Thin Places
Kerri Ní Dochartaigh
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Grief is a country that has no definite borderlines and that recognises no single trajectory. It is a space that did not exist before your loss, and that will never disappear from your map, no matter how hard you rub at the charcoal lines. You are changed utterly, and your personal geography becomes yours and yours only.”
“To stand together under a sky - that no matter how grey and uncertain - still holds room for butterflies, moths, dragonflies and things we once were too fearful to name; things like whispered hope.”
“My sorrow had begun, by then, to spread itself out underneath my skin like a dark blanket – unbearably heavy. I felt the weight of sadness under, rather than on, my chest. Loneliness and the sharp edges of loss were trying to get out from in beside my ribs.”
“Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.”
“As though the thing that best defined me was the suffering and the sorrow, the things I had seen, and the things I had lost. I could not, for decades, even try to imagine that there might be something in underneath it all, that might be a self that would remain no matter how many layers I might slowly learn to undo. (pp 237)”
“There are places that dance on the caves of our insides, even as we try to cover them up from view. We forget their names. We lose their locations on any map. Their coordinates shape-shift and turn themselves into a thing of invisible particles, into a thing not unlike the mist that lives on the frayed and jagged edges of the Atlantic Ocean. Some seem to call us back to them again and again. Some places seem to ring bells, in the dead of night, in those glassy moments of borderless existence, the chiming of which only we can hear.”
“It wasn't that my friends and colleagues were not caring and supportive people; they very much were, and still are. It was just that sometimes even the explanations are too much to bear. (pp30)”
“This border – unseen, hand-drawn by man, and for him alone, too – has been the thread that has run through my life. A ghost vein on the map of my insides, it is a line that is political, physical, economical and geographical; yet it is a line I have never once set eyes upon. This invisible line – a border that skims the water I have just emerged from, as though it were a dragonfly – has been the cause of such sorrow and suffering, such trauma and loss, that I ran from its curves and coursing flow at the very first chance I got.”
“The echoes of the Troubles in Ireland have been, are being and will continue to be a coal-black crow that covers us with its wings. In those moments between waking and sleeping, while the border between reality and nightmare dances, the past, if it has not been dealt with, will keep resurfacing. It is my belief, though, that we are learning to talk to that crow, these days. We are learning to talk with each other, too. How do we talk about things which are so real they are almost unbelievable? I spent decades trying to accept my own story, trying to make peace with the sorrow and the unending, haunting grief.”
“Silence, like the moon, is a white circle moving through the seasons, shape-shifting its way across the phases of its own darkness.”
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Book Keywords:
thin-places, liminal-spaces, between-worlds, loss, veil-of-perception, healing-trauma, nature, grief
