The Path of a Portal Note: This piece was submitted by a group of Burlington-based artists. They have chosen to remain anonymous to give power to the story and the art rather than the artists.
I
n the woods, there is a crossroads, a place where a smaller trail branches from the main one taking a different direction, and then another, even smaller, leads in another direction. The winding paths create a place in the woods, a place where you may naturally want to linger a moment and slow your pace. You can continue along the well-worn trail in the direction you were walking or perhaps turn aside, pause. Here is a place where you make a choice. Which way to go? To stop, look a little more closely, to wonder what is there.
It was here, at this place, we stopped. In the early morning, before the sun had fully risen. We were a group of friends wanting to make something and we were looking for the right place to make it. Here, the crossroads said, here. So here we did our work. We rolled logs from the woods for seating — two people could easily sit six feet apart — to rest, to look around, to talk, to reflect. Two locust trees seemed to watch over this place, tall sentinels to this place in the woods. Here, between those trees, where the paths branched, we made an arch, a place to walk through if you chose the divergent path. With grapevines, driftwood, birch bark, and hemp twined together, we wove a portal. With quiet chat, pausing now and then to see what was emerging, we wove in and through each other's work, twining together our hope and love for all that life is. With respect for place, for ourselves, each other, and our fellow beings, the portal took shape and came alive. It was beautiful. We wanted our conversation to branch like the paths and include other voices. This was our intention, our desire. Knowing that others would be called to this place, we built a way to continue this conversation with those who would choose to step off the main path and through the portal. We made a hand-carved box and filled it with handmade paper cut into soft shapes and tied with bits of twine. On the box, we carved a question that we had been asking each other. A question that helped us connect, and remember what we knew in the midst of all that was unknown — about the pandemic, and about the changes in our lives: "What's getting you through?" Later, after we had completed our work and gone home, the conversation did continue there in the woods. Many people walk that main path, and, that week, some slowed their walk to look at something unexpected in the woods along their regular route. Some stopped, those whose curiosity caught their time and attention; they stepped through the portal. These ones, the curious ones, the seekers, might have noticed the beautiful box with its question written on the cover and some certainly reached out to feel the smoothness of the letters under their palms and even looked more closely and found the fragments of soft paper inside. Some of these curious ones — or maybe simply ones in need of connection — opened the box. Letting the cover become their table, they stopped for a moment to ponder the question: what was getting them through? They wrote a response — or the feelings that arose in response to the place or to the question — on soft paper and quietly tied it among the vines, adorning the portal with their own hope and love and longing. It became a place to reflect and connect in a time of distance and dissociation. A place of quiet conversation. This portal gave hope to us and to others, maybe easing our fear for a time and perhaps lending strength to continue walking through the times to come. For one week, this conversation happened there in the woods.
32
GROUNDED: How Vermonters are cultivating transformative relationships with the land