A Girl With a Sword

traveling mercies

I woke up in the dark on Wednesday. It was the first time I had woken up in the dark in almost six weeks. What the British summer lacks in heat it makes up for in light.

The travels are over for now. I had a glorious finish to my time England, going through L'Abri, taking long train rides, and finally spending a surprise two days in Yorkshire with Laura, eating English strawberries in a grassy moat, wandering through meadows and rape fields, skinny dipping in fountains (okay, so maybe we didn't exactly do that). I had my last pasty on Friday, my last chips on Sunday, my first and last kebab on Saturday night while listening to live music spill out of a pub called The Roman Bath in York.

Traveling mercies is the phrase I kept coming back to during my trip. It was a frightening experience at times. I didn't always know where I was sleeping at night, I didn't have much money for food, but I realized that, in the end, I was glad. It was probably the only time I'll get to feel like I'm living from hand to mouth without really living from hand to mouth. I read a poem in The New Yorker this spring called "Tree Limbs Down." It contemplated how in an overpriviledged society it's really hard to appreciate the value of things. We need to live with immediacy to really appreciate life. It included the lines "the outside of immediacy, alas, is uncertainty: / so the costly part of the crust of morning / bread is not knowing it will be there." I'm not pretending that I was ever starving, or even on the edge of starving, but I did get to live with more uncertainty than normal and that was good. Of course the best part of it at the time was finding a place to stay and food to eat and good conversation. Traveling mercies.