This semi-long distance relationship

'Why do you love me?' I asked Jacob on a Monday night last term on a day where I was finding it hard to feel the love despite knowing it exists. A hard thing about living a semi-long distance relationship is not having all the ways of expressing love you used to have, and then having to trust that love exists (oh hello Wales villanelle) without those signs so unconsciously littered in every day life spent together. It's a lot like faith in God when you have 'valley moments' and God seems far away - you know he loves you, you know he exists, you know and yet you can't see or touch or speak.

The day after that I came back from a morning in the library to find a postcard for me on the stairs. 'This postcard is a sign' it said, with big words 'I LOVE YOU' on the front and a poem mixing semiotics and assurance on the back (I find semiotics fascinating if you didn't already know). He must have sent it before I asked him on Monday night, and yet it was like the question I asked had conjured that physical reminder of an answer.

All this to say, semi-long distance isn't easy, and it takes work and writing post cards and articulating why you love the other even when it seems the most obvious thing - and yet the love endures and grows all the better for it. Here are 5 important things I've learnt after a term and a bit of this semi-long distance relationship:

1. Say what you want/how you feel. 

Early on in our relationship Jacob sent me the song 'Honesty' by Billy Joel (just because he likes Billy Joel) but I took it very seriously and vowed that I wouldn't play games -  when I felt something I'd say it and when I needed something I'd ask it. That has been incredibly helpful with semi-long distance - when you aren't there to read body language or see someone's change of mood from day to day, when so much of their life is obscured it's impossible to be able to know what they need or want so instinctively. And what they need and want changes because of distance, but the adapting to that isn't easy unless they articulate their new needs.

Last term I had to tell Jacob that I needed to feel desired/wanted despite the distance between us. The change from seeing each other almost every day to seeing each other once every couple of weeks (if that) meant that articulating love in the every day together ways of time and touch and certain acts of service weren't an option any more, so I needed him to say he loved me more, or describe his day to me more or ask about mine. Telling him I felt that way instead of letting it make me hurt or frustrated inside was so good - it showed him that I trusted him to be able to adapt, and showed me how earnestly he does want to make sure I feel loved when he made conscious efforts after that conversation to do so.

`2. Stick to your rules.

Quite early on in our relationship Jacob and I came up with clear boundaries regarding intimacy. One important one was not spending a night in the same room together. This has meant that each time I visit him in Cambridge I've asked people if I can stay with them. It might be an added 'inconvenience' but it has been really useful in helping us respect each other and obey God even when I've not seen him for a while, and am tired from travelling, and his bed is so warm and the outside so cold...

But I do it because I love and respect him, and I love and respect God, and I know keeping my side of this promise shows him that I am someone who can keep faith, and it also upholds the purity that God asks of us to have in our relationships. So though because I love him keeping the rules are hard, because I love Him/him keeping the rules are worth it.

3. Comfort each other with truth

On a crummy day I was telling Jacob over the phone how I was feeling frustrated, and finding it particularly hard to pray. 'Jesus is right by you,' he said, 'he's holding you in his arms and smiling down at you.'

I laughed. 'I was with you until you said smiling,' I said, 'In my head he was frowning and disappointed.'

'No! He's smiling - he loves you and you're his child.'

It's particularly hard not being able to 'be there for each other' in the immediate sense when either one of us is going through a hard time, but the most loving thing either of us can do is speak the truths that both of us believe in. Jacob reminds me that God made me, loves me, and that He has a plan and his plan is good. Those three truths are good no matter what the situation, because they remind me that I have a purpose, a comforter, and a guide. The reminding is loving and comforting in itself, but it is also a humble recognition of a greater and more constant comforter than either of us can ever be.

4. Have a shared ritual

Jacob and I have prayed together almost every night since we started this year. We begun this in Singapore, continued in Wales and so we had that ritual pretty much rooted when we parted for the term. Nightly calls have been such a source of joy - we've seen so many prayer come true which is incredible, but it also is a way of caring for each other actively since we know that prayer works, and if we pray for the other person's peace or productivity or courage or... we know that God will take that prayer and use it according to his plan and purpose.

Particularly in the early weeks of London, prayer was such a familiarity in an unfamiliar environment and routine, and it really grounded me to know I could keep praying no matter what, and that Jacob was praying too. When Jacob was in Rome, he stood in the stairwell of a noisy hostel and called despite the shaky wifi. If I'm out late, I often call him on my cycle home, keeping one earphone out to listen for traffic and the other in to hear about his life. It's a ritual that has become so interwoven in each of our lives and which weaves our lives together.

(Other rituals include having porridge while sitting on the bed whenever I visit him in Cambridge, or going for a run together whenever he comes here/I go there)

5. Make time together more than ordinary

In a conversation with Lucy (who is so wise, and so easy to confide in) about how she and her boyfriend work with distance in their relationship, she mentioned how one of the beautiful aspects of a long distance relationship was the specialness of the time together. Since they wouldn't see each other often, when they did see each other they'd make it a point to make the time extraordinary.

When Jacob is coming over, I try to get as much work done as possible before he arrives, so that time is free for doing joyful, special things with him. The last time I went to Cambridge we went to a play and a burns night party, and the last time he was in London we went to Pierre Bonnard's exhibition and the orchestra - things we wouldn't do usually, and things we probably wouldn't do alone. Sharing them with him makes them extra special, though they are already special in themselves. It's a way for each of us to show the other that we value them coming over and that we save the best of our time for them.

From "A Brave and Startling Truth"

Cool art by www.kanghee.kim

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

(Maya Angelou)

Compliments from my brother

A Chinese New Year's Eve conversation with Tim about our respective strengths and personalities resulted in this gem:

Tim (on why I am like Monica from friends - apparently): 'You have your shit together.'

Me: 'I do not have my shit together.'

Tim: 'You have the most shit together out of all of us!'

Um - thank you?

i thank You God for most this amazing

Today I sat on a park bench in the late afternoon sun, diary in hand, thinking 'How do I distill this golden weekend into words?' Even that precise moment, sitting there, was beyond the capacity of my writing - because of my own literary limitations and the moment's infinite nature. I was in the park because I went for a walk because the world is beautiful and no other reason, and the sun shone on my face - I am unworthy, and yet I basked in it.

This morning Jacob left, but not before sharing this weekend with me. We shared yoga and a run, overdue hugs and kisses, the paintings of Pierre Bonnard in the Tate Modern, a long bus ride, a vegan quiche and Christmas muesli, and a concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra which left me breathless. Sharing is a far better word than doing, partly because often we aren't the makers of the joy we partake in, and also partly because this weekend has impressed on me so strongly something I'd been thinking on Friday after reading Romans 12 - that as part of God's community we belong to each other, him to me and me to him.***  Therefore, somehow the joy I feel at the sun on my face is also his joy, because I know my joy makes his complete. 

That was something else we talked about this weekend - the possibility of a 'sated joy' this side of heaven, and we concluded that it must operate like that phrase Christians often use to explain the tension between the fact that the kingdom of God has fully come with Jesus and is also yet to be fully expressed: that we will see the full expression of joy when we finally see God, and yet here on earth because of His grace, we can feel joy that is full and complete.

