It’s quite easy to write about what’s wrong in the world. The topic du jour (année?) is A.I. and its cousins, such as rage against The Machine, the dangers of the modern world, and how everything is going to hell. Even calmer versions of this, such as why it’s so hard to not be on a screen, or how to not focus so much on global news to the detriment of your mental health, still sit on a perspective that notices first and foremost what’s wrong. “The reason you feel bad is because things are bad” gets a lot of clicks and likes, a lot of comments, a lot of engagement. It’s easy to publish and it’s easy to respond to.

The pendulum swing is also rather easy to write about. Look at this cat video, here are ten ways babies are cute, this is why it’s beautiful to wear all linen, and wouldn’t it be lovely to live on ten acres and gather apples from your orchard every fall but in a way doesn’t involve the mud and muck of farming? —these are also click-magnet topics. It’s often a reaction to the above: everything is awful, so here’s a C.S. Lewis quote about how we’re made for another world paired with a photo of a young woman hanging her all-white sheets out on a clothesline surrounded by grassland and a toddler at her skirt. That toddler isn’t crying.

It’s much harder to focus on the in-between of all that, where most of us actually live and what’s based in actual reality. Because sure, A.I. is everywhere and messing up a lot of stuff, and yes, farmland is idyllic and I’m still keeping my eye out for free nearby land with a babbling brook that no one else miraculously wants, but the honest truth is that I live most of my life wiping down counters and listening to my kids’ “fun facts” about how much PSI it takes to crush a human skull and commentary on their shift bussing tables at the nearby diner. I bet you do too, in some iteration of your own. Reality, in reality, rests on a foundation of three-dimensional skin the game and not pixels; grocery lists and not bullet points about why [insert latest global catastrophe] must be protested; let’s ignore our actual lonely neighbors so we can focus on our global outrage.

Every couple years, since I’ve been actively writing online in 2007, I’ll write up a State of the Union about the space I’ve been given to publish. It helps me remember why I bother doing what I do, and it provides clarity to readers and listeners, new and old, what they can (and can’t) expect from me. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done one of those. So, this is that.

Welcome! Here we go.

My Personal Priority

Cutting to the chase: Right now and for a few more months, I have two kids left in my home. As of this fall, I’ll have one, when our middle guy starts his freshman year of college (which means he’ll be coming and going for the next few years, like his older sister recently did). My youngest will be starting his junior year of high school, which means I have two years left of him under my tutelage, both as his mother and his humanities teacher. Sure, I’ll always be his mom and I’ll always be given the solemn duty of imparting wisdom on all of my children. ...But I know from experience that it’s different once they’re adults, and my full-time influence will shift. This is good and by design, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a recurrent smack in the face at how these days of kids at home are insanely fleeting.

I have two years left with any of my children in my home full-time. Two. Years. 🤯 I remember continually reading that online trope of “we only have 18 summers with our kids; make the most of them!” and each time mild panic would set in, as though if I were checking email for thirty minutes instead of swimming with them in the nearby river I was doing something wrong. When I started my blog (from which many of you first read me), my oldest was two and my middle, who just graduated high school, was a four-week-old. I was literally nursing him when I held him with one hand and clicked ‘buy’ on a domain name with the other. It was a Sunday afternoon in our Turkish apartment, and the sun was angled from the living room window onto my laptop screen; my toddler was down for her nap.

I know from personal experience that there is nothing online that matters more than being fully present with my family. Nothing. For two more years, while my youngest lives at home, this remains my first priority. I know I won’t regret it, because I don’t regret one whit all the minutes and hours and days that added up to years from the past two decades that I prioritized focusing on my brood of kids in the midst of writing and publishing. I missed a fair amount of opportunities to “grow my platform,” I know, and I’m well aware of all the things I didn’t do to become more of an Influencer™ because I just didn’t have the bandwidth. No regrets in the slightest.1

But admittedly, I do have more time now than I did a decade ago, a few years ago, or even earlier this spring, when I was chock-full busy planning a wedding, navigating the college admission experience for a second time, and rewriting entire chapters of a book. These kinds of seasons ebb and flow, I know, and I know I’ll have them again soon (more book edits might land in my inbox any day now, and in a few months I’ll start teaching again). But on the whole, in comparison to my early days of growing a blog and podcast with a trio of kids under age five, I now have more time. Who knew that would ever happen?

My Work Priority

I had an ‘aha’ moment in 2018 on the first pilgrimage I led, and it continues to ring true: when it comes to my work-work, all I really want to do is write books and lead trips. It’s when I feel most alive, like I’m doing the work God’s given me to do, where I affect the most good, and what I reasonably see myself able to do for decades still. I also love teaching, and I do earn an income doing so, but I categorize that task, for the most part, more as community involvement than career growth. I’m open to teaching for a while after my kids are fully graduated, but it’s not something I definitively see myself doing indefinitely. Like homeschooling, it’s something I prayerfully consider each year before committing to more.

But writing books and leading trips? I see myself doing that until my mind and body will no longer let me. Who knows how long that will be, but for now, I have no plans to stop.2

This means that all my other work-ish things point to those two end goals, which includes this newsletter, The Commonplace, and its podcast, A Drink With a Friend. To put it bluntly: to those of you who read and listen to my words here, I hope you are convinced to eventually read my books and travel with me.

(If you just read that last sentence, this means I’m talking about you.)

This is my desire and ultimate goal with this newsletter. What, then, does it look like to “convince” you to eventually do those things? It looks like writing and talking about topics here that people who would also read my books and travel with me would resonate with. Those people are also largely Carries, but not always—yet as I’ve said for years, if you write for everybody you write for nobody, so I keep her in mind.

My Priority for You

...Which brings me to how I initially started my thoughts here in the opening paragraphs. Carrie can find plenty of other podcasts and newsletters on how the world is burning and what’s the unattainable ideal. With me, I want Carrie to find encouragement in the in-between. She needs readable and listenable reminders that, despite all the hard around her, she’s able to roll up her sleeves and do the hard work of living her ordinary life. She’s able to question the theology she’s always assumed was true and do the scary thing of changing streams, if needed, and co-leading her family to do the same. She’s able to make choices about how to best educate her kids. She’s able to host her neighbors for dinner and make time to really know them, because she’s also able to live her life offline and recognize that community is found in the real world, not in some Influencer’s™ social media account or newsletter comments. She’s able to save up her pennies so that she and her husband can join Kyle and me on a game-changing pilgrimage, should God allow. She’s able to participate in her local book club and teach her child cursive and make time for nightly drinks on the deck with her husband after all the kids are asleep. She’s able to read fiction for fun. And as I’ve long told my own kids and students, she’s able to embrace the truth, even when it’s hard, that she’s a beloved child of God who’s able to do hard things and trust in the goodness of Christ.

