We need to talk about your door - #168

Actually, all your doors.

An audio version, in case you’d like to faff about in the kitchen or garden instead of screening.

The migration is underway as countless birds grace us with their presence for a day at a time before heading further south. One of the purest treasures of this season is hearing the ever-changing chorus outside. And so, we keep the door to the screened-in patio cracked open. We have various large stones Ben has picked up on his hikes to act as doorstops, lest the incessant wind of this alpine valley hold the door wide open all day. We want a little music, a little feline freedom—not the entirety of spring weather.

On a particularly gusty day, I found myself having to go in and out of the house several times. On the opposite side of the cabin from the patio is our “front” door. I question the validity of this door’s frontness because this door is, in fact, on the side of our house. There’s no arguing that the grand facade with its large south-facing windows, house-spanning deck, and prayer flags lapping in the wind is the front. And so, people come in through the woodshop beneath the falling-off deck all the time.

In my pleas with the universe to make life a bit easier, one of my more desperate efforts included incorporating some feng shui. I have a hard time believing that keeping certain colors or spices in specific corners of my house can make a difference in my bank account, but I do like the idea of balancing the elements, and logs know I’ve got enough wood, fire, earth, metal, and water in this house to do it.

The first area to tackle was, without question, that “front” door. As far as my understanding goes, feng shui says that the entryway to your house be light filled, clutter free, and obvious. Ours was not. It was a dark cavern with a heavy wooden door where we kept donation items. In the winters, we let the snowdrift that cocooned our home fully subsume that door, choosing instead to always enter through the shop or the catio where we could bang our snowy boots about. When we first saw this cabin on a brisk February morning four years ago, the man who’d built it had pinned cardboard over the interior of that door with a falsa blanket pinned over that. The door was not in use. The door was dead.

And that was bad feng shui.

Shovels quake at the sight.

As we try to recover our financial footing, Ben has been taking more carpentry jobs at various wealthy homes always under renovation, and if there is one thing that it seems wealthy people love to replace, it’s doors. Their doors can never be thick enough, big enough, heavy enough, sealed enough, and so to the bin their old doors go, having served a purpose once and that’s enough.

But once is not enough, and so Ben has been rescuing doors. There are, currently, maybe three doors scattered around the perimeter of our house waiting for repair or use, and one lucky winner was installed in the front. It’s a half-light metal door, painted barnyard red with white trim around the glass, and it changed our life.

The eastern sun pours through this door as soon as she climbs over the ridge. She pools in the formerly cavernous front hall, dripping down the staircase to the shop floor, and scattering through the open stairs above to the loft, kissing the plants on the other side of the house. It illuminates the center of the house, and so, it illuminates our day. A dracaena plant basks in her direct light for an hour before daydreaming in the lingering ambience of her glow for the rest of the day. Our shoes are all lined up, the rug is swept, the dirty old sconce was replaced, and now there hangs a poster of all the birds in North America. We shovel the steps every morning in the winter. We trim the sprigs of mint every spring. And I’ve even taken to tossing a bit of cinnamon over the entry on the first of every month.

It is a beautiful front door, and so on that blustery day, I was using it.

And every time I opened it, the door to the catio slammed shut.

The wind and the suction and the flow would create such a need for that door to shut upon the other opening that it would shake the whole house. It would rattle the blinds and the plates and my bones, and every time I would open the front door, I would forget all over again that the patio door was going to close with such a force as to derail whatever I had just remembered I was doing again and again and again.

I would storm over to the patio door and set up various shoes and door jams, and still, it would find a way. I stomped about complaining, for the umpteenth and unending time, about the wind.

It would be days later when something would occur to me so delightful, so twee and sweet, that I would chuckle to myself. I was listening to a podcast and someone shared the trite and banal idiom that when one door closes, another one opens. Except this isn’t true. No doors should open if those doors are properly latched. And in reality, a door will only unexpectedly close on its own if another door has already opened.

This idiom is backwards.

When one door opens, it violently shuts another one elsewhere in your house.

You may find that if you’re open to feng shui, you may also be receptive to this thinking: that a door shutting on you isn’t a prompt to go find some open door, but rather that something big and capacious has opened to you and it is the one who shut the other door. It is an insistence, an importunity even, that you come to where the wind is, where something pulls and calls. A door only shuts because something else has already swung open and demanded it.

Of course we have a hard time listening to these open doors with all the door jams and rocks and shoes we cram into the ones we already have open. And when we insist on keeping them open, it is ever harder for other doors to open.

But if you find yourself at a job site and come across an old door in a dumpster that has good bones and great light and you have a snowdrifted walkway you don’t use to an old wood wall that never swings open, perhaps you can choose to open that door yourself. Perhaps you can be the one who calls, the one who swings the other door shut.

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Cabin Notes: a space to call one's own

Some other good Shangrilogs reads for your Sunday leisure:

Regrets - #148

Will you stay? - #124

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