From the New World: Thoughts about Wales and Anecdotes of My Trip

     One never overcomes the fear of new things. Whether, the fear is specific to a certain type of new, or left to a general anxiety regarding anything new, each person has some fear that revolves around an experience or a concept they have never tried. I recently faced the general anxiety of facing many new things as I set out on a journey to Aberystwyth, Wales.

     I had never set foot in a country foreign to my homeland before I came to Aber; though I have been on my own before, and I have traveled before, it is difficult to prepare for every change I will go through as I become accustomed to this country. However, I am thrilled about the opportunities I have as I look forward to a year abroad.

     I chose Aber and Wales partly due to the programme, partly due to the scenery, history, and culture of the country, and partly due to its centrality in much of the literature that has defined my formative years. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, the Time Quintet by Madeline L'Engle, faerie stories, and Shakespeare's works all contain hints of the wonder that Wales has imparted on the respective authors as they came into contact with the country's rich culture, and I hope that wonder will influence both my own writing and my outlook as I find paths that are older than most in the New World.

It took me nearly two days to arrive in the UK. The trip itself was fun, though I had a lot of nervous energy that caused a little bit of discomfort in parts. Some of those nerves still remain as I'm getting adjusted.

     My first layover was in the Cincinnati Airport. There I spent some of my time looking at the local museum's impressive collection of fossilized mammals. Then I connected to the JFK Airport in New York. (This airport is very big and very efficient, but aside from shopping, there isn't much of interest. I spend most of my time charging my phone for my first flight out of the country.) The flight to JFK was mostly uneventful aside from one or two pleasantries from a woman who had a flight to Ireland in JFK. In JFK, I had a little adventure, while I was trying to keep my money secure in a belt pouch that fit under my clothes. When I changed from $ to £, I tried to put it in and thought I had succeeded. I walked back to my gate and suddenly felt the money all go down my pant leg. I bent down as though I were tying my shoe, and was able to retrieve the money while covering it with my jacket. I then went into the restroom to put it away safely, leaving some in my wallet so I wouldn't have to worry about re-enacting that SNAFU.

 My flight to Iceland was interesting because I had a touch screen showing movies, TV shows, the flight details, and a music player. I decided against watching a movie and put on a Brahms symphony and went to sleep after looking at the flight details for a while. (I was happy to see a blanket and a pillow were provided on this flight as it arrived at 7 AM local time.) After I woke up I realized the symphony had restarted, so I looked back at my options and found Dvorak's From the New World. It was epic breaking through the clouds to that music. I recommend it if you have a flight to Iceland.

     The Reykjavik airport was much more interesting than JFK. When we first landed, it was so early that the airport looked almost like it was empty. At first, I thought it was a lot smaller than it was, but once I picked up my bags after following the winding trail to the claim, I saw that the section I had passed opened into the main portion of the airport where all of the business was conducted. There were several art exhibits there including an experimental video titled something like "Brain" that showed a lot of cool abstract images and shapes overlaying MRIs and videos of people. They also had self-service for check-in luggage. Since I had to change airlines here, I printed off my luggage tag and brought the bag over to the place where I was supposed to drop it off. By this time, there were lines in all of the person-operated checked bag sections, so I thought I'd try the self-service line. I stood at it for a few moments trying to figure it out when one of the airport employees came up to me and showed me how it worked. (He said it was easy as falling off a log, and I agreed.) For the rest of my time there, I bought a keychain at the gift shop and looked at a lot of the different folk writings they were selling at the bookshop.

     The next flight was to Copenhagen, and as I settled in, I saw a very tall, very Icelandic-looking man coming down the aisle looking for his seat. His son, around five years old, came over to the seat next to mine and he sat in the aisle row. My neighbors on this flight kept me entertained for the entire trip. At first, I found two things about the five-year-old: he didn't speak English, and he liked Superman. He was carrying a Superman Pez dispenser around like an action figure and smiling up at me. He would turn to his dad and say something in his language, then continue what he was doing. Occasionally he would drop something, and if he couldn't reach it and it was on my side, I would hand it to him. I spent perhaps half an hour alternating between watching him interact with his toys and his "papa" and watching out the window at the clouds. Eventually, the kid got some yogurt from his bag, which he dropped before he could open; I picked it up and handed it back to him. He smiled at me and turned to his papa who thanked me. This whole time, I and the father had been silent to each other, and I thought he may not speak more than a few words in English. He offered me chocolates which I gratefully accepted when I handed the son back the Pez dispenser. After having returned the yogurt, I was surprised by the father asking me where I was from. We spoke the rest of the flight about the US, what he was doing in Iceland, and what I was doing in the UK. He was a big fan of Marvel, so I spoke a lot about Marvel movies, and eventually, we started talking about genealogy, Norse Sagas as compared to American tall tales, and finally about some parts of Iceland he had been to.