The words and conversations I publish here, and plan to publish in the future with even more narrowed concentration, hopefully help Carrie do just that. They’re essays and episodes that remind her to stay buoyed in hope and not despair, to love her ordinary life, and to dig deeply into the real world in which God has placed her. The words and conversations here do not, Lord-willing, trigger anger or malaise, distraction, or addiction to too much screen time. They give her hope that her ordinary life is good, that there is Truth that is knowable and findable, and that it is worth it to do the hard work of living in the flesh-and-bones world.

At the risk of cashing in on clichés and relying on quotes from other people (I’ll leave off any sharable graphics or stock photos of the back of someone on a hike), here are the three quotes I keep coming back to when I think about what I want The Commonplace to prioritize:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” -G.K. Chesterton

“Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” -Wendell Berry

In spite of all the facts, I want us to be joyful, to recognize just how extraordinary our ordinary lives are, and to take off our shoes when we truly see all of it.

I hate publicly committing to something because as soon as I do, I either change my mind or something out of my control comes up that makes the commitment less feasible, but it’s also good for me to do so. And it’s good for you, reading this, to read where all this is going. So consider the following as the overall plan for this newsletter that I’ve been trying to get at since my first sentence here.

Here’s what you’ll find at The Commonplace, now in its seventh year:

• Weekly 5 Quick Things (always free for everyone)—I’ve been doing these since before I migrated my newsletter to Substack, and have no plans to change them.

• Weekly or bi-monthly podcast episodes during the school year3 (still free for everyone)—I’ve been doing some form of podcasting since 2008 and in spite of all the changes, I still overall enjoy the medium. This fall, I’ll be returning to favorite book conversations, which are also reportedly your favorite, too. They’ll also include conversations on favorite places around the world, ranging from some famous monument on the other side of the globe to a beloved corner armchair.

• Monthly essays reminding us to be joyful though we’ve considered all the facts (free for everyone)—The foci will be on the Transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, which easily covers a huge range of topics. This includes thoughts on the natural world, art like books and films, travel, the goodness or raising a family, where truth is really found and why we can’t just make it up based on our whims or preferences, and occasional stream-of-consciousness observations about the joy of neighborhood third places or grilling meat on the back deck. Oh, and super occasional short stories.

• One more monthly essay that digs a little deeper into the above, perhaps with a bit more practicality or some personal experience (for paying subscribers).

• Bi-monthly conversations with you all about books we read and books we plan to read, as well as invitations to name our monthly gratitude lists (for paying subscribers)—these simple chats are some of the highlights of my month here.

• The ability to leave comments (for paying subscribers).

• First dibs on pilgrimage news and registration openings (for paying subscribers).

I plan to keep the annual newsletter fee for paying subs as low as Substack will allow me, which is currently $35. This is because I want to make it as accessible as possible, and because I know how many things are vying for your wallet these days.

For those of you who can, I’ll still encourage you to pay to keep the lights on around here, because it really does help and because we all vote with our dollars. If you want to see more focus on beauty, goodness, and truth on the internet and less despair and anger, then one way to help is paying the small subscription fee for The Commonplace. I’ll be honest: while free subscriptions have gone up around here this past year, paying subscriptions have gone down, for whatever reason (I have my theories). I have no doubt that some of this is due to inflation and the economy in general. But to be up front, this newsletter’s revenue has dropped substantially in the past year, and yet instead of despairing over this, I’m choosing hope that those of you who can help keep the lights on the newsletter and podcast, will. As of now, I plan to keep my current offerings ad-free, so long as I’m able.

As always, thank you for reading these words. I’ve long said that I have the best readers on the internet, and I still believe that to my bones. You all pick up what I’m laying down, and every reader and listener I’ve met in real life turn out to be the best, most hope-filled, ordinary (in all the right ways) people.

This summer I plan to make progress on my novel, make edits on my next non-fiction book (out next spring!), record conversations for this fall’s podcast season, and publish this newsletter when it’s good to do so (unlike most summers, when I typically take my annual much-needed break). I’m also leading a small group of us to Scotland on pilgrimage during the second half of July, which you still have time to register for! I’d love you to join us.

And as always, during the second half of the summer I’ll also start prepping for teaching next year’s classes, help organize our co-op, volunteer at my parish, have friends and family over for dinner, and weed the garden. I’ve got another kiddo to launch into university life, another one to launch into upperclassmen status as a high schooler, and yet another one to encourage in her early days as a wife. Life is good.

If the spirit moves, I’d love you to do two things next:

1. Take this short anonymous poll, and

2. Tell me in the comments here how you first found this newsletter (if you can remember!)—I’m opening up the comments for everyone.

…I’m so grateful to publish here. And that’s because of you, so thank you.

I was curious how I’d feel during the first week after my firstborn’s wedding, and the honest answer is: elated, overwhelmed, and very, very tired. I had no idea how tired I’d been, and by 2:00 pm most days I crawled into bed for a mandatory afternoon nap. Who am I? I almost never take naps. It was like my body had been holding on to so much emotion, administrative mental load, and spiritual recognition that what our family was embarking this spring was a Very Very Big Deal, that once the big event finally happened, my body responded by needing to charge like a device on one percent in need of an outlet.

That week’s exhaustion hit me how much I’d actually been holding on to for the past eighteen months: my daughter’s studying abroad and meeting of her guy, getting engaged, finishing her time in college, and hosting her wedding; writing my most important (to me) book to date (and then edits so big I basically rewrote the whole thing a second time); finishing my final year of homeschooling for my second-born, helping him navigate the college admissions process, keeping him on task with scholarship applications in order to afford his first-choice university, helping him finally get his driver’s license and first job (these things take a bit longer for him with his autistic challenges); plus still running our local co-op and teaching my class (focusing on a historic era I don’t teach often, so I had to create a lot of new lesson plans for books that needed dusting off). Plus carrying the weight of aging parents and their health issues, continuing on with our forever home renovation and managing the funds for said projects. Oh, and plus planning for and promoting this summer’s pilgrimage, spinning my many volunteering plates at our local parish, and all this along with the usual rigamarole of keeping our bills paid each month and dinner on the table night after night.