I thought, as I sat there, about a question my friend Pierre had asked me this week: whether I feel overwhelmed that Jacob might come to Singapore at the end of the year if God provides a way. I said no, then I said yes, and I meant it both times. Not overwhelmed because I feel so certain that this is good, and he feels sure too - besides, the alternative seems more 'overwhelming'. But also yes, because love is the scariest thing and it means coming up with the terrifying and beautiful realisation that you are wanted, cherished, that you could change someone's future and they yours. And yes because I wouldn't want to have such a commitment from someone I didn't feel overwhelmed by. It wouldn't be love if I wasn't overwhelmed - I feel quite strongly that some part of yourself must be drowned in the face of something so good.

I only sat there for ten minutes, thinking, writing, reading some of the poems from the anthology Alex gave me for Christmas ('forgive me' the letter that came with it said, 'I found it in Oxfam books a couple of weeks before Christmas and couldn't resist') - I will leave you a poem now.

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

*** God's people are told to 'belong to each other', in a segment about the community of Christ following the call to offer ourselves to God in worship. I gathered that in some ways how we offer our bodies to God has to do with how we operate in the body of Christ (as Romans 12 puts it - I don't think the metaphor's echo of the 'offer your bodies' is accidental) and cultivating humility, valuing diversity, 'belonging' to each other and using your gifts generously and cheerfully were what I saw as ways the passage encouraged Christians to live in a way that made the body of Christ a worshipful one, a community pleasing to God.

Devotion

This year, I decided to hold a word as my 'word of the year': a word to go through and grow through this year with. The word I chose was 'devotion'.

The word 'devotion' in the bible (greek - προσκαρτερῶ) has its roots in words meaning strength and perseverance, attention to one thing or adherence to one person. I wanted to be attentive (Mary Oliver, after all, said that attention is the beginning of devotion) in my interactions, giving myself wholly in conversations and time with people, with God, with my work and my running. I suppose you could think of it as being a fully present person at any one point.

God was so good a the beginning of the year, giving me reminders of devotion (when cycling down to see Jacob on that wondrous St Martin in the Fields day I passed a statue that had the very word inscribed onto it in big capital letters) and giving me the strength to actually be single-mindedly attentive in what I did. Spending time with someone (or someones) and being absolutely invested in the present, not planning ahead for the minutes and hours after or worrying about what you left undone in the past, is so liberating and makes time with people so special. I feel this more acutely in London, where it is far more difficult to arrange a meeting with someone, so when you do see each other the time seems surrounded by a palpable halo of preciousness. Something did  worry me though - devotion requires rather a lot of giving of yourself to that thing. A half-hearted devotee is a creature of oxymoron, but I wondered how I could retreat and rest, and still throw myself into this life whole heartedly?

On a run a while ago, I realised something that quite simply cleared every thing up (from a theoretical point of view - practice takes practise):

You only need to be devoted to one thing. 

After all, you can only be devoted to one thing, or you change the definition of the word. Devotion requires adherence/attention to one thing or person - and I have no doubt in my mind who that shall be. Teach me Lord, I thought, to be devoted to you. Because where devotion to other things asks that I give my all to them alone, devotion to God means attention and love to my neighbours, honouring my time and my work and my body. But the attention and purpose I approach all else with is rooted in the strength and perseverance that comes from God.

In practice this has meant sacrificing my 'goals' and the intentions behind what I do apart from God (for instance, maintaining a good grade average, getting faster/stronger in track, finishing every bit of reading, only eating healthy meals...) and letting him lead me.  It hasn't meant I don't care about these areas - in fact, I care more about them because I see them as areas to use God's gifts and express my thanks to him in creative ways. It just means that the end point, where my eyes are fixed upon, is always (ideally, though obviously not realistically) God's glory rather than measures of success in these areas. It has meant that I've felt a lot less anxious, a lot more joyful, and learnt a lot more about God's character which has meant worship has become so much more of a real and a living part of my life in and out of church. I'm excited to see what the rest of the year teaches me and how that will change me...

When I walk out into the world, I take no thoughts with me.  That’s not easy, but you can learn to do it.  An empty mind is hungry, so you can look at everything longer, and closer.  Don’t hum!  When you listen with empty ears, you hear more.  And this is the core of the secret:  Attention is the beginning of devotion.
-Mary Oliver

3 other small things:

1. Last Saturday when I got home from the airport (it seems so long ago) I came back to the house and found flowers by the door. I was talking to Jacob at the time over the phone, and after opening the door and putting things down, and bringing the flowers in, I asked if he'd got them - and he had. They were beautiful, different shades of pink, and purple and blue and cream, small leaves with a soft, downy fur on them and others that were long and elegant. I put them on the kitchen table, and one morning during the week I came down and was surprised by their beautiful scent. ( I could finally smell then because my cold was beginning to clear)

2. On Sunday during my cycle to church, at a traffic light I caught the eye of someone walking across the street. I can't explain it, it was a funny gaze but not in a bad way. I looked away, then a couple of seconds later looked back to find him looking over his shoulder at me still. He grinned, 'so beautiful!' he said, and I laughed. What a lovely thing to say to a stranger, to make her day.

3. Yesterday I got home from a lecture and felt so tired I lay tummy down on my bed for a while. When I had breathed a little, I propped myself up on my elbows and read a cup of jo article - this one on parenting. And suddenly, reading Loren's comment, I found myself crying:

“I was putting my four-year-old daughter down for the night. She was begging me to stay with her, but we had guests over. I told her ‘Just think happy thoughts.’ She said, ‘But, Mama, you are my happy thought.’ Be still my heart.” — Loren

The best day of 2019 (so far)

I realise I haven't written anything 'small' here for a while, something just descriptive and not reflective. It may be because I feel like I need to make 'worthy' offerings on this platform, whatever that means (and perhaps my mind tells me different things are worthy at different times.)

Here is something 'small', just a day, because it was a day of joy and that is quite worthy enough.

Last week, tuesday.

I woke up and did some yoga, breathing in and out on the mat that Alex sent to the signal-less, up-a-mountain-in-the-lake-district, next-to-an-abandoned-slate-mine hostel that I was in last year on my birthday.

I had breakfast, porridge. I might have had a cup of tea. (I am proud to say that my prediction to fall in love with tea has largely worked - I have had more than 25 cups of rooibos since mid-October last year, and also various other cups in different houses with different people.)

I did some reading, then made some sandwiches accompanied by a growing excitement. Sourdough bread, hummus, smoked walnut tofu, sliced beetroot, sauteed garlicky kale, hummus, bread.

I got onto Liv and cycled down to St James Park, singing Ellie Goulding's The Writer as I went - I can never remember the first verse, so I always start from the chorus, cycle through the second verse, back to the chorus, second verse, over and over till I get bored. But the people I pass in quick succession do not know and I quite like repeating the line 'I try out a smile and I aim it at you/You must have missed it/You always do'. The cycle took me past St Martin in the Fields, the National Gallery and down The Mall, a wide avenue which makes me feel quite regal.

When I got to St James Park, I chose a spot on a bench that was drenched in sunlight, and sat there and read while I waited for Jacob. I'm working my way through 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', which is taking a long time, no longer the quick hurricane reading I did as an undergrad. But that means I get to enjoy the book in different places and different times, like on a park bench in the sun. Half my mind was on the book and half was just enjoying the feeling of sun on my skin and the feeling of spring. Of course, it is still technically winter, but the sun and the green of the park and the almost palpable shared feeling of promise was quite a spring like feeling.

