Spaces

Coming off the plane in Ontario, CA on Wednesday morning, I did something I've never done at SeaTac Airport; I walked down a staircase at the back of the airplane onto the tarmac in the open air. As I did so, I was struck with the space of California, its brightness and width. This was not the first time that has happened.

I remember walking off a similar plane in a similar way last year, three days after leaving Oxford, England. The 360-degree expanse of flat, hazy horizon is a far cry from the narrow cobblestone streets of Oxford. In the cafes and libraries of Oxford you watch students, monks, and tourists rush by the windows. You can breathe in the age, intelligence and writing of the city; you can experience a palpable sense of possibility. The possibility that you could write a book, prove a theory, or convince an audience comes from the knowledge within the spaces of Oxford. The creaky little rooms and crooked passages leading to low doors seem bursting with knowledge. Studying in those spaces, it feels like you can access that knowledge, and not only in books. Because you are in such close quarters with your thoughts, it seems easier to recall information from the deepest corners of your mind.

When I left Seattle Wednesday morning, it was raining the proverbial cats and dogs, fat wet raindrops pouring down in the dark. Even when the rain is not as heavy as it was that morning, the Seattle sky feels closer to you than the sky in L.A. The moisture hugs you, envelops you in mist, fog, or at least a heavy blanket of clouds far above your head. Seattle is my childhood home, and my family lives there. It is a place I associate with comfort, old friends, coffee shops, childhood imagination and high school escapades.

The sky here in Upland is infinite blue, interrupted both by enormous cloud formations in every shade of gray, and by the brown foothills to the north (these days, the hills are dusted with snow like powdered sugar on a craggy waffle). Weather in the “Inland Empire” is as predictable as Seattle’s, but instead of cloudy with a chance of showers it is predictably dry, hazy, and warm.

Studying in California feels completely different from studying in Oxford. In this geographical space, the top of the box has been left open, and ideas can float up to incredible heights like as many balloons. This space doesn’t beg for an open mind, it demands one. Oxford beckons you to consider the past scholars who scribbled by candlelight and paved the way for your meager ideas to grow. California demands you remember the men and women who traveled this land by starlight on horseback and in wagons. They left familiarity behind to go west, believing they would reach a golden land on the edge of the Pacific. Their freedom of thought, the freedom to go anywhere your thoughts go, is palpable here. We travel in cars now, not horses, zooming through the golden land on concrete freeways until we reach the Pacific.

Drive fast, live young, be beautiful, question everything--those are the cultural rules here. We are not in Oxford anymore, nor are we in Seattle.

Our space affects our lives. Nancy Wilson says that your room reflects your theology. I say an ugly library ruins reading. And I am sitting at my desk laughing with the Creator who made both the open sky of California and the rolling green hills of the English countryside. For I stumbled into the only English country house in San Bernardino Country. When I arrived here, it felt familiar because it felt like England. When I arrived in England, it felt familiar because it felt like dozens of books I love. C.S. Lewis would say those books felt familiar because their beauty felt like heaven.

Enjoy your space. Return to the spaces you love. Find the beauty where you are.

 xx