When I’m tempted to wonder why I’ve been so much quieter in my newsletter here this past year (which is not my preference), I simply need to step back and recognize all that God has asked me to carry the past year and a half—and then I’m not surprised in the least. Yes, writing is part of my job, and that includes this newsletter. But when real life beckons, hitting publish on words takes a backseat, even when they’re simmering to a near-boil on the back burner.

The honest truth is that most of the reason I haven’t been as prolific on here as I’ve been in the past is because my real, offline life is much sweeter, richer, and more fulfilling than any semblance of life online. I check Substack, and it doesn’t take me long to want to close out the app—it’s so painfully obvious how much ‘grasping’ is going on; people begging for relevance and reposts, staking their identity on being mentioned by others so they can justify all their time and brainspace spent on the platform. There are exceptions, of course; I want to write poetry all day, and I’m so buoyed by ’s recent expose into her heart and writing situation, as heartbreaking as it is. I want to muse on digital paper what it’s like to live in the Yorkshire Dales as much as he’s willing to give us, and I will stop whatever I’m doing whenever hits publish, as rare as that occasion is (a practice of hers, intentional or not, for which I applaud).

The best writers are the ones who do other things besides write. At minimum, this is because they have something to say. I remember back in 2018, when I was first asked to teach at my kids’ school, that my first concern was a wipeout of my time and focus on writing. Turns out dedicating part of my waking hours to class prep, teaching, and grading did nothing but make my writing sharper and my time-management more effective; this is because we need to be people with multi-dimensional, flesh-and-bone, dirt under the fingernail lives in order to be worth any pixels we publish. I don’t mind people earning a living off their writing; I do, too. But if they want to earn my hard-earned attention, they need to do more with their lives than think of their next essay topic and scroll feeds in order to know what to say next to please the algorithmic gods.

I have nothing to say about AI that hasn’t been said ad nauseam in every. single. essay I’ve been shown the past few weeks. I’d rather tell you about the sparrow that just landed on my table here next to my mint cold brew in a mason jar, its beak full of microscopic twigs, which I imagine it will bring to its nest-in-the-making in the tree behind me. I’d rather wonder why the morning light hits different this time of year, and I don’t mean ‘hits different’ in a soul way, I mean literally hits differently on the walls of my living room as the sun peeks its way into the neighborhood, orange and waking up the people who live within my four walls and tells our new rooster, who was not that long ago a pullet on its way to life as an egg-laying hen with the rest of his flock, to clear his throat and begin his pubescent crow. (Related: anybody need a rooster?)

I want to tell you about how one of my favorite baristas is due with her first baby in mid-September, which makes me wonder whether she’ll return to the coffee shop afterwards or if her days here are numbered (good for her, sad for me). I prefer to tell you about the delightful encounter Kyle and I just had a few hours ago, wherein we met a reader of mine who’s in town with her husband and who came to this coffee shop because she read me waxing poetic about it (I promise I do other things besides come to this coffee shop... but I do come here an awful lot). We parted ways and Kyle asked me to find out where she got her husband the t-shirt he was wearing, because it’s a little nod to Pearl Jam and we are part of that Oregon Trail, Star Wars, in-between Gen-X and Milennial generation that prides itself on generational homelessness. I also want to tell you how dadgum friendly our neighborhood is, and how half the time when I’m at this coffee shop I overhear conversations between fellow patrons either catching up like long-lost war buddies or meeting each other for the first time, sharing likeminded perspectives of their canine companions and concert tees and becoming fast friends.

And mostly right now, because it’s really all I’ve been thinking about the past two weeks, I want to tell you about what it’s like to now have a married daughter, and how strange it is to now be suddenly thrust into this stage of life. The two of us are as close as its possible to be in a healthy adult child-parent relationship (at least, I hope so, and is my now longstanding fervent hope and prayer), which means our closeness now looks different. She was already on her own in many ways, having gone to college a thousand miles away, studied abroad, and generally came equipped with an independent, can-do spirit that’s often the case for firstborn daughters (especially those who spent their earliest years as a third-culture kid). But I’ve still been her go-to person for her thoughts and reflections on life, and that person now needs to be her husband. This is good, and how it should be, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy and it doesn’t mean it’s a seamless transition. It’s an inner journey that, two years ago, I didn’t know I’d be taking right now, that’s for sure. It involves so much prayer that my knees are battle-bruised and I’m forced to bring to Jesus all my needs to remember whose I am and what’s my purpose in life, first and foremost.

As for the wedding itself—I never knew I could feel in my bones such unadulterated joy. Hokey and clichéd, I know, but it’s true. For days afterward I rode the ripples of joy from the all-too-quick plunk in the water of the Saturday afternoon wedding we’d been planning for months. The whole week after, my eyes would water without my permission at the remembrance of the tiniest moment from that day: getting to drive to the church, just my daughter, her dad, and me, as we were given the unexpected gift of relishing together in her last twenty minutes as a single woman. How she and I were whisked off to the quiet room off to the side of the narthex so her groom couldn’t see her, which meant two sweet minutes of just the two of us to quickly pray and then spy on who all was there in attendance.

The whole week after, I’d play my playlist that echoes a mix CD a friend of ours made us as a gift for our honeymoon, and a song would conjure up a memory from our own week post-wedding, smacking me in the face how quickly time really does fly.

One minute, and I’m begging my two-year-old, for the love of all that’s holy, to stop drawing on the walls of our Turkish apartment, and the next minute, I’m watching her walk down the aisle with her dad at her arm. I know all the pintucked alterations done on the dress she’s wearing, lovingly sewn by my mother, and I wonder if the shoes she’s wearing are pinching her toes. She’s holding the bouquet she made two days ago in our living room with her bridesmaids, who’ve all come from out of town to stand with her, and she’s wearing my own veil that she tweaked a month ago with a needle and thread while she sat on our couch and watched a movie. She and I traded necklace chains so hers could sit at a better spot on her décolletage, and it does indeed make her dress’ neckline pop, just like she hypothesized.

Behind me right now at the coffee shop as I write, a gaggle of little kids are collecting snails and making Very Serious Plans to build their snail village—it was two weeks ago when my own daughter, too, built Terabithias and Roxaboxens and critter compounds and stick forts with her siblings and new best friends from the playground. …But that can’t be, because actually two weeks ago, I watched her bond with girlfriends who span all different stages of her life, dance to Tom Petty with her dad, and I threw potpourri in her face as she ran off, smile plastered on her face while I wondered how very tired she must also be feeling since I was there with her all week, holding the hand of her new husband who then whisks her off in his four-door sedan painted with ‘Just Married’ on the back windshield. They drive off and I wave goodbye.

