Eloquent Thoughts About the Sensation of Thin Places

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A while back, we had a conversation about thin places.

Those are the places where beauty or stillness just overwhelm you.

They feel unreal or otherworldly, like maybe you’re in a cathedral or you’re on top of

A mountain where you feel like the sky is just this scrim you could poke your hand right

Through.

You remember that, Grant?

I do, yeah.

It’s when something bigger than yourself seems to be poking through to the everyday.

Exactly.

That’s a great way to put it.

And we got a wonderful email in response from Rebecca Moore, who lives in Kirkland, Washington.

And it’s just such a great email.

I can’t read the whole thing, but I wanted to share some of it with you.

She describes thin places as the places where the walls between this world and other worlds or the past seem thinner than usual.

In terms of places, I’ve only felt that in one place, the Custer Battlefield in Montana.

A friend and I were driving across the country, spending a lot of time on the interstate with all its reminders of modernity.

When we stopped to see the battlefield, we found the land still as it had been at the time period of the battle.

No reminders of modernity, just endless blowing grass and silence but for the wind.

It was eerie despite the broad daylight.

You could almost hear the ghosts from across the years.

Not a comfortable silence at all.

And then she goes on to write about how many songs can also trigger that sense of connection to something old or ancient or otherworldly.

And she writes about how in some it feels like a connection to the way people thought in a time when their belief in magic was as unquestionable as our belief in gravity.

And then she lists several examples of songs that do this for her, especially old songs.

And she comes back to the point that it’s the words, it’s always the words that carry our history in every syllable that open the past to us when the music catches them and shines a light right through them down the centuries.

My thin places are always conjured from words and notes.

And I thought that was such a beautiful description of so many different things, Grant.

I mean, just how a song from the past, you know, an old folk song or something, just whisks you away centuries ago.

That is a lovely letter from Rebecca Moore.

We must put some of that on the website, Martha.

Yes, let’s do that.

And, in fact, you can find all of our past episodes at waywordradio.org.