Raynor Winn and the Thin Place

On my birthday, my wife and I went to the cinema to see The Salt Path, the film adaptation of the 2018 book of the same name by Raynor Winn. The book tells the story of Raynor and her husband Moth, who lose their home, just as Moth is diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. Without money or options, they take the decision to pack up their few belongings and begin walking the South West Coastal Path - the longest of England's footpaths, which stretches for 630 miles around the cost of Devon and Cornwall, into Dorset.

Reading is something that's very important to me, as a source of knowledge, comfort and inspiration and The Salt Path is, without doubt, the most impactful book I've read in the last five years. It's beautifully written and explores themes of home and what that means, the unpredictability and often unfairness of life and the beauty of nature and mindfulness in the face of it.

After reading the Salt Path, I devoured Winn's two subsequent books - Landlines and the Wild Silence and the three books merged into one narrative of the lives of these two people and the family and friends Raynor introduces the reader too. As with all stories, there are the big things that you remember (the paths they walk, the nature of their homelessness, Moth's illness and it's impact on him, their resilience and courage) and there are little things which stick with you. One such little thing which I've thought of endlessly since I read it, was a concept that Winn introduces in The Wild Silence which I'd not encountered before - a Celtic concept called the Thin Place. She says:

"The thin place is right here, and it’s always here. This place between the stone and my fingers, this is the place where our conscience and the earth are inseparable"

The idea of the Thin Place is that it's a place (not a physical location, so much as a moment in time, or experience) where the membrane between the physical and the spiritual world is so fin that you feel a heightened connection to something beyond the ordinary, beyond the everyday. A connection with the divine or the unseen. A permeable barrier between heaven and earth.

A man in the wilderness, looking for The Thin Place

This concept was planted in me like a seed. Quiet, yet profound. Like many powerful ideas I've encountered, it didn’t shout for attention, but over time, it began to grow roots in how I think, how I observe, and how I live. I've come to understand that Thin Places are not always found in cathedrals or on windswept moors and hillsides, though they can be. More often, they sneak up on us in quiet moments: in the light filtering through trees, in the moment the rain stops and the land sits in silence, in the stillness after a conversation that touched something deep.

We live in a world obsessed with productivity, clarity, and control. But Thin Places ask something else of us. They ask us to pause, to be present, and to trust that not everything can (or should) be explained. They ask us to engage with mystery, with awe, and with vulnerability. For someone like me, raised with a certain preference for logic and structure, that hasn’t always been comfortable. But it's been transformative.

Thinking about Thin Places has helped me redefine what sacred means. It’s no longer confined to religious rituals or formal spaces. Instead, sacredness has seeped into everyday life. I feel it when I walk in the hills with Flora, when I share silence with someone I care for, or when I sit alone under a clear and star filled sky. These are moments when the veil thins, when the world feels charged with more than just what we see.

I’ve started to intentionally seek these spaces and moments. Not to escape life, but to deepen it. Walking helps em more than anything else – not with a destination in mind, but simply to be with the rhythm of my own footsteps and the world around me. Journaling, just capturing my thoughts or more accurately letting them fall onto the page, opens me up to the unseen. Music, too, especially live music, seems to create a portal into something bigger than the notes themselves. I can picture now the exact moments when I felt the thinness of the membrane between the seen and the unseen at gigs I've been to over the past years.

And sometimes, Thin Places aren’t beautiful. Sometimes they are raw, painful, or disorienting. They can emerge in grief, in endings, in moments of heartbreak or letting go - I lost two close friends in a three month span, last year and felt a vulnerability and a daunting thinness between what I could see and touch and what lies beyond it. But they are no less sacred for that. In fact, they may be even more so. Because they connect us with our deepest selves, and with something vast, compassionate, and wise beyond us.

Winn's use of the term Thin Place gave language to something I had felt but never articulated. It validated experiences I had often dismissed as just being "emotional" or "tired" or "coincidental." And it encouraged me to lean in, to notice more, to soften the borders I had placed around what counts as meaningful.

One of the unexpected outcomes of embracing the idea of Thin Places is that it has changed how I relate to others. I listen differently. I show up with more presence. I try to hold space for people not just with my words, but with my attention. And I have found that in doing so, the membrane between us thins, too. Something deeper, more human and more divine, becomes possible in our interactions.

So much of modern life seems to pull us out of ourselves, into distraction, reaction, and fragmentation. But Thin Places call us back. Back to stillness. Back to wonder. Back to connection – with nature, with each other, with the sacred.

I now look for these places. Not just in the dramatic landscapes of the coast or the hills, but in the small cracks of my daily life. In the laughter I share with my daughter. In the quiet of early morning as I walk Flora. In the ordinariness of doing simple chores as the evening falls. Perhaps the greatest gift of the Thin Place is not that it offers escape, but that it reveals the world as it truly is – layered, shimmering, shot through with the divine. Always waiting. Always here. If only we pay attention.