#thin place

🍃The Legends of ye Isle of Avalon🍃

O’er the Ancient Town of Glastonbury there is stood a Hill and this Ancient Hill is steeped in history.🍃 Tis known as the Tor and upon it stands St Michael’s Tower. Stood up high, the Tor stands watch O’er the Ancient lands of Avalon.

🍃The Tor is well known for its many Myths and Legends, In English folklore they do say that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were laid to rest upon the Hill, and Monks found their coffins in 1191 and moved them to the nearby Abbey.

🍃In Celtic Mythology, Tis said that the first Lord of the Otherworld, the King of the faery folk Gwyn ap Nudd was associated with the Hill of Avalon and this is why the Tor is known as the entrance to Annwn, the Other world, the land of the faeries.🍃

🍃Many folk do say the Tor is a gateway to many Other Worlds. And who ever you be, what ever you believe, as you near the Hill there’s a strange feeling in the air, Why, it’s magical and healing energies can surely be felt.🍃

And, I must share my favourite part of the Hill, the little Apple Orchard of Avalon which can be found beneath the Hill, where it’s craggy, old twisted, bent over Apple trees are covered in lychee and mistletoe.🍃Ooh there’s something quite romantic about this Orchard and it’s dancing Apple Trees, it’s my favourite place to wander and rest for a little while.🍃

And, what about the Crow that greeted me at the bottom of the Tor..

Written by Athey Thompson

My wanderings in Glastonbury, Isle of Avalon

Pictures taken by Athey🍃

Bless’ed be

A thin place,” she said, “is a place where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin. It’s a place where we can sense the divine more readily.”

The first time I went to New Mexico I profoundly experienced a thin place.

I was camping in Chaco Canyon and during the night I heard my old Alaskan Malamute, Chena, who was with my girlfriend in Florida, howling. It was not until the next morning when I spoke to the girlfriend that I connected the howling to Chena. My girlfriend told me the precise time Chena was howling and I told her the precise time I heard a wolf howling in the Canyon.  We discussed the oddness of coincidences and that there were no wolves in New Mexico at the time. She left it to coincidence, I felt it was something more. Eventually Chena passed and the relationship with the woman died as well because, as she said, she wanted more than a guy in cowboy boots who wanted to live in New Mexico.

I drove on from Chaco that day to another camp in the Grand Canyon with a hawk’s feather that had “fallen” into the plate of my mess kit during the night. Later, I was to hang that feather from my pickup truck mirror as a token reminder of permanently moving back to New Mexico to live.  The feather hung on that mirror for eight years only finally disintegrating on the drive from the mortgage signing back to my granja, my small horse property, which was to ground me and be the first place I felt at home since I was a young boy.

I had many experiences of New Mexico being “a place where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin.”  In time I came to realize that there was no place in New Mexico that that boundary was not thin.  Living in New Mexico my spirit was more exercised, my prayers more powerful, my sense of peace was often overwhelming and life answers came more readily.  That thin place allowed me to be more who I had believed I was and to have a sense of my place in the universe. It also allowed me to profoundly experience the other side, the mysterious side.

I was invited to attend an Apache Sunrise ceremony or na’ii’ees, the arduous 4-day puberty ceremony where a girl makes the physical and spiritual transition to a woman and takes her place in the community.  The ceremony took place deep in the Mountains beyond Ruidoso on the Mescalero reservation.  On the second night, with clear starlit skies and the drumbeat echoing the heartbeat of the divine, I saw the universe open as the women danced a slow solemn dance around the rim of the fire.  My view shifted and I suddenly saw them dancing on the edge of a galaxy and all around me transformed into a starfield. At that moment I was part of the profundity of life in a thin place, part of the life of the Mescalero community and part of the divine.

My life in New Mexico was a series of such experiences. With those experiences, I became stronger, kinder, more confident, having a deeper sense of right and wrong, good and evil. I felt myself being clarified and all artifice being stripped away.  I participated more fully in life than since I was a boy growing up in a place where I had the experience of thin places scattered in the landscape.  I became truly and fully myself. I fully learned that thin places are where one becomes clarified and one sees the deepest nature of who one really is, who one was born to be and are essential if we are to find out who we really are, stripped of social expectations.

One might ask, as I often do, why I would ever leave such a place.

