The Body Is A Thin Place

Thin place - Celtic folklore. A place in the world where it is possible to pass into the Otherworld. Often ‘edge places;’ crossroads, shorelines, twilight, etc.

Imramma - Irish mythology and legend. A voyage to the Otherworld, usually via sea and various islands, undertaken by heroes and saints.

The body is border country, lying between self and other, me and not-me, but too porous to be a boundary between myself and the world. My skin longing for touch, my hair tangling in the grass as I lie in the shade, too fatigued to move. Feeling the breeze sweep across and through me, reminding me that all form is but emptiness, all emptiness form. The body is not barrier, but thin place, a portal between this world and the other world, a land of ghosts who carry the DNA of both ancestors and descendants, echoes of ocean and sky. The human capacity to weave all this into story and song and sonnet, to create shadows of shadows, is a little miracle, a glimpse into a world we can only translate through the language of dreams.

There are layers, worlds within worlds, painful memories linger like ghosts, grey-clad and wailing next to a lake where monsters swim in the deep, monsters that rear their heads when there is an intrusion, and something bursts in uninvited: a hand, a penis, an insult, a speculum, yet another surgery. Trauma makes the body both brittle and thin at once. The monsters of the deep are often protectors of the treasure below. In the old Celtic stories of voyage, Imramma, there is always somewhere else to journey to, another island waiting beyond the mists. The Island of Women is that place, perhaps, where our matriarchal mitochondria dance, carrying stories that go all the way back to the caves. To an old woman covered in fur, barely human, who coos over the bones.

I roll over on the grass, allowing my legs only to meet the sun. It's 39 degrees today, and the heat makes dysautonomia worse. I can't even sit upright. I smile at the irony of thinking about journeys when I'm barely able to move. But of course, the imagination can go anywhere. The imramma, whatever else they are, are journeys of the psyche, of the embodied soul. For our psyche/soul is not separate, using our body merely as the vessel, the boat with which we journey from one world to the next. I've spent much of my life, from childhood onward, disassociated from my body due to both abuse and undiagnosed dyspraxia and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. I didn't trust my clumsy, wonky, too easily injured body that made me the target of ridicule at home and at school. Even less when it attracted the wrong attention from adult men. To occupy a female body is to be all too easily penetrable, to embody the other world for the men who want to plunder it.

All our classic journeys, the Imramma, the Odyssey, the Hero's Journey, are undertaken by men. Usually want to rescue a particularly ideal woman, and may rape a few others along the way. To have a female body then is so often to detach, to become a ghostly being ourselves. It was becoming chronically ill that plunged me back into my body and made me realize I had never gone anywhere at all, but simply become a ghost in my own landscape. It is impossible to disassociate totally when in such pain. It will make you acutely aware of sinew and muscle and bone, of where skin meets water, temperature, and fabric, the body of another. Pain is the mindfulness bell I didn't know I was getting, the door into my own other world. It's easy to get stuck on the island of ghosts, to balk at facing the monster. In our classic stories, the monster is always slain, and so we can waste energy and time battling it instead of asking it the right questions.

There are other pitfalls, other islands. There is always the place of illusions, a sidestep from where you really want to be going, a place where the music and the people are so enchanting that you don't know if the plants are dying and you're eating sawdust. Drugs can take you there, something I have to force myself to remember when I'm tempted to take extra painkillers. So can bad relationships, risky behavior, the glitter of celebrity, and riches. So many ways to get stuck, to hover at the edges, instead of journeying into a place where the pleasures are real. The Island of Women is always a good place for a reprieve, but the ultimate destiny of the Imram was always the Divine.

It doesn't have to be this hard. Sometimes the body can be a straight shortcut to bliss and to embodied flow. And in that flow, we see that our body is not just a way into our own psyche, but a way into the whole world, the drop returning home to the ocean. We have the pattern of trees in our lungs, of flowering plants in our genitals, of galaxies in our neurons. Stories can be a bridge, but sometimes we need no more than the body itself, the grass tickling the small hairs on our legs, sunlight on our lips, a breeze whispering in our ears. I imagine myself sinking into the earth, skin and soil and hair and grass, breathing out carbon to the hungry trees, taking in the oxygen they so freely offer, and I let myself smile. For a few brief moments, the earth holds my pain. And I feel myself open up to the sun. For a few brief moments, there is no separation, and I realise there was never anywhere at all to go.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post and would like to support me to keep writing, you can buy me a coffee here.

If you liked this post, you might enjoy these previous ones:

The Blackbird Sings the Spring - Welcoming in the Spring While Sick

Dark Moon Musings - On Selkie Stories and Finding My Way Home

The Witch, Too, is an Outsider - On Green Witchcraft, the Disabled Body, and Our Struggling Earth