And then, Kyle and I rolled up our sleeves and cleaned up alongside all the friends and family who graciously stayed to help. I changed out of my handmade dress and back into shorts and t-shirt, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and gathered flowers, charcuterie trays from the bridal suite and groomsmen changing rooms, leftover curling irons and oxford button-downs, and the black-and-white framed photos on display for the ‘Love Stories Before Ours’ family wedding gallery. I pause again to look at my own, the one of my husband and me hugging in our white dress and tuxedo, very aware on this side of things of how in love we were and how, by all accounts, how very little we really did know each other. Isn’t that just the way? We stand before God and community to promise each other our fealty until death do us part, and what a step of faith that is. We have no idea what’s coming, all the stretch marks and bills and budget-friendly date nights in the living room after the kids are asleep and late-night bedroom chats about how the teens are doing, and how not knowing what’s all in store is probably for the best.

After we throw away what needs tossing and pack up what needs taking, the caravan of vehicles leave for where they need to go. Kyle and I leave last, and the required security officer and venue representative can finally leave. But Kyle pauses, makes a little turn, and heads back to the venue once the coast is clear. He parks, the two of us get out, and we head back to the meadow behind the old Tuscan house we just rented for its required twelve hours, now empty, and for which we still have twenty minutes left. He laces his fingers in mine, and we sit on a back limestone stoop, where minutes ago we watched our daughter and her husband have their first dance, and now we watch the orange sun paint the sky purple.

“We did it,” he says. I lean my head on his shoulder.

We sit in silence, playing back the joy of the day, of all the toasts and cheers and congratulations from friends. And I play back all the diaper changes, three a.m. nursing sessions, stroller walks, lunches made, middle school friend drama-fueled hugs, inconveniently-timed conversations about whether God really is good, and late-night waits in bed to hear the front door open as she comes home from a high school date.

“Yeah,” I reply, “...We did it.”

The two of us stand up, briefly twirl like we’re still dancing, kiss, and walk back to the car. Our twelve hours are now up. So are our two-plus decades. We are asked to move on, and so we do.

We drive home. The next morning, I make bacon and eggs for my daughter’s brothers, both still at home for at least a few more months.

The days are long but the years are short.

I first wrote the following essay in the second half of the website’s life, but like most of the topics I wrote about there, its idea had long been taking root in my mind for years, slowly growing from a seed to a spout to a full-bloom leafy plant. Five-plus years later, I’m relieved to say that not only do I still agree with my original ruminations, but I’m on the other side of my need as witness to how well God meets heartfelt desires like this.

As with all my essays I plan to republish, I’ve edited it for clarity (because I’m a better writer now, thank goodness) and content (because some of my ideas have deepened or even changed with earned wisdom, also thank goodness).

Enjoy.

The topic of friendship has been a common one around our house lately. We have several kids who’ve shared a desire for more—or for more like-minded—friends, and after taking off my mom hat when the kids are in bed, I pour myself a drink and confide the same thing to Kyle.

I, too, would like to have more like-minded friends. It’s a weird thing, to be a full-grown adult and confess that it’s hard to make friends. It conjures up playground emotions of vulnerability and awkwardness because it puts you in a position of need, which feels uncomfortable.

Being on the receiving end of years of emails and private messages from readers: a lot of us feel this way.

Some of you who’ve written me are in your teens and have confessed a desire to find friends who share a kindred-spirited value of people over things, quality over quantity, meaning over status.

Some of you are in your twenties, doing the career-building thing and feeling alone, or doing the young parent thing and likewise feeling alone, and overall feeling alone as you navigate some pretty big waters.

Some of you are in your thirties and forties, like me, realizing how isolating our roles can be, whether they be breadwinner or stay-at-home parent or something in-between, longing for more local support and camaraderie.

Some of you are older than me, walking ahead and confessing that it’s still hard as we get older to make friends.

Let’s just say it collectively: finding friends can be hard. But finding friends is also so very worth it.

Here’s what I’ve told my three children for years now1: partial solutions. It’s something my therapist in Thailand taught me years ago, it’s something I’ve also been writing about for years, and I say this phrase at least once a week at home.

Life is full of partial solutions—where there’s a way to get a need met, and it might not be the ideal way, but it’s a way that still works.

Partial solutions apply to almost every area of life, from decorating our home, to getting dressed in the morning, to carving out a career for ourselves, to making dinner, to electing a politician. We can’t do the absolute ideal thing, but we can do the good-enough. And of course this is the case with friendships, too.

When I espouse the idea of partial solutions to my kids, I’m telling this to myself, too, because it’s easy for me to build a wall in order to hold on too tightly to my ideals, because when it comes to friendship, I really would love to find more kindred spirits2, so I embrace my must-have list of qualities in a person in the name of holding on to my integrity.

I’d like my ideal friend to be uber-local to me (as in, lives in my neighborhood), an entrepreneurial breadwinner who gets the challenge of providing for her family both financially and maternally, a Christian—with the same theological convictions as me, please—and while we’re at it, it’d be great if she also currently lives in a fixer-upper renovation and deals with all those challenges therein. Oh, and a mom with kids the same ages as mine.

I’m unintentionally treating real human beings as caricatures of personhood instead of divinely-made souls walking through real life on earth, like me. Ridiculous, right? But when I’m feeling pouty and pitiful, I take a step back and realize that this is precisely what I’m doing: being ridiculous. (Another word for this is picky.)

Here’s what I’ve been telling my children, and therefore myself, too: Pray for and hope for close friendships. This is a good desire. But don’t be so idealistic that you’re blind to the opportunities for friendship right in front of you. The person in your life that you least expect might end up the answer to your prayer.

This looks like pursuing that person already in your life instead of waiting for someone who might not exist. It looks like looking out for who might need a friend more than you. It looks like taking the initiative to get together when you’d rather wait to be invited. It looks like keeping healthy boundaries when you feel particularly vulnerable about all this, not turning to social media for a facsimile of the real thing.

It looks like continually keeping your eyes peeled for someone who fits the bill, but it looks even more like keeping partial solutions at the forefront of your mind when you yearn for companionship. Maybe God’s already answering this prayer; you just need to recognize who it is He’s really bringing to you.

