doors-windows-portals

Inspired by: http://www.dailywriting.net/Doors.htm

(collage made from some of  my door photos)

Doors and windows, what is it about them that never ceases to fascinate us? Frequently photographed and illustrated they appeal to something deep within us. They are literary doors of possibility too. Open the cover of a book and you immediately step into another world.

Discovering Heather’s Soulfood Café was like opening the door of possibility for myself. I stepped into a world where I could write and create art in a supportive, non-judgemental environment. Indeed doors were to feature frequently in subsequent adventures where crossing through the portal was as important as the rest of the journey. Reviewing the 4 years in which I have been involved with SFC I found that I had written no less than 4 pieces about portals and had created at least 2 collages/images of doors.

When I first arrived at the Soul Food Café this is the first door I created this door

My door is in a little street paved with cobbles. Curiously enough the name of the street “rue pavée d’amour” means the street paved with love. Above the door there are two inscriptions “abandon inhibition all ye who enter here” and “in order for us to discover new lands we must be prepared to lose sight of the shore”. There are two panels in the lower part of the door, when these are open you can see, in one, a series of numbers. These represent the lotto that is life – thank goodness you don’t have to find the right combination to get through the door! Behind the other panel is a heart, for this indeed will be a journey to and through the heart.

You can read the other pieces here:

http://enchanteur.wordpress.com/2006/09/18/troubadour-sets-out/

https://traveller2006.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/desert-portal/

http://enchanteur.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/finally-made-it-through-the-portal/

Windows of opportunity – The eyes are the windows of the soul – Close one door and another one opens, etc. Thinking about how often references to doors are made during ordinary conversation I decided to see what quotations I could find on the internet. These are some of my favourites:

Door quotes:

“It is often the last key on the ring which opens the door” Proverb

“The greatest step is out the door.” German Proverb

“When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon the closed door that we don’t see the one that has opened for us.” Helen Keller

“Every wall is a door.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness” Christopher Morley

“A small key opens big doors.” Turkish Proverb

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” Walt Disney

“There are things known, and there are things unknown, And in between are the Doors”

Jim Morrison

“When you have shut your doors, and darkened your room, remember, never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone, but God is within, and your genius is within”

Epictetus

“Beware of the door with too many keys” Portuguese Proverb

“All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and secretly as a cat.” Walter de La Mare

“A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.” John Updike

“To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.” Anne Rice

“When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.” Jesse Jackson

“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment” Carl Sandburg

“Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.” Jan Myrdal

“A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.” Ogden Nash (same applies to a cat to my way of thinking!)

“The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.” Eleanora Duse

“Don’t ever slam a door; you might want to go back” Don Herold

“The back of one door is the face of another.” Proverb

“An open door invites callers.” Turkish Proverb

“You just have to believe in yourself when you’ve got something, and just keep pounding on the door, because if you pound long enough, somebody is going to open it.” Cynthia Weil

“I have been here before./ But when or how I cannot tell:/ I know the grass beyond the door,/ The sweet keen smell,/ The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti

“It is a dangerous business going out your front door.”J.R.R. Tolkien

“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself” Chinese Proverb

Walking around in Brussels at lunchtime two years ago, in the area near where I was working, I came across a terrace of houses probably dating back to the turn of the century. Each house had a different pattern of ironwork balconies gracing its facade and one of the houses had stained glass windows. Unfortunately there were no lights on inside which might have given an idea of the probable beauty of the designs.

Away from the terrace I found another house with a stucco-work “green man” type head next to the front door and a magnificient frieze, at the top of the building, featuring three panels of voluptuous ladies devouring bunches of grapes.

This started me thinking:

1) what sort of people live in a house decorated with panels of voluptuous ladies?  is the decoration linked to their mode of life? cultural (or any other) interests? or did they simply purchase the house because they liked it?

2) have you ever walked past a building and thought: ” that’s exactly the house I would like” ? If you were asked to make a picture of the house you would really like to inhabit, what would it look like?

Doors and windows, what is it about them that never ceases to fascinate us? Frequently photographed and illustrated they appeal to something deep within us. They are literary doors of possibility too. Open the cover of a book and you immediately step into another world.

Discovering Heather’s Soulfood Café was like opening the door of possibility for myself. I stepped into a world where I could write and create art in a supportive, non-judgemental environment. Indeed doors were to feature frequently in subsequent adventures where crossing through the portal was as important as the rest of the journey. Reviewing the 4 years in which I have been involved with SFC I found that I had written no less than 4 pieces about portals and had created at least 2 collages/images of doors.

When I first arrived at the Soul Food Café this is the first door I created