'If we were in another universe where Jacob and I had never met, and I was on this bench reading, and he walked by, would he fall in love with me?' I wondered.

Jacob entered from a different end of the park, so I walked along the pond to meet him halfway and as always after I haven't seen him for a while - butterflies. (It's been a year and a half but I still feel as happily excited as November 2017) We sat on the same park bench I'd been reading on, and he pronounced the sandwich the best one he'd ever had.

Writing about time with Jacob is one of the hardest things, because I can't remember every detail but the each detail was a golden moment.  And I can't convey how normal conversation is elevated because it isn't elevated by words but just by being there, with him. Will you trust that I was wonderfully happy without my writing how?

The best of 2018

2018 was possibly the happiest year of my life.

In January, I began the new year watching the fireworks over Edinburgh castle and feeling so much hope and promise it almost felt painful, in the way a heart bursting with joy is painful. I ceilidhed on the streets with Alex, and danced to Bohemian Rhapsody and the Lion King with Emily in an odd club called The Shack. This year I watched fireworks over an Austrian lake from Nat's house in Zell Am See and wondered if I could have a year so wonderful again .

The last months of Cambridge: 

I had cosy movie nights with Alex, early morning essay practices with Becky, slow Sunday mornings with Jacob and loping Saturday runs.

I wrote an essay with the line 'unlike Ellie, Scarlett refuses to eat the carrots of reality', which to this day I am not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of. (I was definitely proud of that essay as a whole though.)

I decided to join the rowing team, if only for the chance to have my overnight oats in the sun by the boat house.

I fell sick, and realised how much blessing existed in the smallest of things like going for a walk, and birdsong, and peas. 

I finished my dissertation, which I was really happy with, which I learnt so much about God from. 

Perhaps the most glorious day of the year - the day I jumped into the Cam with Harriet and Jacob, then rode on the back of the bike while Harriet pedalled so we could make it to our respective evensong rehearsals, then sang Noble in B minor as a sun ray came through the chapel window and warmed my face, tried to get ice cream in the break (which didn't happen, but the thrill of trying!) and then sang with my heart brimful of joy - God is so good.

Exams were terrifying but also such a good test of trust. I prayed with a group of Christian Englings before each paper, and emerged out of the first two feeling dissatisfied, the Visual culture one feeling jubilant, and the final postcolonial one feeling satisfied and oh so relieved. Always there was the knowledge or the timely reminder from people around me that it was all in God's hands. 

I graduated with a first, and my family came to be there for it. It was so happy and so sad - a high way to end three years of study, but then again I didn't want it to end. Not because I didn't feel ready for what was to come - in the graduation speech that Juliet Foster gave she used the same picture Miss Tan had shown my Junior College class when we graduated (Quentin Blake's Finale) and I felt full of confidence and hope for the next year. Cambridge certainly left me equipped with more knowledge, more assurance of what I know (and of what I don't - but balanced with a curiosity to find out), and more happy memories than I can count. (I know this isn't every person's experience, and Cambridge was certainly hard at times, but overall I was incredibly blessed in that place.) 

Choir tour followed - my first time in America. I meant to write about this, but never got round to it. As usual choir tour was a strange, bubble of space in which everything is so present, and events so vivid one moment and already the next day they've attracted that strange, blurred quality of memory. Lots of my memories of America are either coloured blue or orange - so many sunsets (from a still beach in Cape Cod, from the Staten Island Ferry, from the High Line) and so many bright, afternoon walks in a place where everything, even the sky, seems bigger.

The end of student life really began after choir tour was over - I remember having a few days back in Ixworth, which was like a small oasis. I went for a walk daily, in a field near the house, just myself and audiobooks. I watched hares and deer that had been nibbling on the crops bound away as they heard my footsteps, and saw calm sunsets. Life settled back into a step by step that wasn't going anywhere in particular, but was going.

Those steps soon took me up 16 hills in the Lake District with Becky. A different kind of step by step - sometimes quite difficult when the going was steep - but always incredibly rewarding. The quietness of the hills, the husky labour of breath and occasional deep, winding conversation were such luxuries.

“Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously wrought within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town are smoothed away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe. Something happens to you in the silent places which never could in the towns, and it is a good thing to sit awhile in a quiet spot and meditate. The hills have a power to soothe and heal which is their very own. No man ever sat alone on the top of a hill and planned a murder or a robbery, and no man ever came down from the hills without feeling in some way refreshed, and the better for his experience.” ― Alfred Wainwright

Back home for the shortest summer, in which Jacob came too and my two worlds or here and there, home and home, collided and thankfully both welcomed the other. In first year I remember returning to England feeling like I was two different people, daughter me at home, student me in Cambridge, but at the close of three years those two people have made friends and become one. Seeing the people I love so much - Emily and Christy, Weixin and Ellis, Claire and Luk Ching, the board games group from church, the class, Cheemeng, Ben... it was a blessing to know that though I am so absent so much of the time, our friendship has deep roots and stays.

In a kind of chiasmus my return to the UK was marked by more hill walking - this time in Wales, with Jacob. They were higher hills, and more fightening -- 'as we reached the summit, the winds picked up, whipping against our exposed faces and hands till they were numb, tugging at the hoods of our raincoats [...] cold, wind, howling, storm, tempest. At points the wind was so strong it was physically difficult to lift your leg against it to take the next step [...] 'God, please keep us safe,' I thought over and over, hoping I could cover this mountain with a cloud of prayer to counter the cloud we were stepping into which obscured all view and seemed to transport us into a different dimension, black and merciless and entirely elemental [...] There were large steps, a giant's staircase, to reach the highest point, and in a surreal vision I felt like Jacob and I were small children, fightened and desperate, ascending to the throne of some mighty but severe God [...] only to reach the throne and cling on - and it was empty.' (excerpts from my diary)

In October I began studying in SOAS. I remember one day feeling that London was too much, and saying to myself 'this is possibly the hardest thing you've done, but you're doing it. Maybe you aren't doing it well, but you are doing it and that is good enough.' It was hard, but I know I can do hard things. In November I did a hard thing with Jacob and ran 10 kilometres in the South Downs, but it didn't feel hard but glorious. I finished my first term with a lot more knowledge about Buddhism, and a lot more love for the bible and God. People have asked me how studying different religions impacts my own faith, and I think by juxtaposition it makes me thankful for the unique parts of Christianity, and by similarity it makes me wonder that so many various people search for God or meaning - even in Buddhism where there is no 'God' really, since there is no enduring self (and the Buddha was a human), there is still a yearning for the things we attach to God - perfect peace, the end of suffering, and that is inevitably represented in a identified, deified figure.

I began this year wondering if I'd used up all the joy last year, but realised that the grace shown to me in every turn is proof not that grace is limited but that it is sustaining and freely given. Assured of God's graciousness, I know he will give grace for this new year because he doesn't change, and doesn't run out, and doesn't hold back his love from those who love him.

In the next five minutes, you will receive sustaining grace flowing to you from the future, and you will accumulate another five minutes’ worth of grace in the reservoir of the past. The proper response to the grace you experienced in the past is thankfulness, and the proper response to grace promised to you in the future is faith. We are thankful for the past grace of the last year, and we are confident in the future grace for the new year. (Grace for the New Year, John Piper)

Thoughts on London, a term in

Yesterday as my plane landed and I took the next two buses back to Highgate, all I could feel within me was how much I wanted to be back in my house, on my bed, sprawled and resting. And then I realised how God had answered my prayers from last term, the prayers especially in the first two difficult weeks, where I asked Him to please let me settle. London has, in some ways, become home because now when I return it feels familiar and comfortably recognisable. 

