Dear Reader,

There are places where the boundary between the ordinary and something deeper feels thin. Ancient peoples understood this instinctively — they built their temples and sacred groves where the human world seemed to draw closer to the divine. But the reverse is also true: some landscapes carry the weight of violence and grief, an atmosphere no rational explanation quite accounts for. On my pilgrimage journeys, I've walked into villages and felt an immediate lightness — open doors, tended gardens, people who meet your eye. And I've walked into others where the shutters stay closed and the streets fall silent, as if life itself had withdrawn.

Walking slows you down enough to notice these differences — not just in a village's architecture, but in how people inhabit it. And it made me wonder about the landscapes that shaped our greatest writers and thinkers. Walking the lanes and hedgerows around Chawton recently, I found myself thinking about Jane Austen, and how her precise eye for human nature seems inseparable from that particular countryside. Perhaps creativity isn't only something that happens inside a mind — perhaps it's also a conversation with a place.

I don't claim to know what a thin place really is. Maybe it's not where heaven breaks through, but where we become capable of noticing that it might.

• Have you ever walked into a place and felt something shift in you, without knowing why?
• Is there a landscape that has shaped who you are, the way Chawton shaped Austen?

Read the full article here.​

Wishing you a great week

Reino

P.S. You might also want to check out the latest episode on the LivingToBe podcast on how words impact body, mind and spirit.