Portals and what’s on the other side

Prologue: The Great Releasing of 2025

Here is my project for this year

I am drawn to philosophical asides. I have boxes of unfinished stories. A story runs parallel with my life but at odd angles to it. The story of my apprenticeship with Hilma af Klint and our doodle-induced cosmic adventuress.

This year I’ve decided to clutter clear, to distill what might be of use in the boxes and notebooks and scraps of paper and profusion of doodles that keep pouring forth.

I am drowning in almost but not quite finished anything. So here it all is, as is, as best as I am able to do in this moment. I hope there’s something here you find useful.

So here goes:

#1: Portals and what’s on the other side

A Portal can be a state change, a change of feeling or heart, an evalution in what matters. You remember who you were and how you fet at the time and you are no longer that person, you are able to disengage from the story that you have been telling yourself, the one that has hypnotize your circumstances to you. Your conclusions shift, as well as the you that is inhabiting this reality, what you perceive and imagine is possible within it.

My Commentary

Portal jumping is a bit like aging. Experience helps you recognize patterns. When you come to a threshold you recognize it, because you remember another moment when you had a choice which lead you here. You can see the path behind you that lead you here.

To go through the portal, to arrive into another reality, might be, like in the movies, one choice, large — like who you decide to love — or small like the turn of your head to the right rather than the left where you soul mate awaits. A look toward or away can be as fateful as the choices we know and remember making.

This is the grace and also something the rub with aging: could, would, shoulda, but the only real possibility is what you do in this moment here and now.

Which is why photographs and sometimes paintings are the perfect portals to return in time to another self.

Unlike photos where time is frozen in the past paintings are more flexible images — they take to dream time, to the time in between, when all things are possible.

( Excerts from Doodling with Hilma, Book 3: Paintings as Portals, forthcoming Fall 2025)