"The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost."--G.K. Chesterton

NOTE: I wrote most of this entry last week, and I decided to post it now instead of starting from scratch, and thus most of the content took place two or three weeks ago. I had my last tutorial this morning, so I’ll post again soon to catch you up on the last week.




My life is a dream, and my heart is full.

To all of my beloved readers, I hope and pray that you are all living an abundant, beautiful life right now—the life you were created to live.

Here I am on the last day of November. Tomorrow will be the three-month anniversary of my relationship with the city of Oxford, its colleges and students.

There are seasons of life when we feel absolutely alive. We notice beauty. We love deeply and are loved for who we truly are. We feel that we have meaning, that our lives have purpose. I am in one of those seasons now.

On Friday the 11th, I went to my dear Irish friend Rachel's 21st birthday party. I gave her my favorite book (of course), J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. The enormous poster on her bedroom door is further proof that our souls are the same; it is the original cover art for The Great Gatsby (her favorite book), the same cover art on my copy, which I first read in May 2010.
Hilda, our au pair friend from Holland, promised to play a song for Rachel. There’s a little connecting room in the corridor with glass doors and a tile floor; it has perfect acoustics. Another girl from the group—Bex, from Scotland—and I found Hilda after she had played for Rachel, and asked if she would play for us. We sat on the cold tile, and Hilda—in her patterned black tights and dress dotted with roses—sat cross-legged with her guitar (a guitar painted all over--even on the frets--with monsters and aliens and stars. She said before she left home her friends stole it and painted it, so she calls it her “monster guitar”). When H sings, it’s unreal. She sang a song she’d written, an Oscar Wilde poem set to music.



And I listened and thought, this cannot be real life.

After the song, Hilda and I went for a walk with Klaus, a Dutch student whom we had met, to look at the stars. We were in Somerton, the wealthier part of Oxford, full of large brick houses and quiet streets. We walked down by the canal, past the longboats that house some Oxford families. We walked on dark wet leaves under trees until the only lights were the stars. Ever since my quarter of Astronomy in the Seattle winter of 2009, I can find one constellation—Orion, because of his three-star belt—and I used to find him in Azusa all the time. There he was in Oxford, over our heads as we sat on the damp path and talked about God—the agnostic, the searcher, and the Christian.

The next morning (Hilda and I spent the night at Rachel’s), we made crepes and cried about leaving each other. If I had any money left, I would stay until Immigration kicked me out. That is what makes this feel like a dream—it is temporary, fleeting.


And in the midst of my absolute bliss here in Oxford, there are others who are not feeling the same. One guy in my program had to leave on Tuesday. A girl in my flat lost her grandpa this week.

A year ago I lost my grandpa. Over the past year, I’ve gone through several difficult circumstances. Some of you know the details; I won't go into that here. But this semester has been an incredibly healing experience for me. It feels like every little detail fell into place because God knew I would need it to be this way. To leave home for three months and live in a foreign country with an impossible workload could have been a disaster. It has been for some people in the past.

But for me it has not been; it has been quite the opposite of a disaster.

Last Wednesday, the APU students had a Thanksgiving Dinner with the president of APU and his daughter (who did the Oxford term in Spring, 2010, and is now studying Economics in London). We had made t-shirts with our faculty advisor’s face on the front and a list of his incredible accomplishments on the back, and we unveiled them at the dinner. Our president said, “You know, one of the signs of a healthy community is the decision to memorialize something together, and that’s what you’ve done here.” He said he’s never seen an Oxford group this close, one that feels like an APU program the way ours does.

Sometimes, we have a season of incredible blessings. The timing is perfect. I had lunch with a friend from APU two Thursdays ago, Heidi (one of the girls who went to Italy with me), and she said, “Don’t you feel like you can do anything here?”
It is the city of high expectations.

If Joan Didion had a “year of magical thinking,” I can have a term of magical thinking. Only mine has not been spent grieving and coping like hers was, but rather healing and loving. The one similarity between Didion's magical time and mine is that we have both spent the time learning more than we dreamed we could.


XX Jennifer

"You Can Make Anything by Writing"--C.S. Lewis

I suppose I should begin with something about the Ball last Friday.
Imagine the cocktail party from Breakfast at Tiffany’s; throw that into one of Gatsby’s parties; mix in a little highschool dance at the gym, complete with the sweat and hormones; put it in the mansion from Atonement; and douse the whole thing in sticky-sweet neon-colored alcohol.
That was the Union Ball.

