"Thin Places"

I've been thinking about how to write this post since first taking these photos back in May. None of my own thoughts, however, seem to accurately express my experiences, so I'll share an article from the NY Times titled "Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer" by Eric Weiner my professor shared with all of us going on the trip:

TRAVEL, like life, is best understood backward but must be experienced forward, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. After decades of wandering, only now does a pattern emerge. I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places.

The Blue Mosque

It is, admittedly, an odd term. One could be forgiven for thinking that thin places describe skinny nations (see Chile) or perhaps cities populated by thin people (see Los Angeles). No, thin places are much deeper than that. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.

Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.

Hagia Sophia

It’s not clear who first uttered the term “thin places,” but they almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona (now part of Scotland) or the rocky peaks of Croagh Patrick. Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.

So what exactly makes a place thin? It’s easier to say what a thin place is not. A thin place is not necessarily a tranquil place, or a fun one, or even a beautiful one, though it may be all of those things too. Disney World is not a thin place. Nor is Cancún. Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.

Thin places are often sacred ones —St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, the Blue Mosque inIstanbul — but they need not be, at least not conventionally so. A park or even a city square can be a thin place. So can an airport. I love airports. I love their self-contained, hermetic quality, and the way they make me feel that I am floating, suspended between coming and going. One of my favorites is Hong Kong International, a marvel of aesthetics and efficiency. I could spend hours — days! — perched on its mezzanine deck, watching life unfold below. Kennedy Airport, on the other hand, is, for the most part, a thick place. Spread out over eight terminals,  there is no center of gravity, nothing to hold on to. (Nor is there anything the least bit transcendent about a T.S.A. security line.)

A bar can be a thin place, too. A while ago, I stumbled across a very thin bar, tucked away in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. Like many such establishments, this one was tiny — with only four seats and about as big as a large bathroom — but it inspired cathedral awe. The polished wood was dark and smooth; the row of single malts were illuminated in such a way that they glowed. Using a chisel, the bartender manifested — there is no other word for it — ice cubes that rose to the level of art. The place was so comfortable in its own skin, so at home with its own nature — its “suchness,” the Buddhists would put it — that I couldn’t help but feel the same way.

Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar, would understand what I experienced in that Tokyo bar. Writing in his classic work “The Sacred and the Profane,” he observed that “some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” An Apache proverb takes that idea a step further: “Wisdom sits in places.”

 Icons in the cave churches of Cappadocia

The question, of course, is which places? And how do we get there? You don’t plan a trip to a thin place; you stumble upon one. But there are steps you can take to increase the odds of an encounter with thinness. For starters, have no expectations. Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations, which explains why so many “spiritual journeys” disappoint. And don’t count on guidebooks — or even friends — to pinpoint your thin places. To some extent, thinness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to put it another way: One person’s thin place is another’s thick one.

Getting to a thin place usually requires a bit of sweat. One does not typically hop a taxi to a thin place, but sometimes you can. That’s how my 7-year-old daughter and I got to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Video camera in hand, she paused at each statue of the various saints, marveling, in a hushed voice, at their poses and headgear.

She was with me, too at the Bangla Sahib gurdwara, a Sikh temple in New Delhi. The temple owes its thinness, in part, to the contrasting thickness amassed outside its gates: the press of humanity, the freestyle traffic, the unrelenting noise and, in general, the controlled anarchy that is urban India. We stepped inside the gates of the gurdwara and into another world. The mesmerizing sound of a harmonium wafted across a reflecting pool. The white marble felt cool on my bare feet. The temple compound was not devoid of people, but this was a different sort of crowd. Everyone walked to the edge of the water, drawn by something unspoken, lost in their solitary worlds, together.

At the gurdwara, time burst its banks. I was awash in time. That’s a common reaction to a thin place. It’s not that we lose all sense of time but, rather, that our relationship with time is altered, softened. In thin places, time is not something we feel compelled to parse or hoard. There’s plenty of it to go around.

