The Portal

I walked a secret beach as the light came up. My mind moved in concert with the ocean rolling in to my left.

In the distance, at the wrack line, I saw an enormous piece of driftwood positioned in such a way that all its branches shot straight up into the sky.

I adjusted my course to investigate and beheld a sixty-foot trunk of a willow. There were beaver marks its entire length. It was the single largest piece of beaverwood I’d ever encountered. It might be the biggest one on earth.

And it was still alive! Green buds were sprouting forth into tiny little branches. It might live for years. A high tide might lift into a nearby place where it could reroot.

I started gathering wood to build a fort within this titanic piece of beaverwood. I built. I interlocked. I hoisted. More wood. More building. More bending and weaving of the branches and spars.

I stepped back to apprise the fort.

It was no fort. I was building a portal of some kind, one with no front or rear entrance. Just an entrance, an opening to somewhere in the mind, the heart, to freedom, to bliss.

One simply had to walk through.

I realized I’d never built a portal before. It just came to me as I built with driftwood. I never build with any preconceived notion. I just let it flow. That is why I build on the beach and will continue to build forts or portals or thrones until I die

Just start building and see where it goes. Writing is sometimes like that for me, but making something out of driftwood is something entirely different in my creative mind. Body, too.

You sweat when you build. I don’t sweat when I write. There’s something right there.