night, the weird impression of being guided here. That it is an equivalent of a lighthouse, but on land. You expect an inn to be here, to host your travelling feet and heart.

We travel through portals. The internet is a portal. Imagination is a portal. Portals are everywhere. In many ways, portals are transitions, thresholds, borders, interfaces. They hold the power of changing environment, atmosphere, capabilities.

What I like about the portal image is how you can take it both ways. You can journey in another world for a moment and then come back. It really speaks to me to imagine that imagination is a whole other world, and then when you write it, you come back to your normal world, crossing back the portal bearing the gifts you found there.

Some people are defined by the symbolism of portals. People in deep connection with the unseen, the imaginary. Mediums, artists, mystics… Those people make a living out of embodying this symbol. We all have driving symbols in our lives, archetypes, that are very broad categories of being that we share and enact, sometimes. Most of the time. They’re like the repository of human behaviours we all take forms from.

So a portal person is this frontier person between the outside world, the etheric, and the material world. It’s a person who is in permanence connected to another version of reality. It’s a person who sees the reality in front of her but also feels all the weight of the unseen, all that is not perceived, all that is potential. Sometimes something emerges from that dark place, a spark, an insight, an intuition, an instinct and a portal manifests that into reality. Bridging the two worlds. Like a portal does.

We are all portals. We don’t necessarily know it though. Next time you cross or observe a portal, check in and see what mood it brings, what emotions, what symbolic. Maybe you’ll discover something about yourself!

Symbols are portals in essence, sym-bolical is etymologically what brings things together, these two worlds I’ve been speaking about, while the dia-bolical is what separates.

One of the first paths towards seing the world in more colours is seeing it as symbolic, archetypal.

It’s fun. Try it out!