It no doubt took adjusting to: my cycle commute has gone from 5-7 km a day to 14-20 km a day. The bigness of this city means longer and more urban routes (read: getting stuck behind buses, rubbish trucks and the billion black taxis), but it has taught me the value of not-rushing and letting go of the anxiety of being late even if I am, simply because there's nothing (within the realms of sensible safety) I can do. The bigness of the city also means that as I cycle along streets, particularly when it's dark, I feel a comforting anonymity - and I sing as much and as loudly as I want to. After all, who's going to ever see me again? Archway road has been treated to many a rendition of hillsong songs, and once I went full gospel and ran through the songs from Sister Act and Joyful Noise, with all the vocalising. 

I feel thankful as well for finding a church that I feel so comfortable in, and which I genuinely longed to go back to over the holidays. Each time I cycle over the Thames to get to church I gasp (sometimes internally, to avoid traffic fumes) at how darn beautiful this city is if I look. Those moments of wonder happened often those early days - the view of the city from parliament hill, a particularly striking piece of activist art film in the Tate Modern, the Serpentine sparkling in the sun...

This term, feeling more at home, I want to live in London with abandon. I want to enjoy it, to look and see and wonder often. I don't want to cling to the familiarity too much, so that every day is just a cycle from house to SOAS or house to church. I want to cycle to theatres and parks and monuments and friends houses and cafes and book stores. Please let it be good.

A few other things I've learnt:

- You do not have to be friends with everyone. People come and go here so quickly that it is impossible to emotionally invest deeply with each person you 'click' with. All you can do is try and then accept if, like a wave they retreat back into the ocean of a million people and you never cross paths again.

-A 'recovery day' of just staying at home and doing the necessary like laundry and cooking and work is utterly justified, but on days where it isn't needed staying indoors will drive you sad.

- Hampstead Heath is utterly beautiful even when it is gloomy.

- The tube is endlessly exciting if you don't use it often (and endlessly costly if you do)

- You never need to buy bread if you have the Olio food waste app (I have a regular sourdough supplier now: some of the tastiest bread I've ever eaten and always absolutely free)

- Meeting someone once in a term is normal, and the rare-ness of it makes the time extra special

different sort of christmassy

In Cambridge, we'd celebrate Bridgemas - a faux-Christmas at the end of November, but with all the trappings. The choir would sing carol services, colleges would have bridgemas formals with all the christmassy foods, people would give bridgemas presents and the christmas lights would go on in the streets. Everything looked like Christmas, and when you broke up for the holidays it felt like a continuation of that excitement.

It's quite different this year in London. Whilst the lights are up in Oxford and Regent street, they aren't in Highgate (except for a rather straggly neon outline of the Nativity on the Archway Methodist Church which I usually don't notice, or feel rather sorry for when I do), and rather than a cessation of work and burrowing down in to bridgemas feels, I've been working on essays and presentations as the school term stretched longer into December.

And yet, in a way I feel like I've connected with Christmas still, though in a different way this year. I've been waking up exhausted, and the first thing I do (after switching off my alarm) is reach for my phone, open up my email and then close my eyes again as I listen to a desiring god devotional. They've been focused on advent, and although listening to them in my half-waking state means many are forgotten, some have stuck - like the one that reminded me that no matter how insignificant I feel he is a Big God who works through the world's seemingly impersonal movements (hello brexit vote, hello Caesar Augustus' census) for the little, individual people he loves. Or one I listened to yesterday (or the day before?) about how Jesus, the long awaited Messiah, coming to earth is a relief and joy, the same 'at last - oh!' of a lost child seeing their mother.

In work too, I've been reminded of the beauty of Christmas. The first millennium Southeast Asian court, invested in Saivism, Vaishnavism, animism and/or Buddhism, might seem the furthest thing from Christianity (so often associated with the West - but 1) Jesus was born in the middle east 2) God has no ethnicity, race, geographical or time boundaries). Yet in the midst of writing an essay on the Saiva Pasupata sect I came across an incredible book by Paul Mus (India from the East), arguing that the early southeast asian people believed in an 'earth god', a god who was 'profoundly impersonal […] a being abstracted from man', and that their worship of stones, lingas, and later anthropomorphic statues as they absorbed and adapted Indic religions were rooted in their desire to 'make perceptible the passage of the amorphous deity to its accessible manifestation'. That basic desire for a God we can understand as a tangible, personal being -- that is in part what Jesus answered when he appeared in the form of a child (And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. - John 1:14).

Yet where the Southeast Asian societies manifested their God in the form of ferocious and powerful deities (think Heruka/Bhairava/Hevajra/Siva/Kali...) Jesus came vulnerable, as a child who was put to death - who would invent a God like that to clothe the notion of a powerful, impersonal God?

I am thankful for these advent reminders in unexpected places. And I am reminded, of course, that on that first Christmas, the people of Israel did not have bright lights, cheery carols and presents to excite them about the birth of their saviour. They just had long-ago prophet's promises, and the need (the need in all of us) for the hope the Messiah would give. We have new promises of the fulfillment of the hope Christ has given, and so without lights or trees or songs I can celebrate the Messiah and wait for the 'at last- oh!' moment when he comes again.

6/12/2018

A while back, I read this quote on a recipe blog: we are human beings, not human doings.

That quote came back to haunt me when I sat down with Naomi in Cambridge, with homemade bread and hummus and salad on the table before us, and she asked me 'And how are you and your heart?' Not in relation to anything else, just purely me. Not 'how are you coping with work?' not 'how is a long distance relationship going?' not 'how is moving to a new city?' which have been the three big changes in my recent life.

Just how are you.

I found it so hard to answer, and told her, honestly, that I'd been viewing myself through the lens of how I was performing/what I was doing. Who I was was so tied to how I was adjusting/loving/learning that it was hard to dig past that crust and get back to my own beating heart.

I suppose it's difficult because who I am is so tied to how I enact myself - the doing does in many ways make me. When I run, for instance, that makes me because the joy (and the pain) makes me more aware of my existence as an embodied, emotional, physical human being. I feel more at home with myself when I am doing. When I read poetry, or write poetry, I feel more myself because often the words express parts of me I didn't have the words for, or verbalise feelings that need an aesthetic and not just documentation. I suppose what links these self-creating doings is that they aren't intended for an end that is productive for some external matrix. I don't run because I'm made to, or because I want to be fit/thin (thank god, because that's a mindset I know I am sometimes dangerously on the brink of and have in the past fallen in to). I don't write because I want to impress people. I do them because I need to do them because they are part of my being.

Of course, a lot of what I do has an intended product for an external matrix - e.g. my course will eventually produce (I hope) a degree that will (I hope) qualify me for a certain kind of career. And that means that sometimes I get lost in the doing, just trying to get everything done so the scholarship board won't be disappointed in me, so people won't be disappointed in me, so I can prove that I'm coping and thriving, forgetting that to thrive means to be in love with life and that's hard when you're going through the motions so quickly you can't even really fathom what life is.

