Jayber.

After a weekend around- reading, sleeping, coffee and tea consuming, thinking, feeling alone, feeling community, going to church with Megan Buff, spending the night at her place and giggling all along, conversing a bit with my housemate Dale from South Africa, and resting and walking-
all those things one does in Belfast, I arrived home Sunday night to finish Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. Sometimes it is as though the words in a book are read at the perfect moment or maybe that I read these words through a lens that enables them to fit within my own life. Whatever the case, it was through the reading and completion of this book that I felt a transition, one that allowed me to wake this morning with a feeling and a truth I have not seen yet so clearly:

A deep love for Belfast, Northern Ireland.

As I have been here, because of the weight of my studies, the occasional loneliness, and the oddness of being a foreigner even in a western culture, it is almost as though negativity has overcome. But what I have forgotten to focus on are these things:
The beauty of green, even in gray.
The wonderful people who have taken me in, and while I am sometimes alone at night, there is a community here most fascinating to take part in. And even as these are new relationships, how does one ever become intertwined in depth without taking the time to transition from new friend to old friend?
I have been lost in "missing" those at home such a great deal that I am forgetting the virtue of living in a fully present way. A quote from childhood that still sits heavily: "Wherever you go, go with all of your heart."
And even though the nature of my research is to study conflict, this cannot negate the humanness and the stunning complexity of this city. Because even amidst sorrow there is great joy. Even amidst healing hearts and broken hearts from violence in the years past there is the ability to stumble upon a scene: people of all ages dressed in all of their various colors, children, young couples, elderly, even drunkards, sitting outside yesterday and watching a street performer... standing on stilts, juggling, cracking jokes...
I looked around and saw faces. and every face was laughing. almost childlike and absolutely brilliant. the joy i took from this moment is still lingering, and reminding me that joy does exist. and so i will not forget to remember and continue studying the sorrow of this place, but what i cannot do is dwell only on the lack of so that i forget the abundance.

Because while I miss you, and I miss home, and I miss those things that comfort me, I am suddenly overjoyed with the discomfort of Belfast, such discomfort that is almost comfortable in its awkwardness. It is a city, and there are cities everywhere. But is a city with its own people, its own stories, its own grace and mercy and pain.

This week is to be a good week. I have a meeting tonight with a friend and then a group of people getting together to speak of sustainability and helping others and loving and how we can better do this. And tomorrow lunch and art galleries with a new friend I met who also studied Art and Philosophy, and more events. Wednesday I will go to a day of reflection at Wave Trauma Centre. Thursday I will meet with women and others. And Friday, well, James arrives and will stay for three weeks thereafter. These things are good. Really good.

And so I thank God for his/ her ability to bring comfort when I think it is gone. And I regret the moments I have spent dwelling a bit too much on the negative. But this cannot prevent me from now remembering it all at once in its bittersweet dance.

I'll end with the wisdom of Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow:
The trouble with many of my dreams was that they were perfectly rational, or they came from perfectly rational fears. They came from The Economy and The War- that is to say The News. It really didn't make any difference whether I was asleep or awake. All I needed was to be alone and quiet and in the dark, so that my mind could concentrate itself on fearful things, and it could not be unconcentrated sometimes until daylight.

But he goes on to express that daylight does come, and that sorrow and joy do intermingle, and that there is great hope and even greater mercy.

In all my love,
Megh