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On doors, aliveness, and letting life in

By: Marjory Mejia

How do you greet life, dear ones? What do you invite into the intimacy of your home to nourish your soul? It feels wonderful to be greeted with care, attention, and love. Our whole being is able to exhale more deeply.

I’ve been meditating on ways in which we let life in and out. What marks this passage in our physical spaces is the door, the entryway into our lives. The door is a threshold that demarcates the boundary between inner and outer. It mediates and adjusts the charge or transition between inside and outside.

The entrance gives a glimpse of what is to come inside. It makes our walls permeable. Thus, it is the quintessential symbol of opportunities entering and leaving, opening and closing, arriving and departing, inhaling and exhaling. The door unveils our relationship to a sense of surprise, possibility, and mystery, to the unknown. Moreover, a door with chipped-off paint, a rusted door handle, and cracked bottom may instill a negative vibe in the person standing at the entry. Even something as simple as a Door Handle when styled right, can make a person feel welcome and homely.

How do you want to feel every time you arrive home? What would you like to be reminded of as you close the door behind you? What would you like to awaken in your heart and soul? Enchantment, wonder, tranquility, relaxation, aliveness?

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

How do we invite a sense of aliveness? Take a loot at your entryway. There are elements that you can use to create a welcoming, warm, inviting entrance that celebrates this connection between your outer and inner life creating both a sense of demarcation and continuity. You can think of it as a filtering zone.

Brighten up this often neglected space, so it can shift and re-center your energy every time you come through the door and leave to meet the world, so it becomes a bell of awareness in your consciousness. Let this area be a clutter free zone with flowers, plants, a welcoming mat, symbols to bless and protect your space, a designated area for shoes inside if you have a shoe free home.

Imagine the entrance of your home signaling the nature of your home to the world. Infuse it with love and bits of your soul. Let it recalibrate your being and shake your soul alive. I love the idea of the entryway into our homes both guarding the sanctuary inside and ushering us into the world in the right state of mind.

I hope you enjoy these beautiful entryways that welcome, celebrate, and embrace life. They are wild, artful, whimsical, serene and yet playful and bursting with life, pulsing with a rhythm of their own:

In the magical and indeed lyrical, The poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about the phenomenology of the home dwelling as a place for dreaming, thinking, feeling and being. Some of his thoughts on doors:

How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life. ~ Gaston Bachelard

This Spring and Summer, may we continue to release what does not serve our expansion. May we learn to receive what calls forth our growth. May we pick our guests wisely. And to the doors that close and the doors that open in our lives and hearts, gracias.

With love,