If you’re lucky enough to step outside on a midsummer evening and the sky blesses you with its spreading fingers of cloud; if you can leave your work behind, shut the door on the day, and give yourself up to a walk; if you look around and set your mind in gear for magic: then, the portals open.
You may spot a slice of sunshine in the distance and find yourself crawling through a gap in the hedge to reach it. Light and time shifts, the air settling around you. You pay the ferryman and drift out over the water. You journey across thick grass plains and through tunnels of trees. You are cloaked in the moment, feeling the twist of the planet and your lungs filling with new air. In the flickering distance, a white horse grazes and you think you can probably start a revolution.
What are portals if not the chance for change? In stories, they transport us from one reality to another – a different world, a different history, a diminishing space between the pastoral and cyberspace. But in our everyday lives, portals can more simply allow us to slip between one state of being and another.
Last night I joined a group of locals practicing yoga amongst the Devils Quoits, a circle of standing stones I will write more about another time. We were encouraged to imagine ourselves moving the elements above us to the rhythm of our breath. On the walk home, the landscape was lit by an all-but-full moon and we swore we could hear cicadas in the branches above us.* I resist the notion of mysticism, but even I could recognise that we had strolled through a portal of sorts.
Can you find a portal to enter today?
Take your phone/camera on a walk and seek out gaps, holes, gateways, or anything else that might act as a portal. When you get home, spend half an hour writing a scene or a poem about it – where does it lead? How did it come into being? What happens when you step through it?
One of my favourite portal devices in literature is Philip Pullman’s ‘subtle knife’, Æsahættr, which can be used to cut windows between different worlds. The windows are great opportunities to explore, but each cut also generates dangerous forces. Give yourself or your character a subtle knife and put them in a position where but opening a portal to a new world will help them solve a crisis. They know the risks. How do they react?
Enjoy midsummer. It’s a full moon tonight – appreciate it, and write down one thing that will change tomorrow.
Actually a grasshopper warbler!
It was a white unicorn!