‘The captured audio originates from a series of cattle gates recorded on the ‘Via De La Plata’ Camino de Santiago. A historically famous pilgrimage across Spanish plains and mountain ranges . Pilgrims take this route for many reasons but almost universally it is an opportunity to reflect and breathe the fresh air.

Although a seemingly mundane part of any journey the humble gate is in fact the punctuation of it. Without gates there are only walls .

In cognitive psychology ‘the doorway effect’ explains how walking through a physical portal causes us to instantly purge recent memories , resetting our focus for a new environment. Each heavy metallic swing acts as a physical instrument of this cognitive purge, signaling a clean slate, clearing the mind’s clutter back into the immediacy of the present.

This psychological reset mirrors what Carl Jung described as the necessary terror of confronting a threshold. Jung wrote that “the meeting with oneself is , at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow” , calling the shadow a narrow door or a tight passage that a person must brave. Beyond this constriction lies what he terms a ‘boundless expanse’ , the infinite unmapped terrain of the inner self.

I invite you to cross this threshold.’