A few days ago, during meditation, I felt myself transported back to the Holland House. What began as a simple return to a childhood space quickly revealed itself to be more: a journey through memory, belief, and the hidden parts of myself that still wait to be understood. The experience has lingered with me, unfolding quietly as I continue to sit with it.

The restless clatter of unfinished thoughts began to dissolve as I sank deeper into stillness. With every breath, the noise softened, like static fading from an old radio dial, until I was surrounded by a profound and resonant silence. In that silence, I was no longer in my present-day room—I was somewhere else entirely.

I found myself once again in the Holland House. We’ve called it that for years, though I don’t think I’ve ever shared the name with you before. It was my Little Grandma Rose’s home on Holland Street, stitched deep into the fabric of my childhood. The house seemed alive in my memory: the soft carpet under my feet as I stepped into my mother’s old childhood room, a child of the ’60s who once lined the floor with zebra-patterned carpet and hung strands of glass beads for a curtain on the right-hand side. Over the years, the room evolved—sometimes hers, sometimes mine, sometimes even Little Grandma’s. We didn’t always live with her, but we stayed often, especially summers, and after my grandpa passed, we moved in to help her manage things. What had begun as a modest two-bedroom house, purchased in the 1950s or ’60s for just a few thousand dollars, later became a four-bedroom home after construction was done to accommodate changing needs. That room, especially, was a constant evolution in both time and space.

And it carried more than family life—it carried mystery. Little Grandma once told me of an experience she had there. She had dozed off in a chair near the window, sinking into deep relaxation, when she suddenly felt a whirlwind-like sensation, as though she was being lifted and moved. In an instant, she found herself outside the very window where she had been sitting. She described the moment with awe, and hearing it opened my mind early on to the possibility that things are not always as they seem—that perhaps we can move from space to space without the body. I don’t think I’m ready to dive fully into my own out-of-body experiences here just yet, but it feels important to say that this room—this space—was never just four walls. It was a threshold.

It wasn’t a vision in the cinematic sense—no sharp images or dreamlike scenes. It was subtler than that. It was the feeling of being there, as though my body still lay where I began, but some deeper part of me had settled into that room in the Holland House. Not seeing, exactly—just arriving.

The Dream That Never Left

That room was also the setting for a dream I had nearly forty years ago—one that has threaded itself through my life, quiet but persistent. In the dream, I opened the door to find the space stripped bare—emptied of furniture, decoration, and life. The only figures were my parents, kneeling before a wooden cross, and Jesus himself standing before it.

My parents were never especially religious. They carried faith like a background note, not a lead melody. Yet in that dream, they embodied devotion. Looking back now, I can see it through a different lens—the lens of psychology, where with age and reflection it carries meaning I couldn’t have grasped as a child.

Their lives, choices, and upbringing have crystallized into what I once called their “locked position.” It is not without love, nor without wisdom. But it is fixed, anchored. It offers them comfort and safety, even if it feels restrictive to me.

That dream was my first brush with the contrast between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to move, adapt, reason—what allows us to slip between time and memory in meditation. Crystallized intelligence is the accumulation of what we know, what we’ve believed, what we’ve lived. My parents live mostly in the crystallized; I, in this meditation, was being asked to practice the fluid.

The Closet’s Invitation

But this meditation wasn’t about that old dream alone. Something new emerged. As I lay in the remembered room, I became aware of the closet to my left. I felt drawn to it—not in a casual way, but as though it were a silent invitation.

I could almost see it again. Some of Little Grandma’s dresses used to hang there, and the longer I sit with this meditation, the more of those details return to me. The closet wasn’t just storage; it held fragments of time, stitched with care.

What else did it hold? A stack of gifts tucked away for later? Clothes folded neatly in the dresser I half-remember inside? Or perhaps something less tangible—a memory waiting in the dark. The specifics blur, but the pull was strong: something important lived behind that door.

Closets are powerful symbols. They are where we store the things we don’t display every day, where memories whisper from the shadows. Sometimes they hold treasures, sometimes secrets, sometimes the “skeletons” we would rather not face. To be pulled toward that closet in meditation felt like an opening—a call to revisit what has been stored away, to see what still waits for me in the quiet corners of memory.

Re-Integration: The Purpose of the Past

Meditation doesn’t always give answers wrapped in clarity. Sometimes it offers symbols—a dream remembered, a closet unopened—that wait patiently for us to sit with them. The Holland House is more than a place; it is a vessel of memory and identity. The dream is more than a dream; it is a parable of my parents’ steadfastness and my own divergence. And the closet? Perhaps it is the reminder that there are still parts of myself I have yet to integrate, truths I have yet to claim.

Fluid intelligence guided me there, letting my mind wander across decades. Crystallized intelligence gave me the knowledge, the context, the lifelong threads that hold it all together. Together, they create the dialogue of meditation: the movement between what we know and what we are still uncovering.

An Invitation

I don’t pretend to know why this meditation carried me back to the Holland House, or why the closet insisted on being noticed. But I do know this: meditation often asks us to open doors we’ve ignored, to sit quietly with the forgotten, and to listen for the meaning that comes not in a flash, but over time.

Meditation is, in many ways, a practice of opening doors—some familiar, some forgotten—each leading us deeper into who we are.

So I leave you with this: what closets in your own memory might meditation invite you to open? What truths, gifts, or long-forgotten pieces of yourself wait patiently behind them?