My portal to the divine

Once you glimpse the divine—touch the hem of her silk dress—you begin to recognize her everywhere. The first portal may disappear beneath years of concrete, city streets, and responsibility, but once you’ve entered it, you spend the rest of your life finding your way back.

And this is how it has been with the memory I had of the wildflower field, the clearing in the forest I came upon in my childhood when I was walking alone through the woods.

As I came toward the trees where the clearing began, I heard the whispering of the maple, the throaty laughter of the oak and the sigh of the tall skinny pine trees, and they all parted and bent like dancers rounding their spines to invite me to enter. The tops of the bent trees rustled on the ground as they formed an invitation, even though there was no wind.

And what I saw beyond the trees I cannot describe to you with just words – not the scent, not the silence where even the bees seemed to have stopped humming, not the colors that weren’t in any crayon box from my childhood, not the light which beckoned me to enter.

There in the clearing was a sea of thousands of blooms, endless flowers I had never seen in my mother’s expert gardening hands, flowers that had never bloomed from bulbs she pressed into the cold earth or from small plastic containers from the nursery.

And the field didn’t end, it was an infinity of blooms.

The sky above that field that was not our sky, it was a gateway to another place.

My eight year old self knew if I stepped into that field, I would never be able to go home again. Was I Dante that day, pressing my fingers through the thin skin of this world?

Had I been given a glimpse of another dimension?

I ran home, hearing my heart and my blood race through the maze of capillaries, past the wasp nests, over the logs, round the pond, crossing underneth the giant willow tree that held my stories, pushing through the front metal door of my childhood home, and finding my mother at her typewriter on deadline.

I insisted she follow me – my mother the gardener, the storyteller. I took her hand and took her through the forest so she could see, too.

She followed me back under the willow tree, over the log, past the ducks, only this time, when I was sure we came to the place where the field was, the trees stood like soldiers, unyielding, and unbending. They didn’t whisper or open, and there was no field - just more trees behind them.

Finally, when the cool night breeze came in and the shadows left, my mother got down on her knees and looked into my eyes.

She said I believe what you saw, but it was for you. Do you understand that? It wasn’t for me.

She held my crying shoulders.

Why me, and not my mother, who worshipped the bloom?

Why couldn’t I share this with the woman who gave birth to me and carried the earth under her orange fingernails? Why not the woman who cupped small creatures in her hands and sang to them while she dropped them back into her legendary gardens?

I grew up and I forgot that field.

Life became apartments and traffic and deadlines and responsibility.

But every now and then I caught a glimpse of that portal through a painting or a song—Van Gogh’s blazing Cherry Blossoms or the Flower Duet from Lakmé—and now when I walk Hanalei Bay in winter.

Even at the edge of the ocean, I can feel the trees bending again to invite me in.

Perhaps memory isn’t a record of the past after all, but the way the divine finds its way back to us, climbing into our lap again and again.

Field with flowers byIvan Didovodiuk

This essay was read in my opening class of our six week series The Hundred Acre Heart, where writers in our community wrote their own stories exploring imagination and the portals that took them there, both in childhood and adulthood. For Christopher Robin it was the woods, for Lucy it was the wardrobe door to Narnia, and for Mary the long forgotten garden.

Ursula Guin wrote every imagination is an act of hope.

Laura Lentz is the founder of LITerati Academy and the author of STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey and Freeing the Turkeys.