     The Copenhagen airport was big, but I was too tired to do much exploring, so I bought a Coca-Cola in order to compare European soda with American. According to my palate, it was bland, but I didn't dislike it. I slept for most of the trip to Birmingham, England, and it was cloudy, so I only got to see ground right before we landed.

     I got through customs unscathed except that when I was getting one of my documents, I couldn't find it because it was folded. Once I picked up my bags, I found a taxi and went to the inn where I had booked in a suburb called Coleshill. The Red Lion doubled as a pub, so walking in with a suitcase was somewhat awkward, but the owner was efficient and kind. I was shown to my room and paid, then I came back down and had dinner. The pub reminded me of Tolkien's descriptions of The Prancing Pony. I felt like a very tired Shire hobbit in a very crowded place full of Breelanders. I also had a bit of stomach trouble from the nerves and the jet lag, so I didn't finish, but the egg mayo sandwich was good. (I was caught off guard by the bacon. If you're ever across the pond, don't forget that bacon means something slightly different over here.) It was cool that night, so I got good sleep.

     I returned to the airport after a continental breakfast served by the inn. The lady working that morning called a cab for me, and I spoke with the cabby on the way to the airport about what I was doing in the UK, (as I had with the cabby the night before). When I arrived, I had my first experience with counting UK currency. I was working on the cab fare, and when I eventually got enough sorted out, my difference was £10.10. I had just finished fishing out a £0.20 coin (twenty pence) and told the cabby he could keep the extra ten. As I was getting my luggage, I realized that his surprised look was because he thought I meant I was giving a £10 tip. I corrected myself, and we laughed at it. I was really flustered, so I forgot to give him more than the ten pence. I wish I'd have given him a couple pounds at least because he was very helpful in giving directions for me when we arrived at the airport.

I waited for about an hour at the airport for the greeting team to arrive, and we boarded the bus where I met a few of the international students. I got quite a few pictures on the bus ride, including one of a double rainbow. (One of the other students had mentioned wanting to see one a few minutes before, so it was well timed, though the top of the rainbow was difficult to see.) Wales is beautiful. More to come.

In love, from my desk in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales,

Justus

Tharn

Hrar elil make a rabbit tharn, but it only takes one hrududu.

    I have been in a great upheaval of my life recently, and during that time, I have been reading. The most recent book I'm reading (which I have not yet finished) is Watership Down by Richard Adams. I really admire the world that Adams created using such simple thing as language. Adams created a world no different from our own, but from the perspective of rabbits and in their own language (translated for our convinience) in order to get his message across. This isn't necessarily a post about what he has to say as much as it is a post about what is going on in my life, and I thought the language he uses in the book fits pretty well, so here's a crash course in Lapine.  The word "hrar" means "a thousand" or "many." "Elil" is the Lapine word for enemy or predators. I intend to use it here a bit tongue-in-cheek. "Tharn" is, as I said on my Twitter, "The state of being a rabbit or other animal goes into when stuck in headlights".  Which brings us to the final word that I'm going to be using, "hrududu": a tractor or any other motorized vehicle.

I graduated in the Summer, and since then I have been working to find a place to root myself. Somewhat like the rabbits in Watership Down, I have been looking for a safe home. This started off with me living back with my parents and looking for a job, which I found quickly enough. That job required me to drive, but I only had a permit at the time, so I worked to get my license by practicing on the way to and from work. Before I could I lost several people very important to me, which has been hard, but I'm not naive enough to think that I could avoid it, so I've just been trying to take it in stride. Now I hate driving the hrududu, so when I finally got my license, it was a big deal, and it was terrifying; I still tense up every time I'm behind the wheel. Add to that that I made a sudden decision to move away from my parents' house to the other side of the city, and now I need to drive if I want to get anywhere or see anyone, including them, I have a lot of time in that tense state. I feel like not a day goes by but I'm almost responsible for a wreck. (Though I know that's not true by now.) Still, I can't help going tharn if I get in the car.

