How Wales Changes People

After checking out a yurt (Mongolian tent) with my Lammas host, he gave me a lift into Crymych to catch a bus to Newport, Pembrokeshire. The only problem was that I had the bus time wrong, and missed it. Only because I had stopped for a few minutes in the library of a town on the way to Lammas, and the bus website had some glitch so the text was miniscule. With my face against the screen I attempted to make out the time, and clearly, I was wrong by twenty minutes.

Since it was Wales, where buses come maybe once a day, and only one direction sometimes, the next bus was in three hours. I was delighted that there was another bus at all. At this moment I realized that my sense of time and distance had shifted a bit. My Lammas host asked if I wanted to come back to the land in the meantime, and I said I could just wait there in case another bus came. I didn't trust the posted schedule, because another bus going the other direction had not come at its allotted time. My Lammas host headed off, after I promised to let him know what happened. I called my next CS host in Newport. He suggested that I hitch or walk to Eglwyswrw, a town four miles away, where he could pick me up. Or wait for the next bus. Again, another shift in thought from Chicago life: I looked at the sign saying four miles, and thought "No problem. I'll walk." I wasn't going to hitchhike, and after long walks every day, it didn't seem that unreasonable. But my Lammas host called at the moment where I was collecting my bags to head off, because another Lammas family was able to give me a lift. A mom with three kids and a dog; I jumped in and chatted with them all the way to Cardigan in their bio-fuel car because they had to make it to the laundry shop before it closed. They dropped me off at Eglwyswrw on the way back, where I sat for awhile before the bus came to take me to Newport.

I was just happy to make it to the town that day, instead of being worried or stressed about how I was getting there. In Wales, I found an abundance of patience, whether through a long walk along the coast, quiet meditation in front of a fire, or taking all afternoon to go ten miles.