(But things like my degree also has moments of helping me be - like last week when I sat on Jacob's bed reading Jones' article on the 'Hermeneutics of sacred architecture' and my heart actually sped up with excitement and agreement and possibility - he is a genius. Here is a sampling: 'John Dixon, for instance, insists not only that the Sistine Chapel "can be understood only by participating in the act, which is an act of worship," but, more poignantly still, that, in some sense, the chapel (and specifically Michelangelo's ceiling)  "is a Christian liturgical act and can be rightly understood only as it is apprehended in its performance."' yes, yes, YES!!!)

But I felt like I needed to slow down some how, and remember that God is my matrix and that he asks for me to be satisfied in him, satisfied with the gifts and circumstances he has given to me in grace rather than anxious about their outcome or anxious about bettering or overcoming them. Because as his child, in the safety of his love, I can fully, truly be without the fear of disappointment (held by infinite love and grace).

This week, I wrote at the top of my planner 'THIS WEEK I WILL TAKE CARE OF MY INNER CHILD', after being inspired by a talk by Jane Adams at Kettle's Yard, who mentioned how the artist is at heart a child (a really refreshing take on art after a whole term of grappling with really political art, and feeling in some ways tired of it all. Can art just be as well? Does it always have to do and say?) And though it hasn't meant radical change in this week, it has meant a big shift in perspective when I do the quotidian things. 

Knowing that I am a child of God means I treat myself with more kindness, and more expectation. I'm a child infinitely loved by God, so why talk unkindly to myself, or stress myself out unnecessarily, or worry about validation/judgement from others? Simultaneously, I'm a child of a most High God, so why do things half-heartedly, or think ungraciously? When I work, I'm fully present and focused (most of the time - sometimes I do still get distracted and restless). When I'm with people I fully savour their time and conversation. When I'm hungry I eat with the assurance of a child. When I'm tired I rest. Interwoven throughout my day I talk to God as to a father.

Tonight as I cycled home, I realised I just wanted a space to not think. Coming from a long day of grappling with theory, my brain felt physically (and mentally) tired. When I got home, I  lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and then said loudly: 'I. AM. SO. TIRED.'

'I JUST WANT TO WATCH VIDEOS AND CRY, AND EAT SOME CHOCOLATE.'

It was a good evening, not forcing myself to do work on little reserves, but instead listening to what I needed as a tired, human being.

(See, sometimes what I say to God isn't profound or structured. It's just honest to God 'this is how I feel'.)

Things I'm loving

1. The Balcony Scene song from Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet. I've been listening to it on repeat since Alex, Sonja and I watched the film on Saturday. Alex and I had gone to watch the RSC production in the Barbican earlier that evening, but the lack of chemistry between the leads meant we needed some more loving in our lives, and so we turned to the electric attraction between Leonardo diCaprio and Claire Danes.

2. This incredible company - Outside In. It is a streetwear brand which addresses the problem of homelessness, recognising that it isn't simply a problem of houselessness but also one of hopelessness and isolation (in some cases). Each product you buy comes with an extra product to give to someone in need, so connections can be made between the consumer and a homeless person.

3. This cookie recipe - another genius way to use chickpea flour (that stuff is incredible). I've been having them with rooibos tea and it feels like a warm hug.

4. This blog which combines two things I love - poetry and good food.

5. Getting to pray with Jacob every night - and knowing that if I'm having a bad day I can ask for prayer from him and he will, in a different city, lift me before God. This morning presentation nerves were a little overwhelming, and even a chickpea cookie and rooibos tea didn't calm it. So I asked for prayer and he reminded me 'God's got you', a good thing to think over on my cycle, and while I listened to the other presentations and when I finally stood up in the last bit of class to do mine. (It was fine!)

Learning helplessness

On Wednesday last week, I listened to the John Piper devotion titled ‘We All Need Help’. It was easy to agree to what he was saying as I microwaved my porridge and ate it in the safety of my room. 

‘Yes, Lord, I need help,’ I mused in my mind, as I helped myself to another spoonful of peanut-butter laced breakfast.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)

Every one of us needs help. We are not God. We have needs. We have weaknesses. We have confusion. We have limitations of all kinds. We need help.

But every one of us has something else: We have sins. And therefore, at the bottom of our hearts we know that we do not deserve the help we need. And so, we feel trapped.

[…] Because we have a Great High Priest, the throne of God is a throne of grace. And the help we get at that throne of grace is mercy and grace to help in time of need. Grace to help! Not deserved help — gracious help. That’s why the High Priest, Jesus Christ, shed his own blood.

You are not trapped. Say no to that lie. We need help. We don’t deserve it. But we can have it. You can have it right now and forever. If you will receive and trust in your High Priest, Jesus the Son of God, and draw near to God through him.

Later that day I found myself in the library, losing myself to the anxiety of planning and trying to please all the people I wanted to meet and worrying about how much work was not getting done in the process, as I looked up restaurant locations on google maps and tried to overcome the reality of London’s vastness. Feeling overwhelmed, I sent a message to my bible study group (feeling again guilty for not going because I felt so anxious) and cycled home, giving myself a good talking to on the way.

‘Miriam – you’ve just got to be firm. You can only do so much. Just find a place, choose a time, and if you can meet them you can, if you can’t you can’t.’ 

Jacob gave very good advice that evening before we prayed – for me to pocket bits of time to focus on things like organising people and life, and to put that out of my mind when I did work – to focus with single-minded intention on work when I need to. So, armed with this practical set of strategies, I went into a new day with more confidence. I turned my phone off when I did reading or writing, I told friends that I needed to leave at specific times to do some work, and I fully engaged with people when I was with them (having fully engaged in work previously).

But it was a false sense of security – that lullaby of ‘I can change things and make everything alright’.  

That became so clear on Friday, when I experienced anxiety as I’d never experienced before. After a coffee with Sally, the beginnings of a knot in my stomach began, a blenched tension that didn’t leave but wound itself tighter within me. I tried to hide the tension (such a physical and also mental feeling) when meeting friends, going to a museum, playing board games. On one level – the rational level- I was having a good day. But my body was telling me everything to the contrary – you are in danger, something is wrong, it hurts, you aren’t normal, something is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

               

This was a different experience to Wednesday – there was no practical solution here. Turning off my phone wouldn’t help, being back home wouldn’t help, knowing my work was done and my friends were there didn’t help. Helpless, and so in need of help. What could I do? I prayed, a garbled thing of ‘God I don’t know why I’m feeling what I’m feeling. I hate this feeling. Help me through it. Help me return to myself. Help me.’ And though I didn’t know what exactly I was feeling and why, I knew that God is good, all the time, and I knew that God listens and answers prayer (something that has been proved time and time again to be over this term in answered prayers for people and circumstances that Jacob and I offer up to God when we pray together before bed).

And God answered the prayers I hadn't said when I didn't yet know this was going to happen - Alex was able to pick up her phone and soothe me when I was crying at the station, and that evening Jacob was in London and gave me a hug that reminded me I am loved and cared for and safe.

This week's poem was written on the train home (and edited afterwards), to do something other than freak out.

1. Hemmed in, on edge,

In my head I am prey:

I cannot eat or I will be eaten.

I walk - poised for flight -

crumpling and uncrumpling

a ticket in my pocket

a ticket out of here.

2. Tomorrow I will wake exhausted

and carry this fragile body into a new day.

Wanting to be held

- the soap dish cradles the soap

and water washes over me -

wanting to be held.

