Throw open the portals!

Happy New Year.

My daily diary is a perpetual kind simply titled Spiritual Diary.  Each day provides an inspirational quote primarily from Paramahansa Yogananda’s writings.  For many years (decades in some cases) I’ve made cryptic entries along with noting the year, day of the week and location of my entry.  Throw open the portals was a highlight taken from the January 1st 2012 quote.  That particular date was a Sunday and 2012 was a leap year.  Most likely I selected the phrase to herald the beginning of our winter snow-bird residency in Florida.

Here is the diary’s entire selection:

‘With the opening of the New Year, all the closed portal of limitations will be thrown open and I shall move through them to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled.’ – Yogananda

An ambitious but not unrealistic challenge for any time never mind for the calendar year’s countdown!  I envision portals ready, willing and waiting to be opened.   Every year since 2012 I have asked myself:  Why are the portals closed?  Was I aware they existed?  Did I tug on a doorknob, feel it stick and stopped pulling?  Was I afraid to even try?  Or did I hesitate, wanting to ask permission to try?  Ugh, the last is uncomfortably familiar.

A portal is more than a door or doorway (from Latin porta ‘gate’).  Today I read it coupled with the term ‘web’ as in web portal; the entryway to a vast cornucopia of information: the world wide web.  Seems appropriate to be opening a closed portal of limitations for the new year.  If I’m going to open a portal I want it to lead me to a better place.

By the way, don’t you think that Benjamin Franklin would’ve loved the world wide web?  Perhaps he returned as a web developer or has already returned for a while as Steve Jobs!

But portals that lead to vaster fields, where my worthwhile dreams of life will be fulfilled is thrilling to conceive.  There’s so much in here that I don’t know where to begin.  Vastness alone is worthy of pursuit.  Greater than a 360 degrees purview, vastness has no limit.  (Vast: Latin vastus ‘void, immense’)  It’s good to press the cranial boundaries for a peek at vistas…   Yet a boundary-less expanse is difficult for us map-bound, identity-soaked, habit-logged beings to envision.

And worthwhile dreams of life.  Now this takes true soul-searching.  More than ticking off a to-do list (of which my mother was always fond of creating and checking off).  Worthwhile.  Worthy of time’s valuable portion.  Will be fulfilled…  Ah, fulfillment – ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.’   That’s what the prospect of fulfillment feels like to me.

For the beauty of it, here’s part of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech where this line barged into my fulfillment musings –

‘Tis a consummation
devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,
for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
must give us pause.

To be continued… of course.

Title photo: My husband Kevin pulling on the imposing doors inside a replica of the Parthenon; centerpiece of Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee.  (By the way, the park became Nashville’s first wireless internet park.  Vastness.)  You’ll notice that Kevin smiles with confident anticipation that these doors will, indeed, open.   He’s always had that way with doors.  No portal too vast for him!

Today this Parthenon is a museum adorned with a not-so-little gem, a glittering statue of Athena.

‘The re-creation of the 42-foot statue Athena is the focus of the Parthenon just as it was in ancient Greece. The building and the Athena statue are both full-scale replicas of the Athenian originals.”  http://www.nashville.gov/Parks-and-Recreation/Parthenon.aspx