All Places are Thin

In the Mecca Hills, deep in California’s obscure southern deserts, there is a slot canyon so thin that only one person at a time can walk through it. There is barely a sliver of sky visible above, as you pass through worn layers of sandstone corresponding to geologic ages stretching back before humanity’s existence.

Even finding it is difficult, given the rough gravel roads to reach the region, and the other narrow canyons to thread first, via ropes and rickety ladders others have left behind. Who would know to even look, without the guidance of those who previously dared to adventure there? Without others risking that slot canyon first, who would know it isn’t a dead end?

The journey’s difficulty is in balance with its rewards. Between those slot canyon walls, silence has a softer, deeper form. The enfolding comfort of a sandstone blanket is as warm as wool. Its ancient dust exudes the steady smell of time. Layers of history are artistically expressed in water-sculpted stone. To be within it is to be embedded within ageless wonder and awe.

I celebrate the reverence with which that experience gifted me. It heightens my awareness of how many other thin places each of us pass through. Yet our thinnest life places are rarely purely physical. They’re also emotional and spiritual: narrow passages through loss, grief, illness, trauma, aging.

I’m aware how many guides we need, for our safe passage through those thin places. Guidance begins with the ones who create us and welcome us into this lifetime, and continues through the day we’re eternally guided out. In those countless tough tests, our guides help us transform our grief into gratitude, our pain into growth. As within that slot canyon, our reward may be scaled to our risk.

With each passage through each new thin place, I’ve better learned how to lean into gratitude itself as a guide. Gratitude is a practice as active as walking. It assists me in keeping my balance until reaching solid ground once more. Gratitude has taught me how to then assist others in balancing in their own thin places; to be steady on my solid ground until they reach their own. I’ve learned how to be in this thin place where vulnerability is also strength. Where healing brings new shared wisdom beyond what we had before. Where the sharing creates chosen family. This day and place is one such grateful ground.

Our entire society is a thin place. It moves thinly between brilliance and madness, beauty and calamity. Injury and discovery are very near each other here. Disaster and grace share close quarters. We need our grateful guides through its acute divisions and distractions.

To return to gratitude’s solid ground is to return to a natural world deeper than civilization. To take a deeper grateful breath, to restore our connection to source. The more I open to the awareness of our connection to elemental ground, the more I realize that all places are thin. Some of the most beautiful places on earth were created by thin passage through earthly calamity, transformed by time into majesty.

I reflect on this as Crater Lake reflects the sky. I recall how the explosion of Mt. Mazama has turned to one of the most miraculous places on earth, over the course of eight thousand years. The lake is so sacred that silent awe is most visitors' instinctive response. And I see as we stand there, how we are each like one of the caldera’s cliffside trees, growing with dignity in difficult places. Thin growth in thin places takes time. Patience. Perseverance.

I also see thinness reflected, when entering the crust of the earth via the caves at Lava Beds National Monument. In the dimmest cave light, it’s still easy to see that the entire surface of our earth is a very thin place. It’s a porous border between endless airless space, and the burning lava we all have underfoot. Seen from even one moon’s distance away, this whole planet is a slot canyon as thin as the one in the Mecca Hills. As majestic as Crater Lake’s blue depths.

Even time itself is thin. Every moment is narrowly nestled in the center of eternity. Ashes remind me of this, from another thin place that burned, five fleeting years ago. There, I was the last to walk a stretch of the Umpqua River trail, on the day before wildfire consumed it.

Despite the grace of the river, nearly the only photograph I took then was of graffiti on a bridge. “Blessed,” it simply said. I felt blessed too, as I stayed with the river until the final rays of dusk. The next morning, fire raged around the water. The bridge and the whole canyon burned.

Graffiti and bridges burn, but gratitude doesn’t. All blessings that ever were, still are, integral somewhere in the thin fabric of time. And if it takes eight thousand more years to turn our current calamity into majesty, so be it. The reward of grateful living is held within the risk of the work itself, infinitely deep, even though thin. I’m grateful that thin places are all we have.