breakfast today with a not-even-that-close friend from EMU was reminding me about how it felt to spend four years tucked securely inside the "Mennonite bubble."
it's been somewhat surprising to me that over the past year I haven't felt all that nostalgic for being in college. I do miss how
intense everything felt, all the time; how alive and awake my brain felt, jumping from organic chemistry to a close reading of
Paradise Lost, from human physiology to investigating the links between language and religion. but when I graduated from EMU, I knew even then that I had taken all that I could from my four years there. I had grown and changed and been set on a path, and the only thing to do was keep walking. like I wrote at the time, I was ready to
do, to
try, to see if I could make it, out in the real world, outside of the boundaries of my tiny, safe school.
"This field is getting too small," she said.
"Don't you know anyone else
To fall in love with?"
-Robert Bly, "Conversations With The Soul"
that's kind of how it was, I guess - EMU felt large & spacious when I was 18 years old, and in the course of four years it grew smaller and smaller as I grew larger. maybe the simple way to say it is just this: I outgrew being a student.
that being said, though - I am missing being part of a community that speaks the same language, that cares about the same things I care about, that understands the identity that I have been growing into. I did not outgrow my church- and friend- and intellectual-communities in the same way that I outgrew the institution of EMU, and I think that is why I miss Harrisonburg so much.
and so. breakfast, this morning. a tiny ache in the heart: all the people I miss, all the conversations I haven't been having. I miss how easy the art of conversation was with people at EMU, how quickly we could jump between things like: young-adult Mennonite identity, work with MCC & what it means, the theology of different churches we've attended, professors we all know, places we've all been.
I want to belong to a community again, one that speaks this language. I don't know how long it will be until I end up in such a place, but I am going to do my best to steer myself in that direction.
