Epic Vacation Part 1: Boston

Yesterday, I commenced an epically long, solo vacation. I'll never have the time or probably the money to go on a vacation like this again, so I'm trying to take full advantage of the opportunity to go to a lot of places and see a lot of things. I'm going to try to blog about it somewhat regularly, depending on how good my Internet connection in Europe will be. My itinerary? Boston, Massachusetts; Ireland; England; Germany; Austria; and Washington, D.C.

I arrived in Boston yesterday morning after a red-eye flight with a brief stop in the JFK airport. I flew JetBlue, which I had never done before. I recommend it. I had a very nice flight attendant named Victor who said he liked my bag and gave me two cans of tomato juice. (I always drink tomato juice on airplanes but almost never at any other time.) He also bought a movie for the guy next to me to watch. Victor was so great.

After eating a breakfast of toast and jam, the first thing I did in Boston was take a nap. Then, I went to a baby shower for my friend Sarah (I'm staying here in Boston with Sarah and her husband, Michael). After the baby shower, I had another nap. In the evening, we went to dinner at Antojito's, a Mexican/El Salvadorian restaurant. We got a ton of food so I had a bit of everything: papusas, tacos, gorditas, some fish, rice and beans. Yum.

After that, we went grocery shopping. I learned that out here in Boston, they call grocery carts "carriages." We watched about half of Bringing Up Baby (during which I had another nap!) and then went to bed. I was so tired.

This morning, I went to church at the Boston Longfellow Park 2nd Ward with my friend Patrick. It's a ward that's pretty full of graduate students. I enjoyed how many of them tied their different fields of study into what we were talking about in Sunday School. No but really. I did. During the fifth Sunday combined meeting, we also were given chocolate and crayons and we had story time. I loved this ward.  Church was followed by a munch-and-mingle with the Longfellow Park 1st Ward where I saw my friend Natalie. Apples and celery and peanut butter were served. (I'll probably be chronicling the food I eat more than anything else I do while I'm traveling.)

This afternoon, we tried to go to Boston Commons and Boston Public Gardens (where the Make Way for Ducklings statues are!), but we experienced a lot of authentic Boston traffic and we couldn't find parking, so we ended up just kind of driving around for nearly an hour. I enjoyed it though. There are a lot of awesome old houses and old buildings here in Boston. We passed by John Kerry's house and a house that Louisa May Alcott may or may not have lived in.

On the way back, we stopped at the Fenway Stadium and walked around outside of it. It's pretty small, but it's a 100 years old and that's cool. I took some pictures that I'll have to upload when I have access to a computer with a SD card drive.

Long story short, I've been in Boston for two days and have seen mostly nothing. But I'm enjoying myself. Tomorrow, I'm going to Harvard Square, Harvard campus, and the Mt. Auburn's Cemetery where a bunch of famous people are buried. Tuesday is Walden Pond and Orchard House! Should be awesome. I'll keep you all posted.

power, love, and a sound mind

I've been pondering lately on this scripture found in 2 Timothy 1:7: "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."

I find this scripture comforting because it reminds me that when I'm afraid to move forward in my life or I'm stressed over trials I'm experiencing, the fear I feel can't come from God. God is love and perfect love casteth out all fear.

I'm a worrier. If you know me at all, you've probably picked up on this trait of mine. One of the things I worry most about is figuring out what to do with my life--on a day-to-day, year-to-year, and even decade-to-decade basis. I keep trying to map things out so I know where I'll be, or where I should be, in five or ten years--or at least tomorrow. I'm not an obsessive planner (in fact, although I keep a planner, I often forget to look at it), but I just like to feel secure--to know what's coming--to be able to picture where life is headed.

Unfortunately, I've long been in a stage of life where you can't really count on how things will go. I still try, however. This often leads me to pray and ponder about the next step in my life and frequently second guess whether my impressions are from the Spirit or from my own head. I'm afraid of missteps and mistakes. But God in recent months has been trying to teach me to be more flexible and more trusting.

This scripture reminds me that my fear and my worry can't have their source in God, so what I imagine are spiritual warnings and premonitions about what will go wrong are really my own worries demanding to be front and center. In contrast to this, God works through power, love, and a sound mind. And I find these things come more plentifully into my life when I stop trying to see ahead--when I allow one step to be enough for me.

Power, love, and a sound mind are most available in present moments. God isn't always willing to tell me whether or not I'll get into PhD programs or when I'll have a family, but He is always willing to tell me what to do with this moment--how to act in the next hour, or the next minute. Of course He wants me to act for myself and He mercifully doesn't direct every action and every decision (how would we learn to act for ourselves and not be acted upon?), but He will, if I let Him, guide me to where I need to be when I need to be there. He'll give me the strength to teach one class, the ability to help one student, and the love to be patient and listening when I want to be selfish and talking. He'll always help me know that I can do for people around me, even if the direction of my own life isn't yet clear. He's willing to give me the power, love, and soundness of mind to act in His service and to become a little more like Him.

And that's enough to take the fear and worry away in the present.

a blue true dream of sky

i thank You God for most this amazing 
by e. e. cummings

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)


This poem makes me so happy. I've just about memorized it simply from reading it over and over again in the past few weeks. It's the perfect poem for all this spring weather, and it reminds me of how lovely things really are. Enjoy.

new year's resolutions

Like most people, I write about ten resolutions every New Year's and then fulfill two of them.

I can't find my list from last year, so that tells you how seriously I took those resolutions. But I do remember writing "finish master's degree" on there, and I think I wrote "find a job" as well. So, there you go, two resolutions completed! Go me!

