Last summer, I had been invited by a friend from aikido to accompany him to Manchester for one of Zahir Khan‘s regular talks.
I don’t know what I expected to happen, but the experience was transformational in a way that I find difficult to explain – at least without using cliches about energetic connection and being in the presence of love, etc., etc.
The meeting had ended, and I was standing in the gentle afternoon light outside of the Friends Meeting House, listening to the calm chatter of people going about their activities. I felt I was on the verge of ‘slipping through a crack in the world’, yet nothing had changed outwardly.
Zahir looked at me for a moment and said, almost casually, ‘I could see your story slipping’.
I knew exactly what he meant. The idea of who we are is shaped by stories: those that other people tell about us, and those we tell about ourselves. Over time, these tales slip into the background and become what we feel as a coherent ‘self’.
But sometimes, this coherence weakens, and something bigger pushes at us from within. This is what I was feeling in Manchester, and Zahir’s words spoke to that larger part of me. It was like I was being recognised and gently unmoored at the same time.
Again, nothing outward changed. The place I occupied remained the same, and yet I was transported. The conversation continued, and yet there was more meaning behind the words. There were no shining lights or mystical glows, yet something widened, like the iris of an invisible internal eye.
These liminal experiences are not dramatic, yet they challenge everything we think we know about ourselves and the world, and in the writing of Eight, the second part of The Kingfisher Quests, I am leaning more into this unsettling and powerful threshold experience, particularly as it applies to places.
As with our own self-descriptions, labeling objects, including places, helps us to keep the world steady. But occasionally, the label thins. Sometimes it slips entirely. And what remains is vaster and deeper than the label can contain.
There are buildings that seem to be larger than their labels. You might call a building an ancient church or an elegant hall or a ruined castle. You can catalogue its architectural style and its history through time. The building’s story stabilises its existence. We perceive it through a narrow but safe lens.
But sometimes, when you step inside, the building’s story slips, and it is not simply the stunning stained glass narratives; rich, woven tapestries or carved stone staircases. It is weight. Gravity.
It is the sense that thoughts and feelings have endured here for longer than you have been alive. Stone doesn’t think. It doesn’t believe. And yet it captures attention. Love, laughter and hope; torture, misery and fear; centuries of kneeling, whispered confessions; the slow repetition of prophecy in chilled air.
Take an old religious building: we might say the carvings and paintings symbolise belief. But what if it’s more than that? What if the building has absorbed the stories it has been told? What if stone, like the face of a stranger, sometimes reveals more depth than the story we’ve assigned to it?
Perhaps this is why ancient places feel different. We like to imagine ourselves as observers: visitors stepping briefly into history. We catalogue, admire, photograph, interpret. We leave unchanged – or do we? Older cultures rarely described encounters with special places in that way. Folklore is full of warnings about hollow hills and the faerie folk who dwell within them. Step too far inside, linger too long, and you may not return as you were. Time slips. Memory shifts. Something subtle is taken – or given.
Many of those hills still exist. Some now sit beneath stone vaults and cathedral arches. The myth has shifted, the architecture has changed, but the underlying intuition remains: certain places have power. Some structures are so charged that they dominate the field of experience. Their atmosphere is stronger than our personal narrative. And if we’re not careful, we don’t just stand inside them. We enter into a bond. Is that what people meant when they spoke of being ‘taken by the hill’?
Perhaps that’s why certain buildings unsettle us. We assume we are entering a building. It rarely occurs to us that the building may also be entering us.
These explorations are shaping the next stage of my writing. If this territory interests you, you can subscribe to my mailing list (bottom of the page) for future reflections.
Image attribution: Torley from torley.com, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons