Doors Are Opening Before You

Are you counting the days?

Weeks?

Waiting for that new door to open before you? 

Perhaps it’s the hope of a new job. A new relationship. Your next home. Or a new life.

Sometimes in these moments, we are waiting for the thing, but we can’t see or even sense the door yet.

I’ve had this feeling before. 

A time I left something (a job, a marriage, a friendship, a community), but couldn’t yet see what was coming next. I had no sense of a new door available to me yet. 

At times, a door was opening up but it was around the corner and down the street.

Still, we can sometimes sense and trust it is there. 

If we hold true to what matters most to us—or to a vision we have for the future—the universe will conspire to support this dream. But for those new doors to open, we have to remain super clear about what we want. 

We can’t send mixed signals, such as “I want a new job in this other field, but I don’t think I’m qualified.”

Or “I want a new relationship, but I don’t believe there are any available people out there where I live.”

These mixed signals are confusing to the universe.

And if we are clear what we want, we can’t keep it a secret from the universe. 

Imagine this: We may even have to say our dream out loud to other people.

Joseph Campbell once said in an interview with Bill Moyers, “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you.”

Years ago, I was pursuing my MFA in poetry, and I took a course about the intersection of creativity and poetics.

We learned about the humble beginnings of poetry as a verbal art form, as fragments of poetry on monoliths, and how it evolved over time. And at the end of the semester, we had to write a paper about creativity.

I thought, “This is a creativity class! I don’t want to just write a paper. I want to do something creative!” 

I asked the professor if I could create a collage as my final project. And much to my surprise, he said, “Sure!”

The collage still hangs on the wall in my office.

On the collage, there is an image of a body swimming downward in a bright, blue body of water. To me, this was about “go deep or go home.” There is a snake, which to me was about transformation. A small picture of a big crowd symbolizing my desire to have a big impact. There’s also a flaming fire in the middle of it because as a Leo, I’m a fire sign. And a mask, because I want to take off my own mask and show up as my authentic self.

To hold the collage together, there’s an image of an angel looking down over all of it.

(Everyone needs at least one guardian angel.)

But one image in the collage always stayed with me: In the center of the frame, there’s a woman in a long, white, old-fashioned dress walking through an open doorway into a giant field.

Where is she going?

And what’s on the other side?

Even once we know where we are going, we don’t always know what’s on the other side. So how do we keep the faith when we are feeling the uncertainty and sometimes terror of that open door?

I recently came across a great meditation about opening doors. It’s a prayer, really. It’s from Growing Big Dreams: Manifesting Your Heart’s Desires through Twelve Secrets of the Imaginationby Robert Moss.

Here is the prayer:

"May my doors and gates and paths be open and the doors and gates and paths of those I love and my doors and gates and paths between the worlds. And may the doors and gates and paths of any who wish to do me or those I love any harm be closed. May it be so."

I now say this meditation each morning and ask that the doors open up before me. I pray that they open for others that I love. And I wish they fling open for the world (which seems to have a lot of slamming doors these days). 

Will you join me in calling for the opening of the gates?

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