We can be each other’s kindred spirits in the most surprising ways; it doesn’t need to look how we think it should look. Very often, the path to finding a good kindred spirit is to simply reach out first to that one person you already have in mind. Ask her to coffee; ask him if he’d like to go on a walk during your lunch break. Go first and initiate, because even though it feels like you’re the only one who’d like a friend—you’re not.

Remember what the wise sage Winnie-the-Pooh once said: “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

Don’t ignore the friendship possibilities God has already put in your life in the name of waiting for that one perfect kindred spirit that may not exist. Embrace partial solutions, in this and in all of life this side of the veil.

Partial solutions is the best answer to the question of where and how to find deep, meaningful friendships.

A few years ago I wrote a practical guide to Lent, and as I sat down to write some Lenten thoughts this year, I realized I’d basically say the same thing again. So, I’m dusting off the following from my archives and tweaking it just a bit. I hope it’s encouraging and helpful! -t

Heads up, in case you weren’t aware: Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, February 18, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season on the Church calendar. There are a great many think pieces on this season out on the internet, and there’s no need for me to add to them. Yet Lent often sneaks up on us—before I had a book about Lent, I’d often find out it was almost Lent this week, or even on Ash Wednesday itself. …Perhaps this is you right now. If so, welcome!

I’ve found this long season in the liturgical calendar to be both deeply formative and practically challenging. There have been years when it’s been clear I need to receive the invitation of Lent to actively participate in the season—and there are years when it’s clear that Lent should be …humming as theme music in the background (usually when all of life feels Lenten). This year, you may be invited to more actively participate, or, you may be invited to quietly let the season have its way with you in a posture of receiving. Ultimately, Lent is just that: an invitation, and should be treated as such.

Lent is very old—one of the oldest-known traditions in the Church (we have documents referencing Lent from the second century)—which means it's a time-weathered tradition and practice in the Christian life. It means, practically, that Lent is an invitation for everyone.

Most people connect Lent to the act of fasting, and that’s true; it’s a literal season of penance. But to many modern minds, fasting is simply not eating food in some way: skipping a meal, eliminating a type of food (caffeine, sugar), or otherwise a more spiritual form of intermittent fasting. These are valid forms of fasting, but fasting is much broader than food, and fasting can mean more than eliminating something—it can also mean adding something.

BIf you want to participate in Lent for one of the first times but aren’t sure where to begin, it’s good to understand some foundational ideas:

1. Lent isn’t about doing some sort of personal quest. It’s not “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-Day Challenge,” as some journalists put it a few years ago. The point isn’t to better yourself by way of personal grit and effort.

2. You will screw up. In some ways, this is the point—not to watch yourself fail spectacularly and have an excuse to beat yourself up, but to have tangible evidence of your human finiteness. You can’t do hard things on your own, out of sheer effort. You need the grace of Christ to do hard things. To do anything. This long Lenten reminder is a gift of grace to us all.

“Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.”

-St. Catherine of Siena

3. Much of the Lenten season is about fighting your “noonday devil.” Acedia is one of our most universally felt and universally unspoken-of enemies in our modern era. It’s spiritual apathy, or as my favorite shorthand definition puts it: it’s a sadness that good things are hard. A few years ago on my podcast I unpacked the vice of sloth, so perhaps it’s helpful to listen to my short introduction to acedia, then listen to the next episode where I unpack with Dcn. Harrison Garlick the noonday devil and how to fight it.

4. Lent is a three-legged stool, with each leg representing the three traditional practices of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. They’re best done in tandem with each other: take one away, and you’ll have to use more of your human effort to not fall over on the wobbly stool. Practice all three in some way (even in a very small way), and it’s easier to rest all your weight on the seasonal purpose of penance.

Within this trifecta, Lent can involve eliminating something in your life—something you sense has a hold on you that shouldn’t—yet it can also involve adding something to your life—something you don’t yet do but sense could bring you to further unity with Christ.

“Lent is a time of grace, a time for conversion, a time to come home to God.”

-St. Maximilian Kolbe

If the overall purpose of Lent is penance, and if the purpose of penance is to shed attachments that keep us from being more of who we’re meant to be—a saint—then our ultimate goal when we participate in Lent is virtue. After all, a habit of virtue is the act of becoming more fully human in the original sense of it all (you know, pre-fall).

If the goal of Lent is a cultivation of our virtue by way of penance, and if there’s a trifecta tradition of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, each of which could involve either eliminating or adding something… That’s a lot to take in. No wonder Lent feels overwhelming and some of us just don’t bother at all.

Let’s get practical, then. If you’re like me, you can think of all sorts of ways in which you could cultivate more virtue in your life, yet you know this isn’t a personal “40-day challenge.” Lent is long, and we often take on too much at the beginning and burn out by week three. It’s good to start small.

First: Start with prayer. Any Lenten practice you take on should be led by God and not made up on a personal whim. God often uses our own inklings, practical circumstances, and wisdom from other people, so don’t write those off. In my experience, I typically discover what I should do for Lent in the quiet hours of contemplation; it’s often the thing that initially makes me think, “Oh no, not that thing!” Yes, that thing.

Next: Listen to my short episode on acedia. Get into the right mindset of what it means to battle our human tendency towards apathy during Lent.

Then: I find it helpful to break down all my options practically into lists, noticing what stands out to me. As per my Benedictine Rule of Life process, I think through the five habit practices of worship, work, study, hospitality, and renewal, continually keeping the end goal of Lent in mind: deeper union with Christ through the cultivation of virtue.

“The purpose of Lent is not to force on us a few formal obligations, but to soften our heart so that it may open itself to the realities of the spirit, to experience the hidden thirst for communion with God.”

-Pope St. John Paul II

Here are a few ideas. They tend to have a yin-yangness of taking away and adding something in tandem, but these pairs don’t have to be chosen together; this is simply a helpful way to think through penances.

Worship (what it is we love) 🙏

• Eliminate: sleeping in

• Add: a set time of morning prayer

• Eliminate: a show that we know isn’t great for us

• Add: a particular book1, podcast, or show that is

• Eliminate: one meal per day or week

• Add: taking the money you’d spend on that meal and giving it to charity

Work (how we participate in creation) 🔨

• Eliminate: sleeping in

• Add: using the morning hours to work on a side project you’ve wanted to do

• Eliminate: complaining about your job

• Add: writing your Rule of Life

• Eliminate: excess spending in a particular category (clothing, eating out, etc.)

