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:

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/

http://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:

“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 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? or did they have it built for themselves ?

2) have you ever walked past a building and thought: ” that’s exactly the house I would like” ?

3) If you were asked to make a picture of the house you would really like to inhabit, what would it look like?

by Traveller

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

non wild things

Written in response to unleashing monsters

I searched my memories for wild things or wild happenings but couldn’t think of any until I remembered one of my favourite childhood songs – “the teddy bears picnic” although this hardly constitutes anything really wild.

The teddy bears’ picnic words by Jimmy Kennedy in 1932, music by John W. Bratton in1907

If you go down to the woods today

You’re sure of a big surprise.

If you go down to the woods today

You’d better go in disguise.

For ev’ry bear that ever there was

Will gather there for certain, because

Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

Ev’ry teddy bear who’s been good

Is sure of a treat today.

There’s lots of marvelous things to eat

And wonderful games to play.

Beneath the trees where nobody sees

They’ll hide and seek as long as they please

Cause that’s the way the teddy bears have their picnic.

If you go down to the woods today

You’d better not go alone.

It’s lovely down in the woods today

But safer to stay at home.

For ev’ry bear that ever there was

Will gather there for certain, because

Today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

Picnic time for teddy bears

The little teddy bears are having a lovely time today

Watch them, catch them unawares

And see them picnic on their holiday.

See them gaily gad about

They love to play and shout;

They never have any care;

At six o’clock their mummies and daddies,

Will take them home to bed,

Because they’re tired little teddy bears.

So this post is really about childhood memories.

When I was about 6 my class at kindergarten went on a teddy bears picnic. My teddy bear had a cough pill tin for a lunch box filled with miniature cheese sandwiches.

Later my sister and I were given a small bear each. Hers was brown and mine was white and I called mine “Syrian Bear”. Both bears had joints so you could move their arms and legs. They also had a small tail and by moving their tails you could move their heads. Syrian Bear lived in my dolls house – a Georgian style house with a colonnaded entrance and a balcony. You could take the whole of the front off.

Inside were 4 rooms. Upper left was the bedroom, upper right the sitting room, lower left the dining room and lower right the kitchen. Dad papered the walls with pages from a wallpaper sample book. The curtains were made of the same material as my school uniform summer dress. One year in a Christmas cracker I got a miniature stags head resplendent with horns and this adorned the wall above the fireplace in the dolls house sitting room. A friend of mine had an antique dolls house and she gave me a couple of pieces of furniture, one of which was a high backed chair in faded blue silk. I remember re-covering it in pink satin but the glue left hard patches under the satin and it never really looked as glamorous as I had hoped. Judith also gave me a miniature flower vase; about the size of a slim thimble it was made of clear glass with dark blue and red vertical stripes. At some point I also acquired a pair of miniature bronze candlesticks (I found one the other day which I will put in Enchanteur’s magic bag). Syrian Bear slept in the lid of small box on a piece of artificial fur fabric. The pictures on the walls were torn from those sheets of faux Christmas postage stamps. That was the only room which had a fitted carpet. I think the sitting room just had a mat. The dining room and kitchen were by far the best equipped. The dining room had a dining table and chairs and a sideboard. The kitchen had a cooker and storage units which were stuffed with miniature cutlery, crockery and plates of food. If you have ever read Beatrix Potter’s “tale of two bad mice” you will remember that the mice steal plates of food from the dolls house – those plates of food were just like the ones in my dolls house kitchen. Later Syrian Bear was joined by a small white cat which slept in a small wicker picnic hamper. As I acquired more furniture there was no longer enough room in the dolls house so Dad made me a two-roomed annexe from an old orange box. Sometimes I used to borrow my brother’s wooden train set and would load SB, the cat, other visitors like my sister’s bear and all the food, crockery and cutlery in the cat’s picnic hamper, into the wagons and take them all off on train journeys around the bedroom on wet days or out in the garden on sunny days.

Trains of thought led me to chains of thought and other childhood memories.

The song ‘Nellie The Elephant’ was written in 1957 by Ralph Butler and Peter Hart.

To Bombay A traveling circus came

They brought an intelligent elephant

And Nellie was her name

One dark night

She slipped her iron chain

And off she ran to Hindustan

And was never seen again

Ooooooooooooo…

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk

And said goodbye to the circus

Off she went with a trumpety-trump

Trump, trump, trump

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk

And trundled back to the jungle

Off she went with a trumpety-trump

Trump, trump, trump

Night by night

She danced to the circus band

When Nellie was leading the big parade

She looked so proud and grand

No more tricks For Nellie to perform

They taught her how to take a bow

And she took the crowd by storm

The head of the herd was calling

Far, far away

They met one night in the silver light

On the road to Mandalay

So Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk

And said goodbye to the circus

Off she went with a trumpety-trum

Trump, trump, trump

Ooooooooooooo…

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk

And said goodbye to the circus

Off she went with a trumpety-trump

Trump, trump, trump

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk

And trundled back to the jungle

Off she went with a trumpety-trump

Trump, trump, trump.

I often wondered what a circus elephant would pack in a trunk – my guess is posters and post cards of all the performances she had participated in and all the places she had visited while with the circus, along with some bits of her costumes and photos. Maybe she kept a journal too ….

by Traveller