3. And before me a vision

opens like a flower

more sense than sight.

The feeling of dust speckled light

- descended -

on a wood worn table

and porridge, like a promise

warm and there.

Surreal Saturday/TRIBE Run free

(For pictures of how blissfully beautiful the actual course was - click here)

I was in my pajamas by 6pm today (although I subsequently got out of them to go and get some sourdough bread) with a good kind of tiredness in my legs from the trail run this morning.

It felt surreal - handing in two essays at midnight night, having fitful dreams of catching buses and taxis and being late, waking up early and taking the tube to Waterloo, seeing Jacob there and then we were on a big red train, eating oatmeal while outside the window the sun hung low in the sky and shone so you could actually look at it for a split second.

We got off the train with lots of other people evidently there for the run too, walked through forest to get to the starting area, registered and then all so quickly we were running.

I'd told myself this was going to be a run, not a race. This past term I've been learning so much about humbly accepting my limits and not letting my own ambition and competitiveness spoil the joy of the moment or the value of the experience. Fearing my own tendency to look at the numbers on my run tracker instead of the world around me, I decided to run without my phone so I would be oblivious to both distance and time during the race. I'm so glad I did, because it was one of the most beautiful courses I've every run. It was mostly in forested areas, over trails covered in autumn leaves (sometimes those leaf-duvets hid boggy bits of mud) At one point we emerged from forest and ran over a dew-covered field which glittered in the sun. There were steep inclines and exhilarating downhill bits. As I ran I couldn't help but think 'thank you God for this run, thank you for the sun, for legs that work, for seasons...' and put in a little prayer request that in heaven I'd be able to run through fields and forests like this (but better).

The weeks poem ended up scribbled in a ten minute interval before calling Jacob for evening prayer:

There was a sea change in the sunrise this morning
a line of grey cloud across otherwise blue sky
and the smell of last night's bonfires fading.
This wooded path has become familiar,
eroded through the process of intimacy.
A quiet optimism previously shadowed by anxiety
follows my footfall.
The night's turbulence is over
it is all going to be okay.

Poem 5 and why I shouldn't drink tea

Last night I drank two cups of tea
and sank into non-sleep.
This is were the night's terrors reside
the body surrenders and you
are left alone
with your mind.

In the interstices behind your eyelids
a thousand thoughts teem.
Maybe - Police siren - what time is it?
I'll get back - How long have I -
felt like this in a while - police siren -
point of it isn't - those earrings -
police siren - When did I last take -
control - take control -
Police siren.

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(That was Tuesday night, after a really enjoyable evening of Thai curry and monopoly with Nic, Nadia and their puppy Hachi.)

(I'm not usually plagued by insomnia, only when I forget my caffeine sensitivity or if I'm too full of excitement or anxiety. But isn't it a terribly real example of just have little control we have even over our embodied self? In so many areas of life success can come through trying, trying harder, trying hardest. But with sleep - trying is failure and only oblivion to the effort means success.)

(I remember seeing that picture in the art gallery of NSW and thinking how magical that sliver of sun was, how the light seemed to actually come from it and dawn over the woman and yet the light also seemed to come from the woman, or at least alight especially on her.)

2 villanelles and a resolution

I remember thinking up a Haiku last year while on a run, something about the sea and the fullness of love. I edited it my head on subsequent runs, using my pace to count syllables 5 - 7 - 5. And then one day I wrote it down and it shined in front of me, a poem, not perfect, but made.

After Wales with Jacob I was determined to write about the experience as a whole, and decided poetry would work. I decided to challenge myself with a villanelle, remembering how I hadn't been utterly satisfied with one I wrote as an exercise for a prac crit class in 2016. The Wales villanelle involved me making lists of words that rhyme with 'Wales' and 'recall'. Eventually it wasn't perfect, but if I am to start on the project I want to start on, I need to settle for less than perfection and practice patience.

I'm going to make it a point this year to write (and read) more poetry. Partly because I want to cultivate a habit and turn the phrases that sometimes drift into my head into cohesive (although not all poems are) creations and also because I am beginning to doubt my ability to finish a novel during term time, when reading about artefacts and theory is taking up most of my reading-time, and I refuse to relinquish my literary identity.

(Also partly because I am inspired by this instagram account and it haikus (for former lovers) which illuminate modern american woman dating life with so much wit and humour.)

Hopefully I'll produce a poem a week. Anyway. Here are two villanelles, two years apart:

Villanelle
2016

It might be as slow as starvation or quick as a landslide
Though I always thought it’d happen by falling up the stairs
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

As a child, it was the distant rumble of brontide,
A flash of lightning that through me tears
It might be as slow as starvation or quick as a landslide

In school I learnt of genocide
A million, million deaths. Not mine, but theirs.
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

In her bedroom, I sit beside
My grandmother, and we say our prayers.
It might be slow as starvation or quick as a landslide.

A million conversations, but this one sticks: ‘Abide
With me. Be my guide. Lead me to the unknown wheres.’
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

There is that odd moment when earth and heaven collide
A peace that passeth all understanding as your world goes up in flares.
It might be as slow as starvation or quick as a landslide.
There are many ways to die without cyanide.

Villanelle 

2018

When I say, 'Remember Wales?'

I do not ask for mere recall.

I mean that love and hope prevail.

Dwell on our God of fine details -

fifty pence fares and blackberries small -

when I say, 'Remember Wales?'

Dwell on our God who doubt curtails -

extinguished by stars and mountains tall -

and trust that love and hope prevail.

If comes a time when love grows stale

let's to those days determined crawl

when I say, 'remember Wales?'

Though on the summit storms assail

I know your hand prevents my fall,

I know our love, our hope, prevails.

When we have walked the final trail

we'll know, God's truth in us unveiled

we'll know, and we'll remember Wales.

In us, God's love and hope prevail.

some beauty from today and yesterday

I am sitting on my bed, satsuma peel on my right hand and general mess on my left, thanking of how beautiful a fruit satsumas are, particularly in the sunlight.

I cycled back from Charmaine's house on my longest cycle through London yet, about an hour from Baron's Court back up to Highgate, but it flew by so quickly, mostly because I was absorbed by how beautiful everything was. I went through Hyde Park and had a brief glimpse into the army and horse building, a looked up as the sun gleamed on the Albert Memorial, I saw the Christmas lights all ready for the celebration season up along Oxford Street, and smelt fresh croissants as I went past the Lidl in Kentish Town. London is built beautifully, but it also has beautiful moments when the traffic isn't packed and people are less frantic (Perhaps because it is a Saturday? Or the frantic people are still in bed, exhausted from yesterday's frantic-ness?)

My mind has been on beauty a lot this morning - I am reading an article by Susan Sontag on Posters, and she talks about how a defining feature is their aestheticisation of information, how in some cases they exist as beautiful (art?) objects in their own right.

Yesterday I went to the Wellcome Collection with Pierre - we spent most of our time in the museum shop, and I asked if he could have three books (and only three) from the shop which he'd choose. He recommended 'The Architecture of Happiness' as one of my three, which after hearing his glowing review I promptly bought of ebay for a quarter of the museum shop price. After reading an excerpt of it I now want to read all things Alain de Botton:

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

In Wales Jacob and I tried to think up the things that made a good day - things like prayer, doing something difficult, gratitude, self-reflection, movement of some kind, spending quality time and having quality communication with God and other people... and doing something beautiful. I am feeling very much that I've been fortunate to have lots of beautiful things done to me this morning, like seeing the misty morning air settle on the brick buildings of Mayfair and having such a sweet satsuma. I wonder if peeling a satsuma can be considered a beautiful thing?