• Add: anonymously doing one extra (not-loved) work task each week

Study (what it is we learn or think about) 📚

• Eliminate: scrolling social media

• Add: using that time to read a book or take a class

• Eliminate: watching a particular (not great) YouTube channel

• Add: watching a particular (better for you) YouTube channel

• Eliminate: endless “research” about a particular topic

• Add: implementing the knowledge gained from the research on that topic

Hospitality (how we love our neighbors) 🏘️

• Eliminate: one particular block of time in our week you tend to waste

• Add: using that time to serve your community in some way

• Eliminate: listening to podcasts on your long commute or daily walks

• Add: calling a friend to catch up with them on this long commute or daily walk (and then praying for them)

• Eliminate: excess items in your home (perhaps decluttering one item per day or one box per week)

• Add: inviting one family or friend over for dinner each week

Renewal (how we care for ourselves) 🚶

• Eliminate: excess food in some way (a meal, a category like sugar, caffeine, alcohol, etc.)

• Add: a simpler menu plan (the same breakfast or lunch, or the same weekly dinner plan throughout Lent)

• Eliminate: evening TV time

• Add: an evening walk

• Eliminate: a creature comfort (your pillow, warm showers, etc.)

• Add: cultivating a new hobby, or perhaps a house or community project

I’ve limited myself to sharing only three eliminations and three add-ons from each of these five categories to curtail the simple response many of us feel at the start of Lent: overwhelm. Remember, the point isn’t to do as much as possible, or to make it as hard as possible. The goal of Lent is union with Christ, so let him lead you to a specific form of participation. Consider your participation an act of worship.

If you can, go to an Ash Wednesday service tomorrow; they tend to be all over town at many hours of the day, and they’re open to everyone. It’s not required, of course, but there’s nothing quite like another finite human being smudging ashes on your body and reminding you that life is short and that you, too, will one day die. Remembering our mortality is the right way to begin a season of penance and renewal.

May we all have a rich, blessed start to our Lents this week! Lean on all the grace poured out for you. No white-knuckling here.

“Nothing, how little so ever it be, if it is suffered for God’s sake, can pass without merit in the sight of God.”

-Thomas a Kempis

I love where I live for so many reasons: our scrappy 90-year-old fixer-upper that will never be finished, our walkable neighborhood and its third places, the people around me who I’m honored to call neighbors, the fact that our family has lived here longer than anywhere else in our adult lives (we were quite nomadic the first half of our marriage, including overseas). There’s something good and right in finding real contentment with the soil you’ve been given to bury your roots.

As I unpack in my Rule of Life workshop, Benedictines take, among the other traditional religious vows, a vow of stability—a commitment to stay put where they’ve committed to serve, even when it’s difficult, or more common in our modern era now, even when life gets boring and ordinary. For those of us who haven’t taken formal vows, there’s still a lesson here: that there’s a quiet, settled wisdom in choosing to stay put somewhere for the long haul, no matter the drudgery of daily life.

For much of my early adulthood, I searched for novelty. I didn’t know this, really; I just thought I was made for adventure, cut from different cloth than my peers who prioritized jobs with benefits and buying a house before age thirty. This assumption served me well because it’s how I met Kyle on the mission field, where we both, out of our own volition, lived in war-torn Kosovo and opted for fields potentially riddled with mines over a neighborhood with lawns and cared-for playgrounds. We spent our first 12-ish years of marriage either living and serving overseas, preparing to do so, or recovering from doing so (along with a year-long stint living out of backpacks with our kids while we circumnavigated the world together).

But there was something in the pair of our bones that finally settled, when we admitted how much knowing and being known mattered, and that there really is adventure also to be found in growing backyard tomatoes, taking kids to tae kwon do and gymnastics practice, and joining local book clubs. As of this fall we’ve now lived in our run-down cottage for a decade, and we can’t imagine living anywhere else. There’s almost nowhere I’d rather be than in my thrifted green velvet chair with a view through the window of the sycamore in my front yard, watching the leaves come and go throughout the seasons as I sip my morning coffee. Turns out there’s a Baggins side in me after all.

But those Tookish bones in me are still strong, too, and it doesn’t take much for them to need a stretch in their joints to continue exploring the world’s nooks and crannies. Once we hung up our backpacks after our family’s year of travel, Kyle and I made a commitment to dust them off whenever we could. Even deeper, we committed to sharing that love for the world, helping others stretch their Tookish bones no matter how dormant they’ve been, and to show friends new and old the places that matter.

This is why I started leading pilgrimages, taking folks to places they’d otherwise not encounter. Because we live in a world with trees and languages and different recipes for bread, and because we’re made with ears and feet and skin and hair, we witness with our eyes that we are not just souls, and definitely not brains-on-sticks. We are body-soul composites, meant to nourish those souls with real-life touching and seeing and hearing. This God-given world, imperfect as it is, matters.

Travel allows us to encounter the world’s wide variety of people and places. Pilgrimages, a particular form of travel, allows us to encounter those people and places while hearing from God about why He wants us to encounter them. What’s the sacred stuff beneath what I’m seeing, tasting, and touching? What’s the sacred stuff in me? What does He want to tell me through this particular journey of mine? How am I called to return home a little different?

Because yes, God can talk to us anywhere, be it in the Costco checkout line or underneath the Sistine Chapel. Yet not all places are created equally, and there really is something sacred about standing where St. Patrick brought the Gospel to Celtic kings, where St. Peter’s bones are laid to rest, where St. Paul shared good news on Mars Hill, where medieval villagers built the world’s greatest cathedrals, or even where the Italians first gave us the gift of gelato and pasta. And to stand in those places with friends new and old, who can revel in good conversation over a drink in the pub later that night and wonder aloud about it all? That’s the gift of a pilgrimage. That’s how it’s been for me the past eight-ish years since I’ve started leading them. What a gift.

And what a gift to do it again this summer, this time on the sacred soil in the hallowed highlands of Scotland, home of William Wallace, log-throwing, tartan tribes, and the Fife Way. Where we’ll wander the thin-placed corners of the Isle of Skye and castles that hid priests brave enough to celebrate the Eucharist when death was on the line? To talk theology, sacramental worldviews, jobs and gardens and kids, and to laugh about our human frailty reflected in long bus rides and long walks around the Loch Ness in pub corners over glasses of Scotch? To be accompanied by my friend Fr. Gabe, who’ll bring us the Eucharist, Confession, blessings, and quite possibly an evening of karaoke with his impressive singing voice—and most definitely friendship, of which he has an abundance to share? That’s the gift of pilgrimage, too.

