have you ever seen a portal?

December 14, 2025

they’re perfect. the brothers from different mothers. both profoundly broken and profoundly indifferent to it. deeply logical, stern, and calm.

the people in the city see them together and wonder about them. they’re both good looking and neither of them knows it, neither of them cares, either. with their long hair and blue eyes and deep laughs, they share coffee and life philosophy.

but if it ever came down to it, both of the brothers aren’t afraid of violence. they are not above it. knives in boots and brass knuckles in a leather jacket.

they had to sew up the one brothers eye when he was ripped on mdma after a bar fight, but you should have seen the other guy and at least he ended up with a cool scar. the other one saw suicide first hand and tried to drink the sight away until he got right and found god. but he isn’t afraid to get loud, to get mean.

the elders i know say that sometimes people are portals, and they take us closer to something.

there’s a line in this film called donnie darko and frank, the six foot tall hallucinatory bunny rabbit asks donnie, “have you ever seen a portal?”

well the elders say that sometimes people are our portals – people in our lives who make us better, who bring us closer to understanding ourselves and each other and our places within the world and alongside each other. the little elder with his cane and kind eyes told me that we find people to walk with in our lives who remind us of the sweetness of life and the joy we can find as perfect beings as we walk imperfectly under the watchful eye of our creator (however you choose to see or define this).

in anishinaabe teachings as we age we have to find our people. we have to find our portals because as we age we draw ever nearer to our own ends and this is the strawberry wisdom. we cannot give in to be haunted. we must find our joys, pick the strawberries and find our portals. we find the sweetness in the mire.

it is our imperative.

the brothers found their portals in each other and i have found portals in them, too.

we pick our berries and laugh.

and isn’t this really true of the people we love? don’t they make it easier to experience sweetness? don’t they make it easier to walk through loss?

the brothers from different mothers laugh together in the living room. to hear it, you would think the brothers had not ever known pain.

so, have you ever seen a portal?