"Thin Places"

Ordinary Mystical

“We just keep handling it until we wear it down to where it feels safe to us. We just keep analyzing it until we can say something intelligent about it.”

Barbara Brown Taylor (Home By Another Way)

Have you ever had an experience that was so out of the ordinary you couldn't find words to describe it? Something so unexpected and other-worldly that no one would believe you if you told them? In my experience the mystical always breaks into ordinary life when we least expect it. It happens and leaves you breathless, and gaping, asking, “What on earth was that?”

I remember the first time I saw someones aura, I was sitting in a seminar, half listening, allowing the drone of the voice to carry me, but not really tuning into the words, when suddenly I saw an aqua flare blaze out around the head of the speaker. I almost fell off my chair. I looked at the people around me to see if they were having a similar reaction, but no one else seemed to have noticed. I was almost afraid to look at the speaker again, afraid that I might be having a stroke or brain aneurysm. But when I did look, I noticed that the aqua flare came and went, kind of like breathing, it extended and contracted, and soon I could also see a thin gold light extending an inch or two around her whole body. That experience launched me into a twenty-year-long study of the human body and its energy fields. I wanted to understand what I had seen—in other words, I needed to control and explain it, so I would feel safe.

I'm sure you, too, have had such an experience. Often when we're out in nature, we will happen upon a place that feels strangely enticing. We want to stay there, to somehow become part of it. We may even return to it again and again because what we feel there refreshes us in an unusual way. The mountains of North Carolina are like that for me, especially the gorges between them, where crystal clear water makes its own music. In such liminal spaces, we feel  connected to all who have come before us; we can almost feel their presence. The Irish call these “thin places” where the veil between our world and another invisible world is sheer enough to see through, though vaguely. Such places are magical simply because we do not yet have words to explain them. Which, of course, doesn't keep us from trying. I have learned not to make excuses for the “why” of such experiences, because I know they are as real as drinking a glass of water.

Interestingly, we often find refreshment just thinking about our “thin places,” and imagining ourselves there. Taking such a memory into meditation often provides the same inspiriting revitalization as the original encounter. I call it going to my happy place. I hope today, on this Monday morning, you are able to picture your happy place and carry the image with you into the work week. It will keep you cheered and energized.

                                                     In the Spirit,

                                                          Jane