Not all sacred places, though, are thin. Freighted with history, and our outsized expectations, they collapse under the weight of their own sacredness, and possess all the divinity of a Greyhound bus station. For me, Jerusalem is one of these places. I find the air so thick with animosity, so heavy with the weight of historical grievances, that any thinness lurking beneath the surface doesn’t stand a chance. Walking through the walled Old City, with its four segregated quarters, I feel my muscles tense. (By contrast, I breathe easier in supposedly godless Tel Aviv.)

Thankfully, Rumi’s tomb, in Turkey, has not met such a fate. It is very much alive. People from around the Muslim (and non-Muslim) world visit the tomb, in the central Turkish city of Konya, to pay homage to Islam’s poet laureate. Rumi’s coffin is draped in a green carpet, with a cylindrical black hat, the kind worn by dervishes, sitting atop. His 13th-century poems brim with an ecstatic love of Allah, and his resting place reflects that. People are encouraged to linger. Some curl up in a corner, reading Rumi. Others lose themselves in silent prayer. I noticed one woman, hand over heart, walking slowly on the carpeted floor, tears of joy streaming down her cheeks.

Perhaps the thinnest of places is Boudhanath, in Nepal. Despite the fact that it has been swallowed up by Katmandu, Boudha, as many call it, retains the self-contained coziness of the village that it is. Life there revolves, literally, around a giant white stupa, or Buddhist shrine. At any time of the day, hundreds of people circumambulate the stupa, chanting mantras, kneading their mala beads and twirling prayer wheels. I woke in Boudha each morning at dawn and marveled at the light, milky and soft, as well as the sounds: the clicketyclack of prayer wheels, the murmur of mantras, the clanking of store shutters yanked open, the chortle of spoken Tibetan. A few dozen monasteries have sprung up around the stupa. And then there are restaurants where you can sip a decent pinot noir while gazing into the All-Seeing Eyes of Buddha. It is a rare and wonderful confluence of the sacred and the profane.

The Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, Istanbul

Many thin places are wild, untamed, but cities can also be surprisingly thin. The world’s first urban centers, in Mesopotamia, were erected not as places of commerce or empire but, rather, so inhabitants could consort with the gods. What better place to marvel at the glory of God and his handiwork (via his subcontractors: us) than on the Bund inShanghai, with the Jetsons-like skyscrapers towering above, or at Montmartre in Paris, with the city’s Gothic glory revealed below.

Bookstores are thin places, too, and, for me, none is thinner than Powell’s in Portland, Ore. Sure, there are grander bookstores, and older ones, but none quite possesses Powell’s mix of order and serendipity, especially in its used-book collection — Chekhov happily cohabitating with “Personal Finance for Dummies,” Balzac snuggling with Grisham.

Yet, ultimately, an inherent contradiction trips up any spiritual walkabout: The divine supposedly transcends time and space, yet we seek it in very specific places and at very specific times. If God (however defined) is everywhere and “everywhen,” as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin?

Maybe it is but we’re too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked.

To read the article in its original format, click here. 
WEINER, ERIC. "Thin Places, Where We Are Jolted Out of Old Ways of Seeing the World - NYTimes.com."The New
        York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 July 2012. 

Cappadocia: the Land

Never before have I experienced a land quite like that of the Turkish region known as Cappadocia . My wish of always wanting to journey to another world was practically granted upon our arrival in Nevşehir, one of the many villages that speckle the countryside. 

 

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” 

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

 “The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts."

--Gerald O'Hara, Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.”  

--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

 "Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people."

--Khalil Gibran 

"The mystery is what prompted men to leave caves, to come out of the womb of nature."

--Stephen Gardiner 

 

“I love the silent hour of night, for blissful dreams may then arise, 

revealing to my charmed sight what may not bless my waking eyes.”  

--Anne Brontë

"Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly,
to be fearful of the night.” 

--Sarah Williams

Up in the Air

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to plan. I like to know what's going to happen and when, to a reasonable extent. That does not, by any means, exclude my future adventures. Like most people--albeit most people are quite a bit older than I when they do this--I have a bucket list that I started a few years ago and continues to grow and expand. Hot air ballooning is something that has always been on the top of my list, and I got to check it off in Turkey, much to my delight.

