Aurora Borealis
I just finished reading a book about a Norweigan who in struggling to figure out meaning in his life took to making lists.. to figure out what he had.. and what he wanted.
I thought it was stupid but a part of me started wanting to make a list of places I would like to see before I die. I quite like the idea of travelling, wanderering.. just taking stuff in.. most of the travelling I’ve done in the past been fairly loud with crazy times with strangers in hostels. I have a clue what this life is about.. but I quite enjoy being by myself.. and being outside I dunno these moments seem more significant than the others. I read a book about the first generation of Christian Celtic monks in England who travelled and identified places like this.. holy places as ‘thin places’ the idea that the border between the seen and the unseen was thinner in that place. It was subjective.. not based on a worship of the place itself but of the objective, expansive presence of God. It could be a room, a seat on the bus, a wood or a grave.. God isn’t actually in that place but that place opens your heart to God.. and God’s spirit rests within those who accept him. The Jews before they built the temples had a tabernacle or tent which moved with the people in exodus, and after the crucifixion of the Christ it’s said that God’s spirit became tabernacled amongst the people instead caught up in a temple..
I heard about this guy called Leonard Knight. I really really would love to meet him some day, theres something else about him.. he made Salvation Mountain which is literally a pile of cement and paint made from donations which he’s used to tell people about the love of God, it’s in the middle of the desert in California but people are drawn to it from all over. It’s all he does really as far as I know, just paint and build non-stop and I think if anywhere is a thin-place it’s, for me atleast.. the concept of Salvation Mountain and Leonard Knight.. I read a story about his life somewhere, it’s pretty crazy.. but just makes me realise what a massive world we live in.
Leonard Knight
I’ve just gone off on one again but, for me atleast there seems a significance in the idea of thin places, of being reminded that God is with us, that to a measure we reflect him and that this world can remind us of that.. whether it’s in something beautiful or even in something horrible that can remind us of our need for God. I never really woke up the idea of Christianity till I had read Nietzsche and.. the world left behind by Nietzsche for me just wasn’t worth living in.. all I could say after reading about Nietzsche was somehow he didn’t live quite by his convictions, and then I read Satre and I don’t think he did either.. which just made me figure I haven’t got these moral hangups by some cruel joke; Not even that.. I just got sick of being so bloody melancholy, half happy, half sad.. and such a consistently apathetic cynic. Even when the world does try to toughen me up I know I got a heart that bleeds, thats flesh.. that might not be pretty but it’s real.
Sometimes I’ll look at the world and I’ll remember all of a sudden it’s real.
Perfect Circles 