Thin Places

On the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday, I woke up to an newspaper article entitled 'Mass extinction of species is happening in Ireland'. The article stated that a third of the species groups examined are threatened with extinction, predominantly due to , , and . A number of species are, in fact, '', and without urgent action being taken immediately, they will simply disappear entirely from this island. That morning, I spent so many hours researching what we have already lost — what we risk losing any day — that I nearly wept with the sadness of it all. Some of those creatures in most danger are the , the , the , the bumblebee, the , the and the .

In old , butterflies were the souls of the dead and it was unlucky to harm one. The , however, was thought to be the devil and was persecuted. The idea of the butterfly as the embodiment of the soul implies their ability to cross into the . My ancestors often saw no boundary at all between wild places and that Otherworld which we cannot see.