I’ve always liked doors. They suggest to me something big — some possibility of change; becoming some other self. I used to believe in portals. I used to live with two people who erected a huge wooden portal in the fenced-in patio of our first story apartment. It was painted red (obviously) and they hung feathers from the top (like a dream catcher; they’d also drawn and written on the wood.) The portal leaned against the stucco patio wall; to enter you slung one leg over and crouched down til you were emerging from the other side, basically into the wall, where you then slithered out. I told no other friends but portaled through anytime I left home. My roommates and I never discussed where it could transport you, but we had imaginations. Close to two decades later my kids sat on the porch talking about portals when a man I had a crush on — our neighbor’s friend — returned for the summer and came over to say hi. I used the conversation to subtly indicate my coolness (having kids that invested in time/space travel and all.) I think it worked. It’s over a year later and I continue dabbling in the possibility of enormous, spontaneous internal change. Can it happen through portals? My kids are now into witchcraft; they’ve spent the morning making altars. I’m reading them a kids’ spell book that I thought they’d find boring — no Harry Potter level results; just encourages herbs, breathing, maybe believing in what you’re saying. It might be working. They seem to be understanding the simple power of belief. Of possibility — that maybe we get to declare that something is happening, so then maybe it is, or perhaps it will. It makes me think of doors. If I believe that I change when I go through them, maybe I do.