The sound of flowing water soothes most nervous systems, but particularly those acclimatized to the desert, and particularly upon waking. I have struggled with sleep disturbances for most of my adult life, so it’s rare for me to experience the weight and metabolic satisfaction of a good night’s rest. But twice last month, I found myself receiving what we can call river medicine: first while visiting friends at their cabin in the Pecos Wilderness, and again east of Aspen, Colorado, while teaching at Beyul Retreat, a guest ranch along the Frying Pan River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork River.
River medicine is like this: surrounded by tall, sappy pines, I found myself one early morning in the atmospheric valley between sleeping and waking, an integrative field of frequencies and forms. You know the place. Even now, I do not know for certain: did the river, by some charm of consciousness, stream into my dreamscape and stir me awake? Or was it the dream that pulsated forward into the matrix of a new day? What I can say is that I felt a bright, hydrous intelligence moving in ripples and waves through my body—clarifying and tonifying, calming neurons and glial cells in their watery beds, clearing layers of baked-in tension like grit loosened from a soaking pan. And for a time, I floated above the push of the day, appearing and disappearing and reappearing to myself.
In the wake of hours that followed, to my delight, I noticed a quiet reverberation—an elemental answer quelling a wordless, needful thirst.
Science offers a partial explanation for this. Water has a high dielectric constant, meaning it reduces the electrostatic attraction between charged particles, which helps substances like salt crystals separate and dissolve more easily. I would also propose that water’s properties of solubility, absorption, and transmission apply to its natural ability to clean and balance the bioenergetic forces of being human.
When a river twists and turns, it releases negative ions into the air. Microscopically, this process is dynamic—even violent. Molecules spill over rocks and tumble forward, rushing and colliding, breaking apart, and thereby transferring electrons and charging the surrounding air. But I find comfort in this science of fluid revitalization. New, more supportive structures can form when old ones give way, pointing to how, beyond turmoil and devastation, we too can hope for vital transformation.
Years ago, I read a New York Times article called “Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer,” in which journalist Eric Weiner wrote about “thin places,” locations where the gap between the ordinary and extraordinary—or, better yet, transordinary—thins out.
“Thin” seemed to me a strange choice to describe where the air thickens with meaning. But Celts and early Christians held that a small but distinct distance, like three feet, separates heaven and earth—and that distance dissolves in “places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments [we] loosen [our] death grip on life, and can breathe again.”
Many a thin place has been built by human hands. Early in my career, I worked for the United Nations Foundation in collaboration with UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre, and developed the sensible habit of visiting the most treasured cathedrals, temples, and sanctuary sites wherever I found myself in the world. Jama Masjid in Delhi, Sacré-Cœur in Paris, Tirta Empul in Bali, Newgrange in Ireland, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem: each has a distinct energetic signature that lives in my memory, a resonance born of its purpose and the accumulation of countless prayers that infuse the surrounding air.
But thin places are more often found than made. Mountains, canyons, coral palaces—they are organic monuments to mysticism and ready reminders of our humble size before nature. As Weiner writes, “Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us—or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.”
In this sense, thin places evoke qualities of alchemy and revelation. In traveling to Beyul Retreat, I recalled how the Vajrayana Buddhist term “beyul” refers to hidden valleys believed to be sanctuaries blessed by enlightened teachers, places where the land itself is animate. A beyul holds the wisdom that rivers, trees, and even rocks are not objects but mandalas — living altars, ineffable and intricate in their aliveness.
Aptly named, Beyul Retreat is a place where the boundary between perception and imagination feels more permeable. The land electrifies with new growth as summer approaches: dandelion confetti bursts open in the meadows, aspen trees shimmy, and fresh sage scents the air. Each morning, as the river’s murmur moves through the valley, calypso orchids bloom in the shade while the pointed ears of silver fox pups perk up from behind cool, wet stones.
In the imaginal realm of childhood, there are many such beyuls, many thin places. There are fern groves and swallow lairs, stars nestled in apple cores and galaxies in lightning bugs, and lobe-handed sycamore leaves at the wild end of the yard.
We tend to think of nature as speaking in symbols, but its directness transmits rather than approximates. “The world is not made of objects; it is a communion of subjects,” writes Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. “To enter the imaginal realm is to give permission to the ineffable within us, to allow the world to speak through our senses, our dreams, our longings.”
To commune is to listen with our whole body, to notice the most basic and vital exchange of breath and circumstance that underpins our existence. To allow for a metamorphosis of our attention. And when we realize the subjectivity of the world, we can discover strange and wonderful ways of joining the conversation. Like us, the aspens drink water and eat light. They have instincts and work to protect their lives. And did you know that the dark spots resembling eyes on the smooth, pale bark are scars left behind when the tree sheds lower branches that receive less sunlight? Look how this porous watchfulness is directed in our direction, how the forest offers us its attention.
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