A packing list for crossing thresholds

You will never feel totally ready to cross. Courage is an ally but you also need luck and guts and a child-like wonder.

I spent much of my childhood looking for escape routes. Exit strategies. A way to get from here to there with finality and speed. 

When I was younger, I found relief in the limbs of trees, rough bark against bare legs, hugging the branches until night fell. I’d often “run away” outside, down the gravel driveway or through the pasture, following our horse Gabriel’s trails through the overgrown grass. Nature was my comfort, a portal promising endless adventure.

Iceland, 2018

Recently, I discovered the word egress, which sounds so graceful and not-at-all like the frantic running and chasing I did for most of my twenties. I think it’s a natural part of the human condition to look for ways out or through. To seek new environments when we’re experiencing pain or discomfort. 

Escape routes are really just doorways, passages, and portals. We hope that by stepping through them, we will change. A permanent transformation will occur, and we’ll have a passport to another world from which we do not have to return. 

“I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.”

― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Near the end of 2020, I was busy charting a map for a new world I hoped to enter. I wanted a deeper understanding of my family’s legacy. I longed to connect to the wisdom of indigenous healers and planned to try plant medicine for the first time. I thought that maybe by going backward, I could finally move forward, into a new landscape. 

Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash

The desert was calling to me, whispering behind ancient stone. But another door blew open in its place, a portal I was not ready to cross. Weeks before my solo road trip across the southwest, my Dad experienced a fatal heart attack. 

Death, like birth, is the most powerful of doorways, pulling everyone in its vicinity across its threshold. Suddenly, a strange world emerged. And I could never go back to the one I knew before.