BY JEAN P. KELLY

I SIT ON A damp wooden bench on a clover-covered island, surrounded on either side by a rushing, Guinness-colored river. The babble cradles my ears and slows my breathing. I inhale, almost tasting the sweet stench of roots that form cave-like hideaways under trees along the banks. Surely I’ve found the homes of faeries, so common in the lore of this country Ireland. Earthen walls form a cacophonous cocoon around me, blocking the view of the valley as it winds toward the strand and the Kenmare Bay. For both that unseen horizon and my narrow hiding place, surely a “thin place,” I offer gratitude. Then I release all thoughts, all questions, and all self-judgment.

I often imagine myself back in a thin place, where I first found both rest and authentic stillness: an island in a river in southern County Cork. Remarkably, I experienced both in the midst of a very painful life transition, leaving a 30-year abusive relationship with an active alcoholic and learning my youngest daughter had been hospitalized because of his neglect.

After receiving a dry text from my almost-ex-husband delivering news that is every parent’s nightmare, I could hardly breathe. Fleeing out the front door of my B&B into what the Irish call a “soft” afternoon of misty rain, I stopped only to borrow a pair of Wellies by the welcome mat. I charged through the yard, down a steep hill, and past an ancient ruin of a mill that once “fulled” local wool by beating it soft. Slipping up wooden stairs, I crossed an elevated bridge leading to a refuge, what was likely a special Celtic geography where the boundary between the corporeal and the Divine felt as narrow as a breath, as transparent as the spray moistening my cheeks and hair. I sat. Ferns and boughs embraced me, calmed me. No wonder, as the poet John O’Donohue wrote, ancient Celts revered nature as “a vision of the divine where…the thing that is the signature of your utmost uniqueness can somehow coalesce with the greater flow of spirit and nature in the world, all without your singular identity getting lost.”

“Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself, Having learned a new respect for your heart And the joy that dwells far within slow time.
–John O’Donohue, For One Who Is Exhausted, A Blessing

The soles of my rubber boots grounded on wet clover, my bottom took root on a slatted bench, and my palms rested, face up on my thighs. My eyelids settled shut. My breathing slowed as I focused on what I knew to be true: my darling daughter was no longer in immediate danger. I released the notion that protecting and parenting her was my responsibility alone. I forgave myself for not being there when she needed me most.

In that thin place, for the first time in my adult life I was not anxious, I was not lost. On that island, tucked inside the island of Ireland, I was still and my soul open. While the river rushed by, I was stationary; but I was open to spirit and nature flowing both in me and through me. I rested, trusting an other-worldly rhythm that was somehow in sync with the wisdom of the ages. I accepted grace, to me a gift unearned and valuable beyond price. On that bench, to which I return often in imagination, I arrived at the path of awe and intentionality’s rewarding destination: the place of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-gift.

Excerpted from Less Helping Them, More Healing You: The Transcendent Gift of an Ancient Spiritual Practice by Jean P. Kelly