Moving out is well and good, but I'm definitely not rooted yet. Like the rabbits, I still need to get to know my surroundings and watch for elil or other dangers. I still need friendship, because, like rabbits, people are communal, so though I visit friends, friends visit me, and my roommates are here, I can still get pretty lonely. I decided the other night to go hang out with some of my roommate's friends, but silly me (almost) forgot about my social anxiety. Not being in a social situation for so long has been good in that I haven't been tharn in a long time for that reason, but I had forgotten the techniques I was developing to avoid it, so my one go-to solution had to be enough. After I had been with these wonderful people, I began to feel that dazed buzzing that comes when I clench up and freeze due to the anxiety. I quickly found the book and read until my roommate was ready to go, who had generously invited me and driven to boot,

This episode combined with the fact that I what I was reading made me chuckle, and so I began to think of myself as a rabbit tharn and surrounded by hrar elil, but at least I wasn't dealing with the hrududu.

Loneliness vs. Love

          One of my early posts was about loneliness. I think that loneliness is sort of like pain. It is  a warning that something is wrong. This social pain tells us that we don't have enough interaction with other people or that our interactions are not deep and fulfilling, as they should be. God said, "It is not good that man should be alone." So He made woman. Man and woman were created for several purposes, the highest being "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." To borrow the famous catechism. However, one purpose for man and woman was to procreate. God made us to be social creatures, and as social creatures, we need others to fulfill a need that we (especially introverts) neglect. (Extroverts, I suspect, have a tendency to leave relationships underdeveloped.) This need, social contact, is more than just the need to be around people, though it is impossible without that dimension. We need to be stimulated both emotionally and mentally. (This is for those of you who tend toward logic or are all "feels.") Emotionally, we need to be able to express our feelings to others, not just bottle it up or show one or two "good" feelings. We need to be able to develop our expression in a healthy way, and in order to do that we need to express ourselves to other people. Intellectually, we need to wrestle with our ideas and beliefs as well as with others. We need to be able to perform appendectomies on our wrong beliefs inflamed by passion. In order to do that, we need to know that we are wrong, which means someone has to contradict us, and we have to tease out the implications from their point of view.

          This pain of loneliness tells us that we need a logical appendectomy or that we are bottling up our emotions or wrongly communicating with our fellow men and women. Often these things are caused by our search for love or for our place in life; this is especially true for adolescents. Paul writes to the Church in Corinthians: "Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)" I want to point out that things that love is not are often things that we get wrong when we are alone, or when we get our relationships mixed up. They are the things that can make us lonely. In particular, love "does not seek its own." When we seek after love, we seek for our idea of love. We're usually wrong, which is probably why God chose to define what love isn't rather than to say what it is in 1 Corinthians. When we do get love right, we usually just find it, from what I've been able to tell. (Even if just finding it is on an online dating site, most people don't seem to expect what we they end up with.) We often love our family members who, outside of being in our family have nothing in common with us. I was blessed to love my family and have a lot in common with all of them, but there are times that I doubt that we are even from the same planet. Seeking for love is a selfish action. We want something to stop the pain of loneliness, like aspirin, but we don't expect to find that real love requires sacrifice. Real love hurts. Loneliness can also be a phantom pain that we get when we imagine situations where we could have done something different or where we might do something wrong. We imagine who could hurt us and how, so fear of being with people builds up in our hearts. "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love." Punishment is pain inflicted by another; sacrifice is a personal choice to endure pain. Perfect love casts out fear because we have already endured pain, so the pain inflicted by another is nothing new. Love "bears all things" and "endures all things." The lover has acclimated himself or herself to pain, so they shrug off the pain others cause. Patience is an important part of love.

           I've noticed that very few relationships, romantic or otherwise, have equal input from both parties. That doesn't stop me from trying to develop relationships with others. On the contrary, I try harder when I see a relationship that I want to succeed begin to fail. Sometimes I fail, but I always hope for grace. Love "does not take into account a wrong suffered," "believes all things," and "hopes all things." On that note, I want to echo Paul's sentiment in Romans 1:11-13 "I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established; that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far) so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles." There are a lot of people that I've always intended to keep in touch with, and failed to do so. I'm sorry for that. Can I get a second chance?

P.S. Love tends to seek others' good before the lover's own good. Philippians 2:3 "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others." I hope I'm not being a hypocrite, but it's always hard to be honest about actions and intentions without conflagrating them. I intend to try to love those who are around me, but I am a selfish human, so I will forget. I ask you to gently remind me to love when I am not. I will try my best to do the same for you.

