Three Ounces

At the Mediterranean, before I poured the water from Tucson into the sea, Rafael was filming. The video shows what I did not know I was doing.

In the first frame, my head is bowed, and my hands are gathered at my chest, holding two small vessels close together. If you did not know better, you would think this was the holy part. It was not. I was decanting. I had carried the water across an ocean in a travel tube — three ounces, blessed at St. Andrew’s, sealed in the kind of bottle you pack toiletries in — and a travel tube does not pour. So I stood at the edge of the sea and tipped the water carefully into a little pottery cup, trying not to spill, the way you would transfer anything from one container to another. It was housekeeping. It looked like prayer.

The distance between the two turned out to be no distance at all. An inch. The width of a bowed head.

In the next frame, I am reading. I had written an intercession in Valencia, and I read it aloud to the water before I let it go: that this water came from the Sonoran borderlands, where people cross and do not always live, and that it was going into the Mediterranean, where people cross and do not always live. Borders to borders. Mothers to mothers. The same water, lifted out of one sea and rained down into another, has been crossing every border on earth since before there were borders. I was asking it to carry the ones we have made too hard to cross.

And then I poured. Three ounces into a sea that holds something on the order of a hundred quadrillion. I looked it up afterward — a hundred and twenty-seven quadrillion fluid ounces, give or take — because I wanted to know the exact size of the gesture I had made. The answer is that the gesture was nothing. Nothing I poured could register at that scale. In the last frame, I am bent toward the surf, two ships on the horizon, the wet sand holding my reflection. I look small against the horizon. I am small. That is correct.

And then the distance closed.

This is what a thin place is. Not a holy site, not a view. A thin place is where the distances we live by — between the sacred and the secular, between three ounces and a hundred quadrillion, between one border and another — stop holding. For a moment, they collapse onto each other, and you see that they were never as far apart as they had to be for ordinary life to go on. The water knew where it was going. It always does. It was the same water the whole time.