We left at before sunrise, awakened by the morning call to prayer (which, incidentally, this particular morning, happened to be at 4:15). Bundled in jackets, eyes puffy from lack of sleep, the group clambered into a van to be shuttled off to another valley of the Cappadocian region of Turkey. 

Luckily, when we got to the location, they provided an ample amount of coffee, çay tea, and pastries for us to eat in order to attempt to wake ourselves up. 

No amount of coffee, however, could have awakened me enough to prepare me for the next hour's events. 

After hastily enjoying breakfast and trying to deny our tingling nerves, we all clambered into the massive baskets (they are larger than one would think--they hold 16 adults!). Not entirely sure of what to expect, I was thankful when a Turkish man who looked like he knew what he was doing handed me a slip of paper with what I hoped were helpful tips and instructions printed neatly on both sides in multiple languages.

Instead, what I found was the instructions on how to accommodate oneself for landing properly. Noting my creased brow and intent reading of the page, the man stated, in understandably broken English, "You must read these very carefully. I do not think today will be a problem since there is little wind, but you must be prepared for landing, especially in case the basket skids and bounces." I laughed halfheartedly, desperately hoping that this man was joking (I'd already suffered a rather detailed nightmare about having to land this darn basket in the middle of the ocean, which makes absolutely no sense but was still at the forefront of my mind). However, my now dear friend Hannah looked at me, eyes wide and solemn, and whispered, "He's not joking, Laura."

Needless to say, my mood became sober rather quickly with that realization and I sought to (at least temporarily) memorize every detail of that page, which I now clung to for dear life. 

I luckily had nothing to worry about. We gracefully lifted off the ground and drifted lazily over the Turkish countryside for a wonderful hour, that is now easily one of my favorite memories from the trip and of my young adult life. We glided over the beautiful, haunting landscape, drifted dangerously close to massive rock formations, and soared high into the sky, the landscape stretching out beneath us, wonderfully out of our grasp.

One thing I will never forget from this wonderful morning, though, is when our pilot (is that the proper term?) got our attention, his eyes dancing with glee as his face split into a wide, devilish grin, and he asked us all a seemingly childish question: "And now we fly to the moon, no?" And with our eager consent, he sent us soaring into the heavens, letting us bask in the glory of the world far below us.

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” 

--Leonardo da Vinci

Cappadocia: the Culture

Without a doubt, one of the best things (or possibly the best thing) about traveling is experiencing the culture of the region. In Turkey, and Cappadocia more specifically, that's no exception. It's colorful and rich, blossoming with life and spice (in both senses of the word). These are a few of the photos I took while traveling about the region, and I hope that I managed to capture its essence and do it justice.

This woman was making Turkish pancakes at a cafe of sorts in the Ihlara valley where we, as a group, had been taking a hike. If you ever get the chance to go to Turkey, tasting one is a must: they're absolutely delicious. 

Precious children in the village of Guzelrut playing. I couldn't resist the vibrancy of both the door and the walls, which were possibly the most colorful buildings in the village. Or that I've ever seen, for that matter. 

This is the kervansaray where we got to see a ceremony of the whirling dervishes, which was built in 1249. Unfortunately (though appropriately), we weren't allowed to take photos during the ceremony, so I only managed a shot of the outside, but that is better than nothing. The ceremony, known as a Sema, was by far one of the most beautiful (and consequently my favorite) ceremonies I've ever seen. The ceremony symbolizes (in seven parts) the various meanings of a mystic cycle to perfection. All of the ways I could describe the ceremony would be cliché and would not do it justice, but one word describes them better than most: mesmerizing. It's beautiful, captivating, inspiring, and thoroughly unreal.

We also got to see these women who make these beautiful, little dolls in the tiny village of Soğanlı.

This is the woman I bought my doll and hand-knitted gloves from; I wish more than anything that I knew her name.

Drew breaking a jar of a traditional Cappadocian dish that had meat and vegetables inside, which was delectable. 

Another kervansaray built in 1229, I believe, that used to lie in the center of the Seljuk empire. These kervansarays were built every forty kilometers along the Silk Road and were used during the 12th and 13th centuries. This particular one was one of the largest on the Silk Road and therefore the largest in Turkey.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

--Henry Miller