Thin Places

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?