Thin Places

The place where here and beyond meet

Thursday, February 22, 2024

I’d been trying to write a story about a close friend who had died, reaching for something beyond my grasp with only puny words to get me there. What I was trying to capture was the way the first annual camping trip to Baxter without Kerry -- a camping trip we all were dreading – wrapped up in a mystical way that last night. By mystical I mean how it was that a cold, drizzly afternoon that had turned into a cold, dark, rainy night with all of us huddling in the open-air shelter after dinner, picking at a bowl of M & M's, had suddenly turned, the whole western side of the sky lighting up with the salmon-infused rapture of the setting sun in the exact color of a scarf Kerry used to wear that now hangs over my banister. The brilliance came out of nowhere.
 
Can the sky do that I wondered? Can there be rain and a brilliant sunset? In our confusion we stumbled outside to look up. Then someone said Hey, there’s a rainbow. We turned and there on the other side of the world was a rainbow, all the colors arching over the sky like a gateway. We stood there in our smallness, stunned, taking in a moment that felt bigger than we knew what to do with.
 
Since Kerry died a year and a half ago, I’d had such a hard time taking in her nowhere-ness, like a child who couldn’t grasp the concept of gone. But standing there in the rain, surrounded by the sublime, suddenly I understood.  Kerry is everywhere, in the thinness of air.
 
During the many months of fumbling around to put that experience into words, a friend sent me an article about “thin places,” mystical places where the border between here and the beyond is more permeable, ”…where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent…” These are the places where we feel in connection with something not of this realm. Where something not of this realm gets awakened in us.
 
These thin places don’t have to be sacred or in nature though they often are. Some places are thin because of the lingering energy of past lives, like Rumi’s tomb in Turkey, for example. Some places are thin because of the particular energetic quality of those still living. But most importantly, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What is thin for you may hold nothing for someone else and vice versa.
 
Personally, I don’t think thinness is restricted to places. I think thinness is anything that can transport us over a mystical border into boundlessness. Music can do it. Works of great art. Feats of great mastery. Acts of great kindness. Anything that overcomes the constraints of smallness. I’m even open to the possibility that people could be thin. You hear enough stories. I’ll never forget a co-worker, now passed herself, telling me years ago about her son who had died at the hands of another, a terrible and wrong tragedy. However, the day after he passed a rare finch showed up at the bird feeder on her back deck and returned for three days running. This was her son’s favorite bird but not one they’d ever seen on their deck or in the region before.
 
What I like most about thinness is how big it makes you feel, as if you are not constrained by the boundaries of your body. How connected to mystery you are invited to be. 
 
For anyone who can use it, here is a thin poem that speaks to the experience of losing someone who never really dies.
 
To the mystery, even if its all in our minds,
 
E