A Hut at the Edge of the Village
On a recent retreat on Iona, I took a copy of Martin Shaw’s book, A Hut at the Edge of the Village - a collection of writings by the Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty. Moriarty is a storyteller, and his stories offer a way of seeing that takes us beyond the familiar. The ‘hut’ is not simply a place but a threshold between the known and the unknown, between comfort and wildness, between who we think we are and who we might become. A ‘thin place’, as Iona itself is often described, where inner and outer landscapes meet and speak to each other in the presence of the creator.
I found the ‘hut’ to be a metaphor with profound therapeutic resonance as I reflected on the journey of healing, my own and that of my clients. The place of transformation. In therapeutic work, we often begin in the “village”—the social, the familiar, the rehearsed roles and stories we tell ourselves. Yet, healing rarely happens entirely within these boundaries. The real shift occurs when we dare to walk toward the edges.
Clients often come to therapy because something in the village no longer holds. The old maps fail. A relationship ends, a trauma surfaces, a long-ignored grief demands to be named. This rupture invites us - if we’re willing, to seek shelter not in the centre but in the wilderness on the fringe, uncomfortable, exposed, and yet mysteriously necessary.
The therapeutic relationship becomes a sort of hut itself - a sacred, safe place where the deeper inner Self begins to emerge through tears of disappointment, loss, and confusion, with the voicing of secret fears and shame. The encounter with the Self at the edge moves us away from false selves - those constructed to survive the village, and toward the original essence of our being.
This doesn’t happen quickly. In Moriarty’s world, stories take time. Likewise, in therapy, transformation unfolds slowly, often in cycles of remembering, forgetting, and returning. The hut doesn’t provide easy answers, but it does offer the conditions in which a more profound truth might surface.
Moriarty invites us to listen for the old stories that lie buried in the bones of our lives. Therapy, then, is not about fixing ourselves but about remembering who we are beneath the noise - reconnecting with soul and the imagination.
The hut is solitary, but it’s not lonely. It holds space for something greater - a rewilding of the Self, a willingness to sit by the fire with what we fear and love most, and when we are ready, we might carry something back from the hut - not to impress the village, but to live with more truth, more presence, and more soul.