Young and old, singles and whole families, devoted Catholics or I-don’t-know-what-I-am-anymores, veteran pilgrims and first-time travelers… All are welcome. In fact, all together make the experience that much richer as we listen and learn from each other. What. a. gift.

If you sense that this pilgrimage has a spot with your name on it, I’d love, love, love you to join us this summer. It’ll be me, my husband, and my two boys on board, and on the travel list so far I recognize some beloved pilgrimage regulars (Hi Rick! Hi Claire!) as well as some new-to-me names. And I can’t wait to see you all.

Starting today and through Friday, February 20, my partnership company, Select, is offering you $100 off for a single when you use the code LOVETHIS or $250 for a duo with the code LOVETHIS2 to register for this summer’s pilgrimage of mine, Historic Highlands.

If you’ve been on the fence about signing up, this is obviously the best time to hop off that fence and truly commit! I’d love for you to take advantage of their generosity.

I genuinely believe that if God wants you to go on this pilgrimage, He will provide you with the means to do so. Perhaps this short-but-sweet deal is a possible sign for you? …I hope so.

There’s something delightful about the pairing of an informal vow of stability—to stay put in life’s ordinariness, with a posture of pilgrimage—to allow God to lead us out of our comfort zones and into the wilds of following Him to new places, even for just a week. After many years of wandering, this rhythm has found its place in my Tookish bones, and my Bilbo soul is eternally grateful for it.

My fervent desire is that we all learn to live more aware, daily, of the beauty, goodness, and truth that surrounds us everywhere—if only we have the eyes to see it. Those eyes can indeed be sharpened anywhere, be it in the carpool line or in the wilds of a hidden forest. Yet every now and then, we’re given an invitation to see God’s grandeur with fresh eyes in new-to-us places. I invite you to ask yourself: am I being asked to go on pilgrimage this summer?

If you are, I hope you’ll say yes. I’ll join you.

Learn more about Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

A little more:

• My recent thoughts on third places (via waxing poetic about my beloved neighborhood coffee shop)

• My thoughts after returning home from last summer’s pilgrimage down the Rhine River

• My thoughts a few years ago after returning home from our pilgrimage to Ireland

• My chat from a few years ago with Fr. Gabe (I’ve got another one with him coming soon!)

p.s. - To keep it easy for you, here it is again: Register for Historic Highlands, then get $100 for one with the code LOVETHIS; $250 for two with the code LOVETHIS2.

p.p.s. - Questions about the administrative stuff, like using the code for your registration? Kindly reach out to my friend Rebecca Stoker at rebecca@select-intl.com. Thanks!

This past Saturday, I woke up Kyle in my usual way.

“Psst…” I whisper, nudging him.

“Mmphm?” He mumbles, eyes still closed.

“It’s 7:08. Coffee’s open. Wanna go or sleep in a little?” Reader, know that the nights before, I always ask him if he wants me to do this, and he always, always says yes.

Brief silence. Then, “…Sleep. I’ll see you there.” He turns his back toward me. Reader, he also always answers with this. I don’t know why he wants me to still ask him, but I oblige.

I pick up my backpack—I’ve been up for two hours and have long been dressed for the morning—and head out the door at 7:10 a.m. I also arrive at 7:10 a.m. because we live that close. This is handy for our daughter who works here, and also for our dog, who is mostly fantastic at staying put in our yard, but if she ever wanders off, it’s to the coffee shop where she’s probably looking for us. Before she moved away, the former head barista used to send me a simple text: Ginny’s here again.

The air smells of the ice storm predicted on its way late tonight. Two days prior, I went on a long walk in shorts; this morning I’m in my down jacket and wool cap. This is winter in the Texas Hill Country.

I slug my backpack onto the second-best seat in the house (the best already claimed by what’s-his-name with a friend I don’t recognize; they’re already talking theology with a Bible in between them) and I order our usuals. The baristas know Kyle will claim his pre-ordered drink whenever he shows up, and I know they’ll deliver the breakfast tacos to our table whenever they show up from the taqueria down the road.

I enjoy two minutes with my book and then in walks Anne1, turtleneck poncho and oversized hunter hat, complete with ear flaps.

“Morning,” I say, “Walk here?”

“Pfft, girl,” she answers, “You know I didn’t.” She’s here almost every morning, bright and early, orders something small in a to-go cup, and often takes it with her on a morning walk. This time, though, she pushes two tables together. As she waits for friends, we chat about our husbands at home; hers already up with his preferred home brew and chair, mine on his way but honestly probably back to snoring. She then pulls out her phone and her thick reading glasses to check the forecast. Combined with her outfit, she looks like a benevolent spy doing a terrible job trying to hide.

It doesn’t take too long for her friends to arrive: Paul and Betty, a couple who’ve retired here from Chicago to be closer to their grandkids, Melissa, a quiet single woman I’ve never really talked to, and June, an older woman who recently moved to an apartment just across the river about a ten-minute walk away. She used to drive ten minutes. I doubt she moved solely for the convenience of the coffee shop, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she moved here for what that ten-minute walk represents.

She waves at me as she walks past. “Getting ready for the exciting weather?!” she asks me with a smile and eager clap.

Back to my book, I read a paragraph once, then twice, then on the third reread I admit I have no idea what the sentences say because I don’t have my earbuds in and can hear every conversation around me. I could put them in, but I don’t really want to. I’d rather hear the cacophony. I overhear Jason at the espresso machine say, “Good morning!” followed by a very British, “Good morning, everyone!” from the back. One of the owners, Katherine, has entered from the back employee door with her husband, Dan, who’s from New Zealand.

Two minutes later, Katherine sidles up to my table. “I’m so sorry we didn’t give you the family discount on your order this morning.” Originally from England, she’s lived here long enough to have a sort-of hybrid accent; definitely not transatlantic but still not straight-up purely Texan nor Brit.

“Oh! I didn’t even notice,” I reply honestly.

“I was lying in bed watching the transactions come in, wondering how business was doing and whether we should even be open right now, and I saw your name come through and it was full price.”

“Truly, it’s okay. It was our usual and I truly didn’t notice.”

“Kyle coming later?” I nod.

We proceed to chat about all the little heart-wrenching decisions she has to constantly make as a small business owner. “A few of the baristas were telling me how they depend on weekend morning shifts to make rent, and that if we close they might be short on cash,” she says with a wince. “But I can’t stand the thought of them getting in an accident on the way. I couldn’t live with myself.”

“If the roads are that bad, there wouldn’t be that many customers here anyway, right?”

