Doors

A Consideration at Dawn on South End Point

I’m writing this introduction on Saturday evening after a day that began with rain, but rallied to mixed skies and pleasant temperatures. In the afternoon I walked a favorite route along North Shore Road by Bantam Lake, where I began to think about…doors. This is how it happens sometimes. So, on Sunday morning, I’ll rise early and head to a place I will always hold close to my heart — South End Point in East Haven, Connecticut — as fine a place for a sunrise as one could imagine. My plan is to sit on the rocks exposed by the good graces of a low tide and ponder some more about doors that I’ve passed through.

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As I arrive at South End Point and park on a dead end, the sky is already awash in brilliant predawn colors from east to southeast, and a variety of clouds smears the low horizon. I skip down into a gully that forms a tidal creek, today nearly empty save for a trickle of water flowing through at a slack low tide. I easily hop across it, and walk past the sheen of a muddy, rocky bottom out to the darkly colored, mostly-intertidal rocks and the small field of sea grass that form the point. I find a high spot to sit upon, and notice the clouds and rapidly changing light with dawn on the way. There is a hump-shaped cloud formation that I could have easily mistaken for a distant mountain on coastal Long Island if there were such a thing, but the dawning quickly reveals the truth of it. Every sunrise has its signature, and this one is about change and transitions. I am reminded of those doors.

I’ve spent time here before. In fact, it was not far from this spot where the idea of documenting these pilgrimage trips to dawn first came to mind. It is a glorious place in all seasons, the kind of place that inspires. This morning, as the gulls flit all about and squawk in the crisp, winter-like chill, a wispy breeze gingerly textures the water’s surface, and a deliciously foul, briny tidal aroma charges the air as the sun arrives to rule the sky. I feel as though I might have cracked open a closed door in the returning, but it won’t become a habit.

I like to keep a good thought about passing through any door — the turning of the knob, the push, the movement in, the willingness to do these things. Doors equal change and imply uncertainty. My leaving the open door of a flying airplane for the first time comes to mind here. And yes, the words first time do suggest there were other times. Many, in fact — a skydiving habit developed, but I’ll do just about anything for a good metaphor. Think, letting go.

It could well be that every step walked is a kind of door — the movement forward, the change, the one-moment-to-the-next of it. From what was to what now is. I once had a mystical summoning to my first pilgrimage in the timeless space of one step:

From an early Substack post, About a Place, quoting my book, Into the Thin —

My foot left the ground, just another step as I walked along briskly on a hot summer day. In the time it took for my foot to return to the ground, Spain’s Camino de Santiago, everything about it and the absolute all of it, permeated the absolute all of me as a fully lived reality. Time stood down to an eternal now, and here became something beyond place. I thought I’d lost my mind.

Sunrise and sunset strike me as doors also — openings, invitations, a call to limitless possibility, the beckoning of the infinite to all its finite, unaware forms. Doors then take on the station of something sacred, an unexpected message received at the end of a long dark night, a way in to something full and whole and quite wonderful.

And in the spirit of my own habitual wonderings, I have to ask, “Who is the one who leads me to these doors? Who is the one who opens them?” It may just be that all really does fall into one, and not so much is there a life I live, but more, life that is lived.

In either case, it would be important to close the last door behind me — ever so gently.

Peace,

Stephen