Here's a beautiful thing for you - murmuration.

Weekollage

As I cycled over regent's canal on the way to SOAS this morning, I spoke (as you do) to my bike. 'You're doing an amazing job - I'm so glad I have you,' I said, smiling down at her.

Oh yes, she's a her.

It's time to introduce Liv. After the faithful silver bike that carried me to lectures, choir practices and supervisions all three years of Cambridge was laid to rest (un)ceremoniously at the SOAS bike racks (I still need to figure out what to do with him), I bought Liv from a man named Angel. At first I had some reservations - her brake pads needed replacing, she was a little smaller than Old Silver, and her chain wasn't gleaming, although Angel assured me that with some oil that would be fine. But I needed a bike, and Liv was blue and light and cyclable and so I bought her.

On the first ride home her chain came off (entirely my fault, for messing with the gears) and I thought, 'oh no'. But after a liberal spray of WD-40 and a session with the guys at cycle republic, she worked fine. If Liv was a person she'd be a 65 year old lady, with blue highlights in her hair, and a penchant for poetry and walks and fruit crumble. In other words she's a bike after my own heart.

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Aside from Liv, London has become a lot more personable.

I've joined a bible study group in church, which meets every Wednesday night. On the first night, I was loathe to go, having ended a lecture in school at 7.15pm - 15 minutes after the bible study began. I began steering Liv back home, and then felt an inward pull and stopped. 'Alright God,' I thought, 'I feel like maybe you want me to go for the bible study, but I'm tired and the cycle back from there is even longer than the cycle back from here and -- I just want to go home.'

'So if you want me to go,' I continued, 'I'm going to ask for a sign. If the time it takes to get there is less than 20 minutes, I'll go. If it's more, I'm going home.' (When I left school it had been 19 minutes, and I'd cycled a little in the opposite direction so I was hoping geography was on my side.)

Google maps read 18 minutes.

'Right, God - another sign please because that could have been a fluke. I'm going to check facebook and if there's a notification from the church then I'll go.' (There hadn't been any notifications when I last checked facebook before getting on my bike, so the chances, I thought, were low.)

Lo and behold, a notification.

'Okay God, you're a lot more technological than I thought. I'll go.'

And it was just the thing I needed. The people there were honest, welcoming, refreshing and serious about studying God's word. We learnt about realising our own sinfulness and yet also living in joy that Christ freely forgives that, bringing us from exile from his love into his Kingdom and a relationship with God. I realised that although I often confess my own weakness/lack of trust/need for control, I rarely actually perceive myself as 'sinful' in the absolute depravity it is cast as in the Bible. Perhaps because it's always in tension with the assuaging promise that Christ has forgiven sin and made a way for us to access God despite sin, and access the Holy Spirit to combat sin.

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Over the weekend I went back to Cambridge, and it was golden. I'd forgotten how easy it is to see people there. I felt surrounded by community all the time - either close, individual friends like Emily, Naomi, Kerry, Jacob or groups like Choir and the SusSex pistols. I did have moments where I thought 'oh, let me not leave' or where I wished Jacob could hold me forever, but it was more of a wish than a fear of what I'd be for not-having. And that, I think, is a big step.

A Quiet Joy
– Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch)

I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.

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This Wednesday, my lecturer called me 'a woman after [his] own brain' in a spontaneous exclamation reminding me very much of Leo. His lectures are all about the body and Islamic architecture, examining how each becomes a metaphor for the other, and how architecture becomes representative and symbolic and manipulated in the cause of the body politic, and how ideas of purity, taboo, boundary (and their opposites) are figured in buildings, which then become part of the experience of living as an embodied being -- and so the building itself is 'embodied'.

Speaking of body things: I've definitely been having a lot more positive body thoughts lately, which has been all the more wonderful because I haven't been surprised by them - they feel natural and unexceptional as they should be. Partly it's because of a good routine of running in preparation for the 10k, the mornings (or evenings) down the parkland walk and in Hampstead heath are usually fresh and exciting and having a reason beyond my body for running is useful too - now when I run it isn't just me and my legs and the world (which can be either incredibly soothing or a disastrous echo chamber, depending on how my brain is being), it's also 17 November and Jacob and all the people who have donated and the charities.

(Also I'm about £50 away from my target for TRIBE --- if you're reading this and have spare change for a good cause please consider putting it into these anti-trafficking charities!)

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On Wednesday I also received a letter from Alex -- it got terribly soggy on my rainy cycle to school (Project get Miriam a raincoat that actually keeps the rain out begins NOW) but I unfurled its damp pages and read them during a break in the lecture, and felt so glad for her honest words.

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Yesterday I met Rachel Dunn, and felt so joyful. We talked poetry, adjusting to London, the danger of finding identity in productivity, the joy of finding joy in another persons joy, how marriage can be missional and not just a love-club for two, sacrificial love... It was beautiful to talk to someone without feeling the need to go to the 'next thing', to just relish their presence and company. Rachel introduced me to Alice Oswald, after we discovered our taste in poetry is weirdly similar (think T.S. Eliot and Yehuda Amichai), and I've spent the morning poring over her poems instead of reading about pop art.

Full Moon
– Alice Oswald

Good God!
What did I dream last night?
I dreamt I was the moon.
I woke and found myself still asleep.

It was like this: my face misted up from inside
And I came and went at will through a little peephole.
I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble,
except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel.

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.

Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes,
Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other,
There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer
Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things.

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.
There's no material as variable as moonlight.
I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:
Good God! Who have I been last night?

The first week of London

Last night Jacob and I watched Brooklyn, a movie I watched when I was in Cambridge years ago. I remember the painful identification of the fear and loneliness of homesickness I felt with the film the first time I watched it. This last week I've felt bouts of a similar feeling, but more generalised. I can't confine last weeks feelings only to homesickness, because while I miss people at home that's not the only thing I'm missing. And missing isn't the only feeling either.

This is harder to explain than I thought it would be - we should go back to Wednesday last week.

Wednesday was the first day I went back to Cambridge. I took a train and read Birdsong on a sunny seat and found my way easily to Sidney without looking at Google maps. Within 5 minutes there I'd met 5 people apart from Jacob that I knew. Jacob and I made lunch, and over a faux-argument about whether peas are more bean or more green we found ourselves laughing and then hugging.

And then the laughter was replaced with the intense feeling of longing met and grief found. I was surprised at how much I realised then that I'd been missing him and the conflation of joy at being with him again and sorrow at knowing we only had a few hours before I had to leave again brought sudden tears to my eyes.

When I got back to London that evening I had some trouble with my bicycle and tube regulations, which eventually left me saying a hasty 'thank you' to the tube staff and speed walking my way out of the station, trying not to break until I was standing outside the red walls of Kings Cross station and I let myself cry. It was about 10pm and there were still many people on the streets, and yet I felt like I couldn't ask anyone for help - things seem to move so fast here and people remain within their bubbles of concern. How would I get back to Fiona's, which was so far away and not the 15 minute walk to Medwards in Cambridge, and on far more dangerous streets? London felt like a ocean and I was unmoored. The contrast in familiarity, safety and friendship that I felt and Cambridge and here, and the geographical difference, was so stark and a combination of lots of the things I was feeling in terms of why London had been feeling like a hostile place.