The Union Society decorated their building so each room was different. Upstairs, there was a live jazz band and a small dance floor, and another room lined with bookshelves and plush velvet chairs had an enormous chocolate fountain. Downstairs was the main bar, the Statue of Liberty, and posters of New York City (the theme was New York, New York). Out in the courtyard, under a white tent, they served hot dogs, doughnuts, popcorn, and “candy floss” (cotton candy”). The tent connected to the dance floor, normally the debate chamber. The men were all in tuxedos and the women were in gowns, boas, fur, pearls, lipstick, and even a few Lady Gaga-esque couture dresses.
The dancefloor was packed for most of the night, and exceedingly entertaining (the British, you see, are not the best dancers, but they are very enthusiastic). Wandering the grounds, I met two grad students—one from Finland and one from Israel—and we talked for quite a while. The Finn could speak six languages, and we ended up conversing in Spanish for about a half-hour. The Israeli and I discussed Israel (obviously I was dying to hear an opinion for someone who’s actually lived in Israel, since everyone else seems to have one).
In the end, we picked our way through the alleyway leading to Cornmarket Street at 1:15am—past the entwined couples and clouds of cigarette smoke—and took a cab home. It was quite the experience!


Now, it’s the middle of fifth week, which means Fifth Week Blues.
Everyone has been exceptionally unmotivated. I’ve fallen into a 3am-11am sleeping pattern. It’s 1:23 right now and I feel wide-awake. I know the only remedy is to get up early one day, but all arguments are void before a warm bed.

But, to prove I’m not such a sluggard as you may think, I’d like to inform you that I wrote my statement of purpose for the first round of grad school applications this week.
Bam.

I spent the first half of this week trying to compile my last two essays into one piece (responding to claims that Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Gaskell’s North and South are anti-Christian) before realizing I should probably start reading Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, since it’s 600 pages and I need to finish my essay about it by Friday night. I watched the BBC production of it, though (if you like Masterpiece Theatre, I recommend it. Gorgeous costumes, and Romola Garai makes a fabulous Gwendolen Harleth), so the reading should go by faster, since I'm just looking for quotes/examples not overall plot and themes.

This is essentially my fifth “finals week” in a row. If I had known I could handle this workload I would never have complained at APU. Each week I read between 450 and 650 pages of fiction—one or two novels—followed by parts of one or two books about the author, and between three and eight scholarly articles or chapters out of books that pertain to my essay question. This takes about three days. The next day and a half consists of drafting, revising, reading aloud, and editing my essay. Every Monday morning, I read my latest essay aloud to my tutor, who has already critiqued it in writing.
In your average American university, I would have at least two weeks to do this. Even as an English major, I had less than three papers like this per class per 16-week semester.
All this to say, I was glad to have the diversion of my Statement of Purpose this week, even if it put me a little behind.

Tomorrow I have my third Creative Writing tutorial, where I’ll read the first draft of my latest story. It’s almost completely in dialogue, which was HUGELY difficult for me since I’m most comfortable writing description.
I’ve been realizing how much writing changes the way you see the world. I can’t believe I stopped for so long. When I was a child, I wrote stories and poems all the time, but I haven’t done anything like that—except for journaling and an occasional creative school assignment—for years.
Now, I listen for juicy details in the conversations of people I pass on the street; I scribble metaphors on napkins or band-aid wrappers so I won’t forget them; I take a few minutes to write a descriptive paragraph about that barefoot girl in the library who looks like she just walked out of a Dutch painting (seriously).

Today, I had coffee at Blackwells with an Irish friend from church. She’s a third year studying English here, and she writes too. Speaking with her was such an encouragement; I couldn’t help but think of Anne of Green Gables’ “kindred spirit” philosophy. She never raises her voice, but has enormous, expressive blue eyes and the loveliest accent I’ve ever heard. I fall into a kind of sing-song English when we speak; it’s impossible not to imitate some of her phrasing and intonation. We talked about how we feel we belong in Oxford; it’s like we never realized how little we fit in with most people at home until we came here.
I asked her if she saw the moon when she was walking to Blackwells. It is full and the sky is clear, and I stopped on the sidewalk to take a deep breath in when I saw it, fat, round, and glowing creamy white. She laughed and said, “Jennifer, if I phoned any of my flatmates right now, I’m sure they wouldn’t know what the moon looks like right now.”
Writers notice the moon.

It’s such a blessing to find someone so far from home with such important similarities. Ok, maybe noticing in the moon doesn’t seem like an important similarity, but it’s an example of a Lewisian alignment of the minds, trust me.
Discussing what God’s been doing in each of our lives, what opportunities are coming up and what we are passionate about, was an incredible reminder that our God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine.”


XX Jennifer

P.S. Coming up this Saturday, a trip to Stonehenge and Bath!