Day 13 of 30: Thin Places

The magic of NYC and a prompt by Jordan Kisner

To celebrate a year of the Isolation Journals, we’re inviting you to join us in a 30-day journaling challenge for the month of April. To support your practice, we’ll be emailing you three prompts each week. Then in May, we’ll return to our regular Sunday newsletter.

If you want a little extra inspiration, you can find a daily prompt here on the site. And if you want to help sustain the Isolation Journals, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Hi friend,

I returned to New York City yesterday for only the third time since the pandemic started, and I found myself saying aloud, “God, I love this city.” 

I had an errand to run in Chinatown, and it was noisy and busy—the jackhammering, the honking, the pigeons flapping and cooing. The sidewalks were crowded with people, and in typical New York fashion, everyone was rushing along, not making eye contact. I myself had earbuds in and a podcast on, as a kind of insulation against the masses.

Then suddenly, I heard a high-pitched sound—a kind of, “Oooh!” I took out one earbud, and I noticed it was coming from a crossing-guard on East Broadway. She was short and plump, with a bright blue raincoat under her yellow vest. She was watching the indicator and saying to people, “Ooooh! You’re gonna make it! You’re gonna make it! Now you’re really gonna make it!”

It came across as both a literal and an existential pep talk, and I was delighted. After that, I had the good fortune to encounter her two more times. I stopped for a quick bite in this dive-y little dim sum place, and they only took cash. I passed her on my way to the ATM, and when I did, there happened to be a BMW at the stop light. She said, “Oooh, look at this car. Well, well, well, baby. Look who’s got the money!” The third time, I was heading back to my jeep, and a guy was trying to cross her crosswalk even though it wasn’t his turn. She told me, “There are three kinds of guys in this city: the hot ones, the bothered ones, and the hot and bothered ones.” I laughed and nodded, even though I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. She made me want to forget everything and cross that crosswalk on East Broadway for the rest of the day.

This past Sunday, I got to host the lovely Mari Andrew for a Studio Visit, and we talked about finding the magic in the mundane. And yesterday in New York, it was everywhere—magic in that exuberant crossing guard, in the pigeons and the scraggly city trees that are just starting to bud. At the dim sum place, I sat next to a sweet couple who’d just gotten married at city hall. She wore a white dress, and he was in a suit, and they were celebrating their nuptials with $3 dumplings. Again I thought, “God, I love this city.”

Our prompt today is from my friend Jordan Kisner, about “thin places,” which are portals onto other worlds. May it transport you somewhere magical.

Quite certain I’m going to make it,

Suleika

P.S. Jordan’s book Thin Places just came out in paperback, and it’s fantastic. Her writing lives in that blurred boundary between memoir and reporting, and it’s profoundly intimate and transportive. You can find it in our Bookshop.

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Thin Places by Jordan Kisner

The title of my book, Thin Places, comes from a notion in Celtic mythology that the distance between our world and the next is never more than three feet (i.e. just a little more than an arm's reach away). There are "thin places" where that distance shrinks and then vanishes, where you can glimpse some other world or way of being for a brief moment. Often, "thin places" are literal places, geographical locations that feel holy or otherworldly, but you could also imagine these kinds of thresholds popping up anywhere: in a hospital room, in a bar, in your apartment, in your relationship, in you. A thin place may also be a moment, a time when you were briefly suspended between a world/life that you knew and something totally new, different, awesome, frightening.

Your prompt for today:

Describe a “thin place” or threshold you’ve encountered. It could be a location, an experience, a relationship, a period of time. Describe it in as much concrete detail as you can: what did you see, smell, feel with your hands? How did it make you feel? Who else was there? What led you there? What did you do? What happened afterward? Did anything change? It may feel hard to describe—that's ok! Ineffable experiences are the hardest to describe. Get weird!

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One Last Thing…

Our prompts will always be free, and all are welcome. But if you have the means, we’re humbly asking you to consider becoming a paying subscriber. Over the last year, I’ve worked with the most incredible team of women to nurture this project, sourcing over 145 beautiful prompts from the most extraordinary people I could find, and coming up with new and exciting ways to build community. It’s been a labor of love but also a whole lot of labor. 

Our hope is to continue to do this work—because isolation did not start with the pandemic, and it will not end with it. More and more, isolation is a feature of modern life. We want to continue providing opportunities for reflection, connection, and inspiration. We want to continue creating with you. Because as our friend Elizabeth Gilbert says, a creative life is an amplified life.

I do this work because I know it works, and it’s necessary. Here, we create ourselves. Here, we write our way through.

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