Threshold
The door is open, child. It will not stay open while you decide who you are.
Who they are
The crone at the door of the hollow hill — silver-eyed, robed in spectral white linen, her wings pale barn-owl feathers, so her arrival makes no sound at all. Every mouth of the Otherworld has its gatekeeper — the well, the ring, the mound-door — and she is the oldest of that office. Behind her the sí-mound stands open, spilling a gold light that comes from nowhere, because hollow hills make their own light. On her lintel the endless knot is carved deep: anything wicked that tries to pass must trace the line first, and the line never ends. On her step: a milk-bowl, a salt line, and three faces watching from the gold.
Drawn upright — the teaching
You are at a real doorway — between what was and what's next. The house, the leaving, the yes you haven't said out loud yet. Doorways are sacred to the Good Neighbours and they have rules: crossings reward respect. Cross this one properly and the way opens gold.
The working
Don't rush the crossing. Go to the threshold — the actual one if you can stand at it, your own front door standing in for it if you can't — and stop with both feet on the outside. Ask permission out loud: "May I come in to what's next." Then pay the doorkeeper: a bent iron nail or a pinch of coarse salt laid on the sill — iron and salt are the two things every boundary in the Otherworld respects, ward and payment in one. Step over the sill, never on it; the sill belongs to neither side. And go through clean — whole, decided, not looking back through the door you came by.
Drawn reversed — the shadow
You're stuck on the doorstep — too scared to go in, too changed to go back — and the in-between is not a resting place. It eats the undecided. Ask anyone who has lived a year in a decision they were "about to make."
The undoing
Put iron in your pocket — a nail, an old key, anything cold and honest. Then name it aloud, both halves: what you are leaving, and what you are walking toward. And take the step. Not the perfect step; the next one. At a threshold, standing still is the only wrong move.
Its tree · the ogham
Luis — the rowan. The protection tree — planted at doors and byres, bound in red thread against enchantment. Rowan doesn't make the crossing safe by making it smaller. It makes you hard to charm while you cross.
Sit with this
Which doorway have you been standing in — and what has it cost you, so far, to live in a doorway?