It is important to know that in a thin place one also meets the dark and evil side of the universe easily as well. I learned that such darkness and evil came with people and thier greed. The more people, the more greed and the more disrespect of the interface between heaven and earth.  I saw such darkness and evil in abundance while I lived in New Mexico.  

I lived through a small oil boom in my last few years there and saw the evil grow. The gentile poverty of the people, the emptiness of the land gave way to inflated salaries for outsiders with no respect for the place or the fact that the veil between heaven and earth was almost nonexistent. Instead the focus was on the rape of the earth and the building of a narrow wealth based on  drugs and prostitution and oil and consumer goods.

Even in my beloved Santa Fe and Taos (I lived in Carlsbad) I saw the walls thicken as more rich people moved in and more greed took over.  I understood that as things became very hard for me in my life in New Mexico that it was time to go. I live in Washington now and though I have chosen to live on an island in the middle of Puget Sound I find no thin places here.  Too many people, too much greedy energy, too many souls focused on intellectual and political agendas other than listening to the drumbeat, the heartbeat of the universe. I occasionally think about going back. I thought about moving to Montana or Wyoming where that thinness is still available, but I saw it thickening there as well as more people crowd in. In the end I know that in their greed for the experience of the peace a thin place gives they will destroy.  What they are looking for – that sense of connectedness and home that comes from a thin place requires a surrender to the life of a place and I think requires an acceptance of  a non material life.  They will destroy it because they will insist on bringing all the things that separated them from that peace in the first place.

I do miss the sense of home, the sense of peace and place and belonging. I have a friend here in the Seattle area who moved up from New Mexico a bit before I did, and she struggles with a profound homesickness for New Mexico.  I know she could go back, just as I could and often want to, but I also know the place is changing rapidly with people from California and Texas full of themselves building lives as disconnected from heaven as they were in California and Texas.

Thin places exist only where the will of man and woman does not overwhelm the natural order of the divine.  In such places there is a poverty that does not feel like poverty,  a sense of community that is not artificial and defined by over thought political ideals, a silence that is so profound one can actually hear the voice of god and know that there truly is a god, not the Mosaic grandfather in the sky, though at times it can feel like that, but a profound energy flowing  in the ground, the plants , the mountains, the sky and the stars. A place where all of that becomes one.

I would lie if I said I do not miss it. I miss it like I would miss my own breath if I could not breath, but I also know that it is no longer there. I saw everything thickening in the last five years I lived there.  I am sure if one goes far enough into the wilderness it could still be found but by the time I left it was not the same. As I hear people here in Seattle often say, too many people. I would add, too many greedy people and confused people and lost people with an energy of despair.

I know I was blessed to find for a time in my life, the sacred and the profound. My soul still yearns for such a place.  I came here to bring my life partner home and even though she says everything here has changed she seems to feel more at home.

become a thin place with what 

at first look like ghosts. 

New Post has been published on http://www.crownofcompassion.org/2016/10/13/a-thin-place/

A thin place- where we meet God in a new way

“A thin place . . . it’s there that we discover that the dream isn’t about us at all.”- Mark Batterson

“During harvest time, three of the thirty chief men came down to David at the cave of Adullam . . .”- 2 Samuel 23:13

In Chapter 9 (“On This Spot”) of Chase the Lion, Mark Batterson notes that the cave of Adullam represented a thin place for David.  Most noteworthy, God met David at that thin place.  Furthermore, David met God there in a whole new way.  While David didn’t want to be there, he needed to be there for a season.

As a result, in a thin place we discover that our dream is from God.  Most importantly, our dream is for God.  For David, the cave of Adullam served as his last resort, not a five-star resort.  Yet, that thin place provides a test- and a testimony.

However, Mark observes, the holding pattern that results functions as the hardest part of any dream journey.  Indeed, almost every dream contains a holding pattern.  And it feels more like a holding cell!  But even when you don’t believe your plan is working, God’s working on His plan.

Most of all, the author explains, a golden opportunity goes hand in hand with integrity:

” . . . an opportunity isn’t an opportunity if you have to compromise your integrity.  It’s the decision when no one is looking that will dictate your destiny.  In fact, your integrity is your destiny.”

In conclusion, your holding pattern presents an opportunity to grow, trust, and prove your integrity.  As Mark encourages, make the most of it.

“Wherever you are, there you are!  Be fruitful right where you’re planted.”

Today’s question: At what thin place did you meet God in a whole new way?   Please share.