Resolutions matter a little more to me now, though, as I contemplate 2012. I'm not in school anymore, after so many years of no break, so I don't have those regular deadlines and expectations to keep me accomplishing things. I've got to figure out my own way to keep progressing. 2012 also marks the end of the world, so it seems like a good year to try to keep your resolutions.

I don't want to start too big, however, because that's setting myself up for failure. Instead of writing ten resolutions, then, I'm going to write just five. It increases each goal's odds of landing in one of the two elite goals-that-will-actually-be-accomplished spots. So, without further ado, here are my resolutions for 2012:

1. Read my scriptures in the morning.
2. Read two books a month just for fun.
3. Write something creative everyday.
4. Exercise three or four times a week.
5. Go to Europe!

I feel strongly that Europe will make it to the top two. Exclamation points are so motivating.

favorite books

Probably because I am (was?) an English major, people often ask me about my favorite books--a question I don't find it easy to answer.

Wayne Booth says that books are like friends: each one offers a different experience. When you sit down with a book, you sit down with a particular type of experience. Rather than having favorite books, then, I have books that I return to again and again for particular types of experience. I have books for comfort (Little Women or An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott), books for nostalgia (Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery), books for hard thinking (anything by Kenneth Burke), books for not thinking (Ella Enchanted), books for fun (Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling), books for inspiration (Gifts from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindburgh or A Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle), and books for pure, unadulterated pleasure (Emma or Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen). All of these books provide me with the particular experience I need when I need it--they're all favorites in that sense, but I can't really call any of them my favorite book.

There are a few books, however, that I do at various times apply the title of favorite to when I have to answer the question. And they are these:

And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

I love these books. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is about these books that puts them on the top of my favorites list. I realize that the experience offered by each of these books, although different, somehow link together for me. All of them provide me with a spiritual reading experience--an experience I'm not sure how to describe. Romans 8:16 talks about how the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits, telling us things about ourselves in a way that transcends verbal communication. These books speak to my spirit, which is why I call my experience with them spiritual. All of them have played an essential role in shaping the way I think about and interact with the world around me. I remember distinctly my first experience reading each of them.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia first when I was eleven. I cried when Aslan sacrificed himself in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I recognized the clear parallel with Christian theology, and wondered if it was sacrilegious that I was crying for the lion. That moment marked the beginning of my understanding of the Atonement of Christ. When I read about Shasta's long walk with the Lion and the stripes on Aravis' back in The Horse and His Boy (my favorite of all the Chronicles), I imagined my own walk with God and what He might tell me about my journey. Aslan represented to me a very personal, very loving, very tangible view of God. I love these books for teaching me that God has a personality.

I read Les Miserables (complete and unabridged) for the first time when I was fourteen. I remember staying up until 4am one night to finish it and bawling through Jean Valjean's death. I had a headache all the next day because of too little sleep and too much crying. It was the book that really made me fall in love with reading--with the experience of losing myself in another's persons words, words that became mine too as I read them. I decided to major in English after reading Les Miserables.

As for And There Was Light, this book impacted me perhaps the most of all. It's the autobiography of a boy who was blinded at the age of seven and went on to lead a major resistance against Hitler during the German occupation of France. I read it when I was sixteen.

How can you resist a book that contains these opening lines?:

As I remember it, my story always starts out like a fairy tale, not an unusual one, but still a fairy tale. Once upon a time in Paris, between two world wars, there lived a happy little boy.

I think it was in August 2001 that I read And There Was Light. In September 2001, the words of Jacques Lusseyran would play through my head as I tried to process the tragedy of 9/11. Here he is describing how he mentally survived his interrogation from the SS:

One small piece of advice. In a spot like this don't go too far afield for help. Either it is right near you, in your heart, or it is nowhere. It is not a question of character, it is a question of reality. If you try to be strong, you will be weak. If you try to understand, you will go crazy. 

No, reality is not your character which, for its part, is only a by-product--I can't define it, a collection of elements. Reality is Here and Now. It is the life you are living in the moment. Don't be afraid to lose your soul there, for God is in it. 

Make all the gestures you like. Wash your hands if there is a place to wash them, stretch out on the ground, jump up and down, make a face, even shed tears if they help, or laugh, sing, curse. If you are a scholar--there is a gimmick for every category--do what I did that night. Reconstruct, out loud, Kant's arguments in the first chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is hard work and absorbing. But don't believe any of it. Don't even believe in yourself. Only God exists. (245)

This book came to me during perhaps the most difficult year of my life and it taught me that it's important not just to cope with adversity. We must learn to thrive in spite of it and see the beauty available even in ugly times.

The fact that I read all of these "favorite" books at very formative ages says something about why the experience of reading them is still so special to me when I go back to them years later. Sometimes, as a jaded MA, schooled in the ability to maintain critical distance, I miss the magic (and, yes, I mean magic) of handing myself over to a book--of making myself vulnerable to all the emotions it asks me to feel and losing myself in believing it--in its honest expression of the thoughts and feelings of another human being and in the honesty and literalness of my own reading of it. I hadn't learned to really question books when I was teenager, so I simply experienced them. Sometimes experiencing them meant making them over in my own image and reading my own experiences and feelings into them perhaps too much, but isn't that the magic of reading? That uncritical process of connecting my spirit with the undefinable spirit of the book is what made reading so personal and so valuable. That was how I read when I was eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. And when I revisit these books, I can read like that again. I go back to them for that experience--the spiritual experience of reading.

What are your favorite books? And what experiences have they offered you?