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
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