The Fairy Fog

In Eternal Echoes Catholic scholar John O'Donohue says about the Celtic world: It was not a world of clear boundaries; persons and things were never placed in bleak isolation from each other. Everything was connected and there was a lovely sense of the fluent flow of presences in and out of each other. The physical world was experienced as the shoreline of an invisible world which flowed underneath it and whose music reverberated upwards.... [The Celts] saw themselves as guests in a living, breathing universe. They had great respect for the tenuous regions between the worlds and between the times. The in-between world was also the world of in-between times: between sowing and reaping, pregnancy and birth, intention and action, the end of one season and the beginning of another. The presences who watched over this world were known as the fairies.

In our world, we have grown used to our circumscribed vision, which sees only walls and corners and clear-cut edges. It seems to me, though, that within Christianity there has from ancient times been an honoring of those in-between moments and places, and they are marked by holy seasons or days. Think of Advent, the time of Mary's pregnancy; or Lent, Jesus' desert time between ministry and the road to crucifixion; or the time of Holy Saturday (fast approaching) in between death and resurrection. These periods all fall around the Earth's own in-between times of solstice and equinox. They are known by Christians as "thin" times, when boundaries begin to dissolve and we can be, by grace, peculiarly open to seeing differently and experiencing the Holy.

We are in such a thin time now. Two days ago I was in the living room of my small house here at Rolling Ridge. It was early morning. Billy had just left for work and I was alone, finishing up my silent movement-prayer-meditation. The room has two wide glass doors opening to the deck and a small meadow and glen beyond. Glancing up I saw a mist floating in wisps and tendrils, kissing the grasses and daffodils and swirling lightly around the trees. The outlines of the deck railing and bird feeder softened; the dogwood took on a soft gray iridescence. The air hushed; the birds seemed to hold their breath. The mist danced, gossamer and graceful, through the clearing and twining branches of the trees and continued on up the soft easterly slope of the forested hill, where it vanished into the sun's warming rays.

John O'Donohue describes a similar scene in Ireland at dusk: "Often at evening one sees a fog low in the fields. Usually fog is first on the mountains and then it comes down. In the gathering dusk, this other fog collects in white streamers and clouds over the fields. It is almost as if a vaporous white wood suddenly stands suspended over the grass. All outlines are blurred; the interim kingdom becomes visible in a presence that is neither object nor light nor darkness. The ancient name for this presence still lingers. It is called 'an ceo draiochta', the fairy fog."

As we move on in time through this in-between season, my hope is that I and all of us can live in this sacred, magic, thin place, even if only for a while. I use "place" metaphorically, though my belief is that the actual place of wilderness is the natural home of these experiences.

~Lindsay McLaughlin