Thin Places

"Thin Places is an exploration of boundary lines, definitions, delineations. We come up against hard edges, places of pain and wounding in which the human world, with its need to divide and claim, leaves its scars. Yet these scarred places are also places where the veil is thinnest. They are places to pass through, like the cracks in the Leonard Cohen song. There is a beautiful description of swimming with her father and listening to the curlew’s call above: “By the time my father and I reached the water’s edge, where our bodies met the outline of the world, where the waves met the land, another borderline had been wiped off the map.” This ability to pass through what separates us, and find connection, is captured with such delicacy in this book, so that the rawness of it is tempered by a sense that we are part of a larger, longer story. Nature, and connecting with nature, offers us a way of transcending, or perhaps incorporating, these divisions, so that we can see beyond them and find the commonality and connection that underlies them. And therein lies hope—not complacent, but fragile, and in need of continual renewal."