I’ve been thinking about third places; how much I love them and mourn them and how we’d all feel less lonely and connected to spirit if more of these spaces existed. My deepest experience of a third place was on a Tuesday evening in 2018. A friend and I stood in a crowd forming outside a middle school theatre turned poetry lounge in the heart of Los Angeles. The readings wouldn’t start for another 45 minutes, but the line wrapped around the building. When the doors finally opened we paid our $5 cash and poured into the theatre. Every seat filled within seconds and we sat on the stage knee to knee with strangers, putting our hip strength and flexibility to the test.
Our eyes turned up towards each performer and the external world fell away in the windowless room. Each poet dropped us deeper into one-pointed awareness; a spontaneous moment of dhyana absorbed us in timeless space and for a while it felt like god was in the room. We were suspended in this state for a two solid hours, sitting at the feet of god seen in the mix of art, deep listening, and vulnerability within shared space. This night of poetry was a spiritual experience that revived a piece of me and once the lights turned up and snapped us back into our bodies, I could tell I wasn’t the only one.
Incase you don’t know what a third place is, it’s a term used to describe the spaces we occupy outside of home and work. Third places are communal spaces where we can engage with each other, be leisurely, and let our walls fade away. I’ve found them often in the neutral ground of my local coffee shop, community centers, public libraries, gyms, yoga studios, my local grocery store, intimate concerts, used bookstores, hair salons, and front porch steps. These casual gathering spaces are the bedrock of society, simultaneously filling our human need for connection as well as our divine need to understand ourselves through each other. While the capitalist systems we exist in make us feel separate, third places remind us that we are deeply interwoven.