Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home Book

I was honored to read this book. That's how I felt throughout--honored. Armbrecht's delicacy in representing another culture on the page, and in representing the *process* of representing the "other" gives the book a roomy feeling. The reader has plenty of ground to stand on as the book unfolds.

Armbrecht is concerned with sacred place. How is that defined? She studies land ownership traditions in a remote area of Nepal and shows how well-meaning international conservation efforts can undermine traditional societies. She well articulates the between-two-worlds position many young Nepali villagers find themselves in, as they acquire more education and more access to Western lifestyles, but still are not afforded the opportunity to participate in a Westernizing society. Nor can they fully return home, as education and professional development systems in Nepal as in most countries do not use traditional values as a starting place. Students aren't educated on the basis of their strengths, and little thought is given toward how development could accommodate traditional social and spiritual values.

The parallels with the experiences of many Native Americans were obvious.

Sacred boundaries also delineate where the soul can most feel at home. Geographically, sure, but also within a person. The village she studied saw humans as possessing four souls, each of which needs to be nurtured and kept anchored to one's body and life path. Her observations led her to consider the state of her own soul, what it means to be at home in a world where physical boundaries constantly mutate, where family ties are easily severed, and where friends can move away or die. As a result of her work abroad, Armbrecht learns to listen better to her own needs and to honor her instincts.

There overlapping and interwoven structure of the book sometimes led to a lot of repetition. I sometimes thought some more direct exposition on her marriage and its decline would have been more effective. I found myself thinking of Gretel Ehrlich's A Match to the Heart, which is a wonderful book--but which lost itself in its own metaphors sometimes. You just wanted Ehrlich to come out and say what the hell happened to her marriage.

This book is a bit of a hybrid of scholarly work and reflection aimed at a lay audience. Thus, there are these odd moments when Armbrecht seems to feel the need (reflexively?) to do that year:page academic citation system. Not the end of the world, but it's a little odd when she's quoting TS Eliot, for example. All you really need to say is As Eliot wrote, blah blah. No one cares which edition you're referring to and anyway they can google the phrase. This type of thing gave the prose a clunky feel at times... also, while overall I appreciated her cautious, reverent tone, sometimes she may have equivocated a bit much.

I dogeared so many pages, I hardly know which to turn to now. I was especially moved by Armbrecht's articulation of the liminality of early motherhood, where it may seem that you're losing an identity, when you're actually gaining one. You ARE in the process of becoming someone else, and if you can embrace this rather than fight it, there's enormous potential for growth. In one sad section, her husband says it seems to him that Armbrecht's wings have been clipped by motherhood, when her internal experience is just the opposite. She's just stunned that he hasn't seen the transformation in her, how she's grown into her intuitions, how she has developed as a person as a result of being so intimate with her daughter. Perhaps she's less involved in worldly matters, such as her career, but she *feels* expanded by what she's going through, and it's a great grief to learn that her husband not only doesn't value this growth, but might not even see it.

What else do we miss?