The Thin Place, A Swarm of Stars, and Your Question
Twice I’ve been given the book Callings, Finding and Following an Authentic Life by Gregg Levoy. The first times was by Karen Scura, the yoga teacher I stalked in Whole Foods until she became my dear friend. She’s one of those people who sees in you and then turns around and gifts you what you didn’t know you needed: a yoga pose, a quote, a laugh, a hug, a book.
The second time was yesterday, by the woman who asked me to come to her place in Sebastopol and write a book about her property. This place, her place, I believe, she believes, is a thin place.
In his New York Times Article Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer, Eric Weiner wrote about thin places:
They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.
Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a ‘spiritual breakthrough,’ whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not…
It’s not clear who first uttered the term ‘thin places,’ but they almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.
So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.
Thin places are often sacred ones —St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul — but they need not be, at least not conventionally so. A park or even a city square can be a thin place. So can an airport. I love airports. I love their self-contained, hermetic quality, and the way they make me feel that I am floating, suspended between coming and going. One of my favorites is Hong Kong International, a marvel of aesthetics and efficiency. I could spend hours — days! — perched on its mezzanine deck, watching life unfold below. Kennedy Airport, on the other hand, is, for the most part, a thick place. Spread out over eight terminals, there is no center of gravity, nothing to hold on to. (Nor is there anything the least bit transcendent about a T.S.A. security line.)
A bar can be a thin place, too. A while ago, I stumbled across a very thin bar, tucked away in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Like many such establishments, this one was tiny — with only four seats and about as big as a large bathroom — but it inspired cathedral awe. The polished wood was dark and smooth; the row of single malts were illuminated in such a way that they glowed. Using a chisel, the bartender manifested — there is no other word for it — ice cubes that rose to the level of art. The place was so comfortable in its own skin, so at home with its own nature — its ‘suchness,’ the Buddhists would put it — that I couldn’t help but feel the same way.
Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, would understand what I experienced in that Tokyo bar. Writing in his classic work ‘The Sacred and the Profane,’ he observed that ‘some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.’ An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: ‘Wisdom sits in places.’
I think about Thoreau a lot as I stay here. My daughter came to visit last night and she also brought up Thoreau. She said we could pretend I was him and she could pretend to be his mother and do my laundry and it could be Walden all over again. I came to Spirit Hill because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
It was one thing to write a book in New York City where the mania of the environment supported the wild spin of my brain, it’s something else to do it here surrounded by apple trees and grapevines, where the environment is more like a womb, more like a clock that lost its tick. I’m a fish that’s been thrown into warmer waters, and I need to acclimate, I need to change to feel at peace here. I need to put away my phone. I need to walk and listen and breathe because otherwise it feels like I’m living a lie—like I went to a cocktail party in costume or like I’m a bird wearing the skin of a snake.
Gregg Levoy wrote, Spiritual journeying, whether we walk around a holy mountain or sit in a single place bon a five-day meditation retreat, is about interior or exterior movement toward the deep self. A geographical journey is symbolic of an inner journey for which we long.
He wrote, The experience of the holy, says Sam Keen, always involves trembling. Quakers quake. Shakers shake. Whirling dervishes whirl, prophets stand knock-kneed before God. The myth of the hero-heroine tells us that we must come face-to-face with our greatest fear before revelation and triumph can occur; that the thing we fear most is the thing we must do…Wherever our most primal fears reside—our fears of the dark, of death, of being devoured, of meaninglessness, of lovelessness, of of loss—chances are good that beneath them lie gems of wisdom ad maybe a vision or a calling...
By going ‘back to nature’ we are, in a sense, returning to the garden, to the place where we where contained within nature’s wholeness, as John Sanford put it…We also realign with nature not merely as wilderness but also as the source of the super-natural—the scene of Creation, the landscape of myth, the stomping ground of the gods: Pam in the forests, Poseidon in the seas, Demeter in the plants, and Artemis in the animals. We need to reclaim our supernatural and mythic imaginations, Sanford says, to cultivate the ability once again to look up into the night sky and see there not just an undifferentiated swarm of stars, but the heroic contours of Hercules, Pegasus, and Andromeda. We need to recapture the vision of our natural selves, remember our native wisdoms, reinherit the wind…
Levoy wrote, Curiosity, no less than devotion, makes pilgrims,’ the English poet Abraham Cowley once said, and like pilgrims at Delphi, we must come bearing questions, with the hope that the meditations, contemplations, dreams and rituals of our journeys may offer some answers. In any case, we need to know what we’re looking for, and by having a clear question, we are halfway to getting an intelligible answer. Questioning is a prerequisite to change and innovation, and without it there is no discovery.
What question is at the heart of your pilgrimage and your life? What question were you put here to understand?
Later in the chapter Levoy wrote, Nothing shapes our lives so much as the questions we ask, says Sam Keen.
And then, even later, The deep questions may not have singular answers but multitudes of them…Rather than asking ‘Who am I?’ we might ask, ‘In how many ways can I be myself?’ Rather than asking ‘Where is my place in the world?’ the question might be better put, “In how many ways can I experience a sense of belonging in the world?’
What else could I add to this at this point?
Time to start making lists.
