Carn Gelli, Rhosycaerau
One of the great benefits of living in a specific place for a long time is knowing that encounters with assorted people in various public places are highly likely. How grand it is to have a reunion with a long lost friend in the check-out line at Home Depot. Despite an interval of often very difficult years, I vividly recall a magnificent experience of community with Cindy in ‘Christmas Decorations’ in Sam’s Club one Saturday afternoon. My mission had been to acquire silk poinsettias for a dinner party in the evening. What Cindy gave me that day was Christmas at its very best. The small semi-rural town I call home in South Carolina has been most generous in this respect. Some days will find me in as many as eight homes. Southern hospitality seems to be thriving in some regions despite long-standing draught.
This morning was given to walking along a maritime coastal path, situated along the undulating upper edges of impressive rocky cliffs that cascade about two hundred feet to the waters of the Celtic Sea. At times the journey was at sea level and at others an ascension would bring me up to panoramic vistas five hundred feet above those brooding waters. Good fortune continues for me. Languid air and titillating pools of sunlight dancing across the cliffs provided a bucolic ambience to my mid day-wanderings.
Making journeys in remote places very clearly reduces the probabilities of chance encounters with familiar faces. After weeks alone in a vast city, seeing familiar smiling faces on a station platform was decidedly … exotic. Yet ...
Having been blessed by the One in charge, fine light illuminated pleasing aureate images of an imposing harbor, there for the harvesting. With two cameras I scampered up and down the outcroppings of rock, capturing the sense of a place that has for centuries provided asylum from the often irritable temperament of the gray feisty sea outside this magnificent natural refuge. After enjoying lunch on an ancient cannon barrel, fortified with a new burst of energy, I climbed a very steep path from so-called Cwm Abergwaun into the town that has accreted on the brow of the cliffs over recent centuries.
A small unpretentious stone church appears on the right behind an iron railing, just before one enters the town square. There is nothing square or ordered about this square which is really an organic collection of small serpentine lanes converging at an ancient pub, where centuries ago the French signed a deed of surrender and repented of assorted misdeeds. As so often happens, curiosity beckoned me into another of these ancient time-encrusted churches, interested in seeing what luminosity might still be found within. Passing through a forest of eroded tomb stones, large oak doors yielded to my queries - a good sign. So often fear has locked them tight.
Inside, the sanctuary presented two dozen panels of luminous glass - very fine glass that told an important story in its own way. Not exactly gothic or Victorian, it told me I had come to a place of welcome, of community. Being absolutely alone in the building, these windows proved easy colorful pickings for my cameras. Suddenly, from the fringes of the sanctuary, dozens of potted flowers, very happy festive flowers, presented themselves to dark-adapted eyes for visual consumption. These were not funeral or wedding flowers. Why was the ancient stone font enshrouded in a most glorious outburst of gold, orange, yellow, amber, and russet blooms?
A man came in, soon followed by his attractive wife. The windows were right. A warm welcome and conversation soon had transfigured me from isolated tourist to included seeker. Pleasing conversation with these local diplomats told me that curiosity does pay off. An invitation to a harvest festival dinner and entertainment on the other side of the unsquare square followed. I had been admitted.
Another couple soon wandered into that spectral oasis. Seven trains, several planes, and a long car journey from home, others seeking to know who they are, showed up in this place that knows no strangers; people from the very place I call home on the far side of the water. It is a very small world after all. E-mail will keep it small. Tim and his vivacious wife sought for the kind of knowledge to be found on weathered grave stones. I wandered through the square, knowing dinner was taken care of.
Just after turning the corner to walk five miles back to the ancient hills where I have found radiant hospitality, I encountered the truly exotic … the smiling face of my dear friend Leon. How could I be on the pavements of this small remote town and encounter a smile of recognition? Suddenly, there was nothing remote whatever about this place. A wondrous time ensued in a nearby shop with Leon and his magnificent wife, Sylvia, who I have been in love with since first sight decades ago. I might as well have been in a gilded sedan chair in the grand procession before the Roman games, sitting in Leon’s strong reliable four-wheel Land Rover, being spared that long trek back into the hills. I don’t know if I will ever view a car as quite so ordinary again.
Fortified with this glorious outburst of community, I later found the energy to again traverse those five miles of hills on foot at last light and ascend into a candle-lit fellowship on the square with the natives, enjoying a splendid repast and entertainment with those that have called this place home for centuries. It was as if I was admitted into the long house and given the place of honor. Perhaps best was the enthusiastic smile of recognition from someone who had been a stranger mere hours earlier.
The great British theologian, GK Chesterton, often wondered about the flecks of paradise that would wash up on the shores of his life, overwhelmed and especially curious about those times when he was even granted a second fleck of paradise. And so it was with me. I was granted another one; this time in a Mazda.
The universe really is a friendly place after all; all five miles of it.
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