Wisdom sits in places. (Apache proverb)
There’s something magic about these predawn hours. They can be hours of brilliant speculation (I hope a smile hovered on your lips as you read that) or dark imaginings. They remind me of “thin places,” those special places in the world that seem to carry a sense of mystery and awe about them. Thin places is a Celtic Christian term for those places where the distance between heaven and earth seems to collapse. Often thin places seem to exist where one ecosystem meets another, where, for instance, “the river meets the almighty sea.” Don’t those very words give you a sense of awe and reverence?
There is a place like that on our farm, where a tiny stream emerges from the woods and trickles into the creek that wanders through our property. That shadowed opening is covered with thick vines and leaves and moss that create a veil across the opening and carries such a sense of mystery for me, as if just out of the corner of my eye, I might catch a glimpse of something hovering . . . On my walks, as I pass by this place on the trail, I always stop and bow, thanking God for the Smallness, the “everything else” in my life that I usually never even stop to think about.
And “under the Christmas tree” is another such place . . . Ask any child. Not only do magical gifts appear from some jolly old elf, but maybe other things we don’t expect . . . Insights. Awarenesses. Laughter. Memories. Answers. And maybe things that we don’t usually think to be grateful for, fears and anger and pain that make us wiser. Our cats, who often seem to sense things that we don’t, love to nest under there. And Ole Hank always checks, every morning, just in case . . . And I always wonder what his nose is telling him . . . I somehow think it’s not just about the possibility of a stray chocolate that might have escaped but about unseen presences as well.
I will miss the tree when I take it down. Every year the room always seems emptier when I remove it, bereft somehow. A place of Mystery is gone, the commonplace has returned, the “world (that) is too much with us” is back, where “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” . . .
And this year? Every morning as I’ve settled down in this space with my morning coffee, words have been waiting for me, flowing out from under the tree . . .
Maybe thin places (and thin times, for that matter!) exist everywhere, but we are too “thick” to perceive them.
And maybe this year I’ll leave the Christmas tree up for awhile.