Description In Irish Celtic lore, "Thin places" are those locales where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape.
In juxtaposing these realms, he expands his, and our, pers.
He leads us in a revealing conversation between two particular landscapes--between Dubuque and Dublin, Iowa and Ireland, the Driftless and the Druidic, the indigenous and immigrant.
Whether in the Driftless region or in the spirit-haunted West of Ireland, Koch comprehends the numinous, and his lyric prose reveals how landscape and myth speak to us in ways somehow both outside and beyond language." --James Silas Rogers, Editor, New Hibernia Review: A Record of Irish Studies "In The Thin Places, Kevin Koch offers a unique journey into place, history, and spirit. "It is tempting to say that The Thin Places explores two unconnected lands--except the point of Kevin Koch\'s wise and watchful book is precisely that there are no unconnected places.
But the text never strays far from story, from a trek through the Wicklow Mountains and the bogs of Western Ireland or among ancient Native American burial mounds and abandoned nineteenth-century lead mines in the bluffs above the Mississippi River.
The Thin Places brings onsite mountaineering guides, spiritual leaders, geologists, and archaeologists alongside scholars in the fields of Celtic studies, religion, and conservation.
What happens, then, when a Celtic view of nature is brought home to a North American landscape in which many inhabitants\' ancestral connections to place are surface-thin? In a quest to find a deeper spiritual landscape in his own home, Kevin Koch applies eight principles of a Celtic spiritual view of nature to Places in Ireland and to the American Midwest\'s rugged Driftless Area, an unglaciated region of river bluffs, rock outcrops, and steeply wooded hills.
The earth takes on the hue of the sacred among peoples whose connection to place has remained unbroken through the ages.
Description In Irish Celtic lore, "Thin places" are those locales where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape
