This morning when I woke up and looked out the window, my first thought was, "Is it still February?" Then I realized--not only is it still February... it is mid-February. Or mathematically speaking, just past the midpoint of February. Suddenly the sun flashed onto the long tall trunks of the pine trees out back and I remembered our second reading from last Sunday morning, a portion of an interview in Flycatcher Journal with Barbara Brown Taylor about those “thin places” in everyday life that help us connect with our deeper levels of spiritual awareness.

As Taylor says, "I’ve known thin places all my life, but I didn’t have the language for them until I took a trip to Ireland a few years back. Perhaps I read the phrase in a guidebook—I can no longer remember—but I had the experience long before I had a name for it. Thin places are transparent places or moments, set apart by the quality of the sunlight in them, or the shadows, or the silence, or the sounds… What they have in common is their luminosity, the way they light an opening between this world and another—I’d say “between this world and the next,” but that makes it sound like one world has to end before the next one can begin, and a thin place doesn’t work like that. It works to make you more aware of the thin veil between apparent reality and deeper reality. It works to pull aside the veil for just a moment, so you can see through....Thin places can open up just about anywhere. They aren’t always lovely places, and they’re not always outdoors. Hospital rooms can be thin places. So can emergency rooms and jail cells. A thin place is any place that drops you down to where you know you’re in the presence of the Really Real—the Most Real—God, if you insist."