Letter from Ynys Wydryn (Glastonbury)

Stephen Price

I wonder sometimes how much of me is all mine

I have my mother’s hands, her creativity

My father’s impulsivity, his guilt, his need to please

My brother, now estranged, took a pathway of self medication for what we’d now recognise as ADHD, leading him from me, and me from him

He was the first among us to pay pilgrimage to Glastonbury

His ffrindiau finding an epicentre for their hedonism, their crystals, their dreads, their music

Their books, their clothes, their kind

My sister, next, the festival, and, like him, a love of standing stones, the esoteric, the new age

The liminal, the borders

The untamed

There’s magic everywhere

I got there late, at 19, and also fell under her spell

Ynys Afallon, she will always be to me; the Isle of Apples; Avalon

Ynys Wydryn, too, like the cool kids from back home

Telling people you’re going to Glastonbury always goes the same way

“The festival?”

“No, the town.”

Silence.

“You should visit, you really, really should.”

“Promise me you’ll visit.”

I send them to the Pyramid Vegan Cafe, to splash their face with water at Chalice Well and the White Spring

To buy apple juice from Earthfare, anything and everything from the Goddess and Green Man, perfume from Star Child, to feel the grass underfoot in the Abbey

To be still

To lose themselves among the outcasts, the others, the lost and found

It’s a wonderful, wonderful life

Wandering the book shops, the Welsh legends sanitised and made silly, made English

Card shops selling Arthur, Blodeuwedd, Gwyn ap Nudd, Mari, Melangell

I can’t decide where I stand, but there’s recognition, there’s reverence, there’s an undeniable magic in the air

Nowadays, weather permitting, I walk up the many steps of the Tor, of Ynys Afallon, barefoot, shoes in hand

Grounding, always aiming for the moment, but never quite arriving

This time, another loved one lost

No one now to call

To check in on

To be checked in on

The feeling of mortality and fragility, of missing and needing, weighing heavy

I walk ahead, through the open doors, aiming for renewal and rebirth

But this time, for the first time, I wish I could go back

To retrace my steps, just for a while

To go home

Llythrau eraill, Mr Price: Clydach, Libanus, Brynmawr, Nantyglo/Annwn, Partrishow