Cynefin
The place that haunts me.
I learned a new word this week. Cynefin (pronounced roughly kuh-NEV-in) has no equivalent in English. It’s a Welsh term that might literally be translated “habitat” or “haunt,” but its deeper meaning is something like a place that has a hold on you, or a place of your multiple belongings. Shepherds might talk about a certain hillside as the cynefin of a flock of sheep — they know in their bones, from generation to generation, that this is where they thrive.
Cynefin is not only untranslatable, it is inarticulable. Nevertheless, I am going to pursue the fool’s errand of writing about my experience of it in Penmachno, Wales.
Like everyone, I had four biological grandparents. I have no memory of three of them ever talking about their ancestors or their ancestral homeland, but my paternal grandfather, Ralph Jones, often mentioned his Welsh heritage and his grandfather, who loomed as an obviously large presence in familial lore, enough so that I researched and wrote about him in the first chapter of The God of Wild Places.
William Jones left Wales in 1867, 101 years before I was born. He was 22-years-old, and he’d already been a preacher for five years. He boarded a ship in Liverpool, sailed to New York, and took at train to Caledonia, Wisconsin, where he met Alice and was married. A few years later, they moved farther west, to an enclave of Welsh folks who lived in southwestern Minnesota. There he pastored New Jerusalem Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church until he retired, at which time he bought a small farm on Lake Crystal and raised Clydesdale horses.
He was known by all as “Machno,” not just his nickname, but a nod to his home village, Penmachno. His headstone in the New Jerusalem Cemetery reads, “PREACHED THE GOSPEL FOR 52 YS.”
Although his grandfather died in 1913, my grandfather spoke of him enough that the word “Machno” lodged somewhere deep in my psyche. More than a nickname, it signified a part of me, of my origins and ancestry.
This week, with two of my children, I journeyed to Penmachno, Wales, in the heart of the Snowdonia Mountains. My experiences there will take some time to filter through me. I don’t know that I can yet make sense of the powerful cynefin I felt. But here are some initial impressions.
