The island from which I come had no choice, really, than to find a name for these dancing, beating, healing places where the veil between so very many things is thin, where it has been known to lift, right before our humble, grateful eyes.
The folklore of almost every culture holds room for these liminal spaces—those in-between places—those unnamable places, not to be found on any map. Are these thin places spaces where we can more easily hear the land, the earth, talking to us? Or are they places in which we are able to feel more freely our own inner selves? Do places such as these therefore hold power?
We have built up a narrative over many years—decades, centuries?—of ‘nature’ as ‘other’. There is so much separation in the language we use with each other; we seek to divide humanity from its own self again and again, and this has naturally bled into how we view the land and water that we share with one another—and with other species. What do we mean when we talk about ‘nature’? About ‘place’? I want to know what it all means. I need to try to understand. When we are in a place where the manmade constructs of the world seem as though they have crumbled, where time feels like it no longer exists, that feeling of separation fades away. We are reminded, in the deepest, rawest parts of our being, that we are nature. It is in and of us. We are not superior or inferior, separate or removed; our breathing, breaking, ageing, bleeding, making and dying are the things of this earth. We are made up of materials we see in the places around us, and we cannot undo the blood and bone that forms us.
In thin places people often say they experience being taken ‘out of themselves’, or ‘nearer to god’. The places I return to over and over—both physically, and in my memory—certainly do hold power to make me feel light and hopeful, as though I am not quite of this world. Of much more power, though, is the way in which these places leave me feeling rooted—as utterly and completely in the landscape as I ever feel, as much a part of it as the bones and excrement that lie beneath my feet, as the salt and silt that course through the water. For me, it is in this that the absolute and unrivalled beauty of thin places lies.
(This also reminds of a roof nail from 2021, about the dialectic nature of trees.)