Hi 👋

Last Friday was the 1st of May; a day to sing the summer in. An ancient Celtic word for it is Beltaine.

In their ancient calendar, there were only ever two seasons, winter and summer, and at either end stood a hinge where the dark and light meet. Dusk and dawn worked the same way, with the thresholds of the day mirroring the thresholds of the year. At those moments, the distance between this world and the realm beyond was thin.

In Ireland, the Beltaine fires were put out. Fires that had carried people out of darkness, through illness, cold, and scarcity, were extinguished, and as they went out, the people cut their ties with the old. Then, they were rekindled to welcome in the new.

That ritual marked a thin place in time. A pause where the cycle turns, and the energy of change can move through.

But there are also physical thin places. Actual locations where the boundary between the everyday world and the eternal feels close, almost permeable. An old saying goes that ‘heaven and earth are only three feet apart, and in a thin place, that distance is even shorter.’

Recently, I have found myself in many a thin place; hiking in Cornwall and throughout the South West gives you that privilege.

It is a deep way of reading geography. Creation, the land, is sacred, and our presence adds to that sacredness. We align with what surrounds us by being slow enough to notice the mystery that we ourselves are a part of.

Different areas of land carry more charge than others, and people sense it. The veil between the real and the mystery feels close. The awe of a thin place is sensed by sight, but also by sound, by wind, by mist, by touch, and most often by silence. It is a place where our private internal world is moved through meeting the expansive external great beyond. 

You have likely felt a place like this yourself. Do you remember the time when, standing on a hilltop, by a waterfall, or looking out to sea, you felt incredibly small? The feeling of timelessness and the insignificance all at once?

They can be found in remote places and at the edges, the kind of edges all along the Atlantic coast and deep into remote Scotland or Northern England. At these places, people have historically marked their presence. Cairns served as way markers, small statements of "I was here, I exist." Reverence and belonging also took shape as a holy well dressed with rags, an ancient stone leaning on a hilltop, or a chapel the size of a shed.

These are places where you can almost reach into the thinness of the landscape while still acknowledging a distance you cannot cross. 

But to find them, you have to invest time and effort to get there. That intention becomes a kind of pilgrimage, and the reward for the hard work is a refreshed perspective; you come back to yourself anew. 

That pilgrimage is also part of how a place becomes thin. The walking, the returning, the telling; all that footfall, wearing stones smooth. A sense of identity and belonging is found through place. Thinness is what happens when human attention and divine presence meet on the same ground over a long time. The place remembers, and so do the people.

They are places to come back to after grief, despair, or any kind of difficulty, as a way of remembering and starting again. Putting out one fire that once helped us through, to then ignite another for the path ahead. 

Talk soon,

Rob

PS Here’s some thin places I have visited recently: 

Who comes to mind when you hear 'salt of the earth'?
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