Thin Places and Thin Times

I first heard about thin places from a woman on a podcast whose voice still haunts me in the best way. She wasn’t just any guest — she was a high-powered lawyer, the kind who made partner before thirty-five, mother of two, married, a firebrand activist running on caffeine and unrest. But that day, she wasn’t telling us about courtrooms or campaigns. She was remembering a different version of herself — one who existed in the electric in-between, on the edge of something beginning.

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Right after graduating university, and just before law school swallowed her whole, she took the one real break she had left — a solo trip to Ireland. Alone. No plan, no itinerary, just a sense that this was her last inhale before a lifetime of holding her breath. She hitchhiked through misty backroads and rolling green hills, drank with handsome and rugged strangers in pubs that felt older than time, and even found herself on an unofficial date at a castle on a hill. 

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But none of that is what she remembered most.

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What she couldn’t shake — even now, decades later — was the moment she stepped into a place so still, so staggeringly alive, that she felt something holy press against her chest. The air shifted. Time dissolved. She said she became utterly still, her senses flooded, her body overcome with presence.

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It was a thin place, she said — where the veil between this world and the other softens, and something greater brushes up against you.

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The term thin places was used by the ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians to describe the moments or landscapes where something greater — God, spirit, the unseen — feels close. A place where the boundary between this world and another becomes porous. 

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Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. Some believe thin places are ancient pilgrimage sites. Others say they’re found anywhere a heart breaks open.

But lately, I’ve also been thinking about something else:
What about thin times?

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If thin places mark the threshold between heaven and earth — maybe thin times are the thresholds within life itself.

Those in-between moments where a soul finds itself suspended: between peace and war, between despair and hope, between freedom and captivity, between exile and return. 

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Let me give you my own example.

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I was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in April 1989 — just after one war ended, and just before the next one began. It was a thin time. The kind where a country exhales but doesn’t dare to inhale. 

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The Soviet-backed communist government ruled Afghanistan from 1978 to 1992, following a coup by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which was supported and funded by the Soviet Union. In February 1989, just two months before I was born, Soviet troops withdrew from the country after nearly a decade of war, due in large part to the resistance of the U.S., Saudi, and Pakistani-funded Afghan mujahideen.

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I try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother — seven months pregnant, carrying new life while the ground beneath her was anything but steady. How do you find your own footing when your country is trembling beneath you, unmoored from anything you can count on?

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Maybe she was hopeful. Maybe, for a moment, she allowed herself to imagine the possibility of a sovereign Afghanistan. Or maybe she knew too much — about history, about how nations so often collapse from one war into the next. Because power and control have always seduced humans, across borders and generations.

Somewhere between collapse and unreasonable hope, a child is born.

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My family left just two years later. You can guess which way the scale tipped. 

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I’ve often wondered what that does to a person — to be born inside a breath that the world was too afraid to finish.

What becomes of the children born in thin times? The ones who arrive at the edge of history — What happens to our minds, bodies, and souls when portals of transformation open and close before we’re old enough to understand the world we’ve entered?

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I think I’ve always lived somewhere between.

Between listening and speaking.
Between what I know and what my mind can imagine.
Between wanting to take up all the space in the world — and wanting to disappear.
Between the grief in my body and the clarity in my choices.
Between power and resentment.
Between divine timing and my restless urgency.
Between the edge of breaking and the beginning of becoming.
Between the wildness of my heart and the discipline of my will.

Between telling the truth and risk becoming exile. 

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These are the in-between places.

The thin times.

This is where my story begins.
Not at the start, not at the end — but at the threshold.
In the shimmer.
In the thinness.

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Kate Pejman

 Creative & Founder, The Benevolent Series 

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