-Written from my dining room at home.
In love,
Justus

Fear Not

God commands us to refrain from fear. (Joshua 1:9, Matthew 28:19-20, 1 John 4:18) . He has not given us a spirit of fear or of slavery leading to fear. (1 Timothy 1:7 , Romans 8:15) He protects us with His righteous right hand through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and against our enemies (Isaiah 41:10, Psalm 23:4, 18) God is love. (1 John 4:7) God is strong. (Psalm 62)

For all of the above reasons and more I have no reason to fear. I shall not fear when I trust God!

Regarding love:
Love is vulnerability. (1 Corinthians 13:7, John 15:13) But perfect love doesn't leave room for fear. (1 John 4:18) I should become weak so that God may use me for others' sake, especially His. (1 Corinthians 9:22-23, 1 Corinthians 1:20-26) I will boast in God alone, for love is not proud. (1 Corinthians 13:4)

May my Love give me courage, may my courage help me love.

In love,
Justus

Joshua 1:9, Matthew 28:19-20, 1 John 4:18, 1 Timothy 1:7, Romans 8:15, Isaiah 41:10, Psalm 23:4, 18, 1 John 4:7, Psalm 62, 1 Corinthians 13:7, John 15:13, 1 Corinthians 9:22-23, 1 Corinthians 1:20-26, 1 Corinthians 13:4

Lonliness

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This is a poem by e e cummings.

I don't think there's a person on this planet who doesn't know what it means to be lonly. Even Christ felt alone on the cross (see Mark 15:34).

     A couple of weeks ago I had an intense panic attack that was set off by an irrational fear of lonliness. I had gone on a walk because I was somewhat bored and there wasn't much going on, on that walk I was intraspectively reviewing myself. I often go on walks in order to consider my approach to problems: school, social, spiritual, etc.

     Usually I end up praying, then returning to my dorm and getting back to work. This time was different. I was working through a social issue which I had just noticed. The friends I have were always doing something and I could never just interject and do something with them. (I later found out that almost everyone on this campus are classified in the Myers-Briggs Personality test as judging people, which means they have to have structure, whereas I'm a percieving person, which means I like to do things off the cuff.)

     As I was walking I began to blame myself for not being able to interject myself into a social situation. I started to panic over the fact that I might not be able to find people who would just go somewhere with me when I was bored. (Selfishness in action. Sin tends to bring awful results like this.) Since it was dark and cold and I was shaking because of my panic I decided to sit until it passed. I went to a gazebo on campus where I sat and began to pray. In my time praying I began to feel much better and realized that I was overreacting. Even so, I was still rattled.

     When I got back to my room, one of my roommates (anonymous for the time being) spoke with me because he saw me shaking. As I was trying to figure out how to word my issue I looked into the Word of God. I had a couple of verses on my mind. 1 John 4:17-18, Isaiah 43:1-7, Proverbs 3:19-26 These verses came through various channels, a chapel message, a Facebook post, and an attempt to memorize a chapter of the Bible, but each of them pointed me to one thing: I need not fear for God loves me and is with me.

     

     My roommate asked me what was wrong. I answered and explained my situation. I realized something. 1 John 4:18 bothers me. I have fear; there is no fear in perfect love; the one who fears has not been perfected in love; I fear love. That's right I have an irrational fear of love. (That is I fear loving others.) The reason is twofold. In order to love one must open oneself, and I do not like to be open, even with those to whom I am very close. And love involves sacrifice. In fact in John 15:13 it says "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."

    

     I am too selfish and value my safety too greatly. That is also why it is hard for me to follow Christ in many ways. (1 John 5:3) My selfishness causes most of my lonliness. Even though my friends may be busy, when they are not I don't seem to have the time to sacrifice to be with them. I am a hypocrite. However, Christ has been at work and I intend to change and "be transformed by the renewing of [my] mind" as Paul puts it (Romans 12:1-2).

     With that in mind, last night I had a conversation with a friend along the same lines as this post. Lonliness is a highly contageous disease. My friend's issue was that he could not seem to find a group to fit in with. I and another friend prayed for him and gave some suggestions while we talked it over, but I still didn't open up. 1 John 4:20-21 condemns my attitude of self-preservation at the expense of love. Love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" according to 1 Corinthians 13:7. So let us love and persevere in our love. Though we bear our selves to our friends and to our enemies, we have shown our love, and in this Christ is glorified.

In love,

Justus

Mark 15:34, 1 John 4:17-18, Isaiah 43:1-7, Proverbs 3:19-26, 1 John 4:18, John 15:13, 1 John 5:3, Romans 12:1-2, 1 John 4:20-21, 1 Corinthians 13:7