The Window in My Mind

I waited for an hour for the bus to Wells. Instead, a bus to Chepstow pulled up. The woman next to me declared, “Fine, I will go to Chepstow.”

“I’m with you,” I said and followed her onto the bus. Chepstow was just a name to me. I imagined a worst-case scenario of ending up at a dreary High Street in a suburb of Bristol. So, I asked her to tell me about my unknown destination.

“We’re going over the bridge to Wales,” she declared, then talked the rest the way about a museum with a Vardo (Romani wagon) and a garden with topiary butterflies. When I asked where these places were, she did not answer.

When we arrived, she took me to the arched Town Gate, built in the late thirteenth century. “Go through the gate, follow the road to the river and you will find a castle.” Then she left.

I had followed a random stranger and ended up in an ancient market town.

As I walked downhill on a street too narrow for cars, past small shops, where everything was encountered for the first time, I resisted the desire to know where I was and where I was going. I knew nothing of this place; it introduced itself through historical plaques along the way.

Perhaps these bell maker Evans’s were my ancestors (that would explain my passion for church bells and carillons).

At the foot of the hill, I walked along the River Wye, where two paths overlap—the Offa’s Dyke Path and the Wales Coast Path—suggesting that this was the starting point of two great journeys.

In front of me was Chepstow Castle, the oldest surviving post-Roman stone fortification in the United Kingdom, built in 1067 at the behest of William the Conqueror. As I entered the middle bailey (an open grassy yard enclosed by the outer walls), I felt a sense of familiarity, as if I had played in this hilly green field on a spring day, safe from the dangerous world beyond the walls. Just beyond this was the window of my mind—a window I had seen many times in meditation. The arched window looked out on a lone tree.

Chepstow Castle, February 15, 2023. Photo by Lynn Childress.

All I had to do was step through the window to enter the world beyond. And, truly, that would have been the case because the window was on the top of a cliff, high above the River Wye. The beckoning tree and hills could not be reached by going through the window. So, it is with our dreams. We can see the vision but cannot go directly to it. It can be reached, however, by a side route through this door.

Chepstow Castle, February 15, 2023. Photo by Lynn Childress.

To have found the window in my mind in the real world changes everything. And now I can see the way to what lies beyond.