There are all kinds of doors

My house in San Antonio when I was growing up had a very remarkable door.  And by “remarkable” I mean that very often people would ask me “Oh so you live in the house that has the six door knobs?”  That was us.  Tall, grey double doors that, because of their hexa-knobbiness, always made people pause as they approached it.  “Do I have to touch them in a certain order to make this thing open?”  What made it even better was that not a single one of the six knobs actually turned.  They were simply ornamentation.  I think people often tried turning one, then another and another, thinking surely one of them had to turn.  All the door needed was a little push.  So the knobs were simply there for aesthetics.

I make no bones about it: this temporary plywood door up at the clinic is completely lacking in aesthetics.   But the door is only part of the process.  Wanting to open it and come into the clinic; telling your friends and neighbors; participating in the community of qi--those are the the bigger parts.  The door is just one small piece of the representation of all that.  We find them apt metaphors because they slice out a plane of everything and indicate: things on this side of the door are like this, and things on the other side will be like that. 

The needles and cups and recliners and comfortable lighting and planetarium music and bespectacled acupuncturists are all still here in their proper places.  All those things that make this a door worth opening are still here.  And so once more, with feeling: we are open 7 days of week (regardless of what type of door we have up).