We're Not In Kansas Anymore, and the Colors are Beautiful

Day 11

Today’s breakfast consists of:
- a lightly-toasted egg-and-cheese sandwich on wheat (sandwich at 8:30am? Of course!
- a bowl of a granola-y cereal I found at the grocer downtown that has chunks of yogurt and raspberry and happiness.
- Claritin (not much nutritional value, to my knowledge), a Vitamin C (more nutritional value) and a pink multi-vitamin (the mother lode of nutritional value.)
- Sunlight streaming through the blinds of the floor to ceiling window in my half of our en-suite room.
- Bon Iver’s “Blood Bank EP,” through headphones (Justin Vernon wasn’t able to make it over this morning)
- A lovely email from a lovely girl back home, a significant girl in my life, a life-giving girl.

I really couldn’t have concocted a better morning. Since arriving at Oxford, at England for that matter, finding a sense of home hasn’t been easy and the first coupe days here felt, at times, gut-wrenchingly strange and awkward, much like freshmen year at high school all over again. I forget how it is to walk into a dining hall seeing 96% unrecognized faces, no friend-anchor insight to grab a seat next to. Socializing here is an interesting thing: the central place of socialization at St. Catherine’s is the JCR (Junior Commons Room), which boasts a big-screen TV, pool tables, a fire place (that’s never been used, I was told), comfy chairs, and, last but not least, the college bar. At night, students, after finishing dinner and their day’s work, congregate at the JCR simply to hang out and have a drink. This certainly isn’t a strange occurrence – people in the States drink alcohol and meet with one another, sometimes at the same time. Yet, this is certainly not how I’m used to meeting others. I’ll generally meet people I know and then head somewhere.

This past week at Oxford has felt very much like the first week of freshman year at IWU, not a little bit because they pair visiting students with the freshmen here for orientation-type activities. The same element of meeting people, of figuring out how to live and work and play here, of wandering around knowing peoples’ names but not their favorite thing to read or what their real laugh sounds like, is consistent with the beginning of college. In many ways it does feel like I’m carving out a new life in unknown territory, yet now that I have a home-base to return to, a little nook that feels like me with its maps and familiar books and peaceful pictures, the half of my suite (I have to say half because my roommate gets the other half, our spaces divided by a curtain), the territory feels a bit more known. And I would say this is true for many things here.

London was very overwhelming in that sense. While I met some lovely American students who knew the town well and shared significant similarities with me, I still felt like a stranger wandering in a strange land, without a landmark in sight except for the touristy-ones. My map was not yet well-worn, and much less memorized, coupled with the navigation of relating with new people I was placed alongside. I tend to be an incremental person, wanting to slowly appreciate and explore and learn things, and the constant dousing of newness wore on me, this past week at Oxford too.

Yet, and yet, each day continues and I feel more myself, more connected with this place and the people here. Two days ago, I had some free time in the morning, a rare sunny morning at that, and I left St. Catherine’s small-ish campus in search of a quiet bench to read and pray. After ten minutes of walking down a trafficky (pedestrian and automotive) road, past towering, ancient-stone and curiously welcoming Oxford colleges, about to turn around, I happened upon Oxford University Parks, a collection of sports greens on the outskirts of town. By myself, I strolled across the fields, a lone park bench near some small trees (I wish I knew what type). When I reached it, I sat, and breathed, and looked around at the loveliness surrounding me: students in the distance walking to and fro class, the empty soccer pitches resting, waiting for the next games, an older couple sitting on a similar bench a few hundred yards away, the city center not too far off in the distance as indicated by the handful of steeples reaching toward the sky. I wasn’t distracted by a sense of having to meet people, or of having to appreciate where I was because of Oxford being Oxford. I was simply, and peacefully, there, looking around and seeing.

Sitting on the bench, reading a CS Lewis book, Letters to Malcolm, I felt a true sense of belonging here, in the midst of its newness to me (oldness to itself). This place will certainly come to me in increments, as will the friendships and the learning, and the less I feel pressure to absorb it all, the more I am able to. It’s good to be here. It’s good to be here for a while.