In the days following, I developed an eye infection, discovered my bike was kaput and needed replacing, struggled to talk to people in my course/on the scholarship, and went for a lecture that didn't seem to say anything although it was 2 hours long. I felt so tired - simply doing the basic things like cooking and having a shower and getting to campus seemed to take so much effort. One evening when I called Jacob it all sort of descended on me as I looked up at the ceiling and wondered if I could actually do this year. 'This is so much harder than I thought it would be,' I told him.

But since then I've had good lectures, met really kind and welcoming people in church, found my way back home from school without getting lost, and got a new bike. (She's called Olivia, and if she were a human she's be about 65 years old, with dyed blue hair and a light, gentle voice, full of joy but also comforting) There have been moments of still feeling lost, but with every cycle up the archway hill it gets a little shorter.

On Thursday I saw waiting for Will on a bench on the top of Parliament Hill, when an old man approached me. 'May I sit?' he asked. 'Of course,' I replied.

His name was Lucello, and he told me about his varied and exciting life - his move from Milan to South Africa under the pretence that he was a bricklayer, although he'd never laid a brick in his life. 'After the first day my hands were all torn,' he said. From bricklayer, he became a carpenter, then a window dresser and stand maker, which included moving to England. He spoke for about 30 minutes, and I was happy to listen because in his presence I felt the rare feeling of slowing down, and stopping and being wholly absorbed in a life of adventure and uncertainty that wasn't my own. Knowing from hindsight that all works out in the end, in some way or another 'if you have enough cheek and enough-- enough -- ah you know what I mean?' (he said, trying to get at the sense of confidence and dauntlessness and risk that I think is best summed up in the word ballsy) was comforting, reminding me that - hey, I'm only 22, and I've only been here 2 weeks, and life with unfold itself according to God's good plan. I might not know entirely what I'm doing but I'm going to be ballsy about next week, I'm going to learn without fearing that I'm the least experienced and qualified person in the class, I'm going to talk to people without the fear of being thought odd or the fear of rejection.

A mystery; or my misorientation

The strangest thing happened on an early Thursday run. I ran down the Parkland walk, across the railway bridge and into Finsbury park, wanting to get to about 7km this morning as my long-ish run. Heading away from the railway bridge, I did a loop round some trees in the park, and after a while more decided that it was time to begin returning.

Return is always a time-confounding moment in running, because particularly on routes one is less familiar with, I find that the first half of the run into the unknown usually goes quite slowly (at least perceptually) while the return flies by far faster.

But this time return was even odder. I followed a path, that led round the gentle bend of a lake - 'The Lake', a sign said. After passing a children's playground, I then ran through a garden with pink and red flowers beds in either side of me, and continued straight.

Until, I noticed before me a lake, gently bending, with a sign 'The Lake' beside it. Puzzled, I kept going, and passed a children's playground. I stopped when I got into a garden with pink and red flower beds on either side, and felt shakey and confused. This was the exact same place I'd been running through less than five minutes ago and yet I was sure I hadn't made any drastic loop. I wondered (quite seriously) if somehow I'd stumbled into a time loop, or had some sort of pre-emptive vision. Because how - how??? - in the short time between seeing the lake and seeing the lake again had I possibly gone round it? Particularly as a) it wasn't a small lake, b) I'd left its contour, and c) I was, as far as I could perceive, running straight.

Shaken, and conscious that I needed to get back so I could get to my lecture on time, I asked a man who was walking towards me in an orange sweatshirt pushing a buggy where the railways bridge to the Parkland walk was he turned and pointed behind him to the right, so I thanked him and began running in that direction.

Less than 5 minutes later, I saw coming towards me...a man who in an orange sweatshirt pushing a buggy. The same man.

'What is going on?' I thought, and slowed to a walk. He looked just as puzzled as he caught sight of me.

'Are you lost?' he asked.

'Yes, do you know how to get to the railway bridge?' I asked, the déjà vécu unmistakable, and he pointed before him to his left.

This time I did find the railway bridge, but felt like I wasn't in reality until my feet touched the path of the Parkland walk, a straight path with no bends and no lakes, and no time loops! (that I have yet experienced)

Starting new: let go and know

Late afternoon - to catch the last part of the golden day I decided to walk down the parkland walk to the shops in Crouch End. As I walked, two things became quite clear in my mind:

1) London begins now, and I need to begin putting down new roots despite the knowledge that in a year I am to be uprooted again.

2) Loneliness is something this year might have quite large doses of.

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Choosing between going to London or staying in Cambridge for a master's was a really difficult choice.

London loomed full of possibility - possibility of all sorts.

The possibility that I would learn from some of the best minds in the field of Asian archaeology and art, the possibility that I would meet people full of passion and fun, the possibility that I would grow in confidence about moving in the vast crowd of fast people and rather than getting lost in an ontological crisis I'd feeling my funny old body stepping, stopping, entering and walking and I'd remind myself of who I am.

But London also held the possibility of losing friends, the possibility of showing my ignorance about archaeology and art, the possibility of being uncomfortable, lost, in danger.  It seems like a little thing, but after a skype call with Auntie Heidi and a phone call with Hannah -- realising that to commute to school could take anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour, and that a grocery shop might not be a 10 minute walk away, and that I could possibly be staying somewhere where green fields and a river were not a 10 minute run away -- everything seemed possibly too big for me to handle.

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But words came from Emily, words of wisdom and honesty:

"Now, in your life [...] you'll have a lot of changes to adapt to, and I think it's important that you're able to keep that momentum. I mean, after your education, you're moving back to Singapore – that'll be another change. After your bond you may find your life elsewhere – there's another change.

You'll meet different people in London, learn of different lifestyles. If anything, it's a great adventure.

On staying in Cambridge: I feel as though, if I were in your position, I might feel like I were on borrowed time, that I didn't accomplish all I'd set out to do, that I didn't quite make my mark in the way I'd envisioned, or done or read or said or painted all the things I wanted to. And that's true. Our minds will always have more capacity than our bodies do. And perhaps you may feel that an extra year will allow you to do all that. To further solidify your friendships and memories to make sure they will not, cannot fade. It hurts to even think that they could be undone and you can't bear that. To properly mourn every street corner you dizzily laughed on or every tree whose shade you enjoyed. To let every inch of your soul know and really know.

But every year won't be enough. And that's life I guess.

It's learning to let go and know

You could never have done it even with a million years."

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I'm holding on to the idea that defeat and it's sisters tiredness, loneliness, fear, mediocrity, discomfort and danger can be positives. That God has put me in a place where I will be challenged - what is an adventure without a few dragons? But God also promises to carry me through defeat, not by making me strong but by letting me rest in His strength. 

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

So I'm learning to let go and know that I can't do it - I could never have done it, but God can and already has. This space might be a place where I 'boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses', partly because I want to be honest in this space, and I want to write, and I want to learn how to lean on God so that my weaknesses are not things I hide with shame but things I gladly give to God, knowing that he does not see me less because of them but says, 'My child, don't take it all on yourself, let's do this adventure together. My grace is sufficient for the next step, my power will be your stay when your mind reaches ahead of your body, my rest will be the relationship that holds you firm when loneliness seems too large.'