“True,” she agrees, “Though you never know. The die-hards who walk here might be banging on the front door in desperation.” I grin and raise my eyebrows: guilty. “…Though we’ve sold an absolute ton of retail in the past twenty-four hours. I couldn’t believe how many bags of beans people bought. Seems everyone’s getting ready to hunker down.” I had my daughter buy us a bag yesterday.

Kyle comes in the front door, plaid shirt and bed-beard, and sees me still talking with Katherine so he walks to the counter to claim his coffee. By the time he sits down across from me, Alex and his wife Cora with their toddler Cece have claimed the table next to us. With Anne and her gaggle of friends at one end and us on the other, as well as the nice tech developer-guy (Steve? I want to say that’s his name) who always asks me how my son’s college applications are coming along sitting in-between, we are now a row of regulars, all in one conversation admitting that we are clearly here to prepare for cabin fever.

“It’s like we know we’re not going to be here for a few days,” Alex muses. We nod in agreement.

They live a ten-minute drive from here, on land, where they are renovating a 128-year-old farmhouse. We briefly exchange renovation woes; our latest is Kyle’s uncertainty on whether he can replace more siding in this upcoming storm; theirs on whether all their old pipes will freeze. Alex and Cora share their plan to keep their animals warm, and I make a mental note to nudge Kyle that we should do the same with our chickens.

“You have ducks? Get eggs?” Kyle asks Alex.

They laugh. “More than we need. Want some?”

“Yes, please!” I say too eagerly.

“We’ll put some on your porch swing sometime,” says Cora. “If you ever see them there, just know they’re from us.”

Kyle and I sip our coffee, inhale our tacos, and weave our conversations in and out of just us and then with other regulars. Kyle and I talk about our big kids for a few minutes, then we remark with Alex and Cora about the delights of toddlerhood as Cece greets one of her best friends, David, who’s just come in with his parents who also live a few blocks away. They hug and shriek like two-year-olds, then proceed to chase each other around the coffee shop. Katherine smiles at the scene from behind the cash register; she doesn’t seem to mind.

“Has Cece ever wandered into the employees-only area?” I ask Cora.

“Yep,” she laughs. I think of the many antics Tate has told me about the gaggle of children that comprise the regulars here: the two little girls who always incessantly knock on the back ordering door to talk to the employees (one time Tate exited the bathroom and one of them greeted her with a loud, “I didn’t know people who work here were allowed to go potty!”), the toddlers who play shop in the kid-sized coffee shop replica out back, the little girl in glasses and pigtails who comes in with her dad for routine dates, wherein she brings her purple plastic purse and dons Elsa heels.

There are times I want to be here because I want to get out of the house in order to focus on my work, yet there are times I hesitate, because while I go ostensibly to write, it is clear why I often don’t.

Then again, there are times to get work done and then there are times to close all screens and look at humans in the eye. The work will still be there.

///

It is now five days later, and though there’s still snow on the ground where the sun doesn’t hit, it’ll most likely melt by this afternoon. I’m back at the same corner table to finish up my thoughts here, and two other regulars are next to me. They saw me in line and saved this seat for me when it miraculously opened. One of my best friends is across the way having coffee with her church friend; she’ll probably come over here in a bit to say hello and sit for a spell. Anne and her usual lady group of five are huddled around a two-person table. The ordering line stretches across the shop and nearly out the door.

People are glad the coffee shop is back open.

We humans are made to live in-person, in the flesh, near each other, with plots of land we can see and comment on and ask about. It is a good-and-right thing that I know one of the women at the table next to me is a financial planner and the other one bakes the cookies for the coffee shop. There is a deep rumbling of satisfaction that I know the wandering cat out on the cafe’s porch that I’m watching right now is named Poppy and lives two blocks away from me. It is also good that I know that Anne’s husband is a firefighter, that Cora wants to ask me homeschooling questions sometime, and that Lucy the barista might be able to do Tate’s makeup for her wedding.

Another hour later, and Paul and Betty are now at the table next to me, sharing with me their ice storm experience. Chris, another work-from-home regular, has just walked in and has sidled over to my table neighbors to talk about his weekend’s hunting adventure. He got two does.

Also:

• A Drink With a Friend episode from the archives on third places

• An essay I wrote a few years ago on third places and homesteads

• My brief thoughts on how online “community” isn’t really community

• ’s recent piece on hosting more family dinners

• on building neighborhood communities and also on stoop coffee

• …And honestly, just search “community” or “neighborhood” on Substack and you’ll see how many people crave it, know their need for it, and are willing to roll up their sleeves and find creative ways to make it happen in their local spaces.

Ask these questions out loud with friends or family in between board games, use the printable version to cut out questions and draw them from a bowl, spend solo time journaling your own thoughts, or any other creative idea you come up with. Answer these over the next few days or weeks, or spend the next 24 hours in intense pursuit of your answers.

The only “rule” I have—if it’s even called a rule—is to spend time reflecting on this past year before moving on to brainstorming for the next year. It’s good to recognize the rewards and challenges from the previous twelve months before hacking out a plan for the next twelve.

Share these far and wide with whomever you think might enjoy these. I’ll be back in the new year… Enjoy the next few days!

New Year’s Eve Questions

1. What was the single best thing that happened this past year?

2. What was the single most challenging thing that happened?

3. What was an unexpected joy this past year?

4. What was an unexpected obstacle?

5. Pick three words to describe this past year.

6. Pick three words your spouse or a close friend would use to describe your year.

7. Pick three words your spouse or a close friend would use to describe their past year.

8. What were the best books you read this year?

9. With whom were your most valuable relationships?

10. What was your biggest personal change from January to December of this past year?

11. In what way(s) did you grow emotionally?

12. In what way(s) did you grow spiritually?

13. In what way(s) did you grow physically?

14. In what way(s) did you grow in your relationships with others?

15. What was the most enjoyable part of your work (both professionally and at home)?

16. What was the most challenging part of your work (both professionally and at home)?

17. What was your single biggest time waster in your life this past year?

18. What was the best way you used your time this past year?

19. What was the biggest thing you learned this past year?

20. Create a phrase or statement that describes this past year for you.

NYE Questions

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NYE Questions For Kids

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New Year’s Day Reflection Questions

Personal Growth

1. What character traits or virtues would you like to see developed in your life this year?

2. What accountability might you need to develop your personal growth?

3. What are some topics or skills you’d like to learn this year?

4. What books would you like to read this year?

5. Do you find fulfillment in your vocation? If so, name what you find fulfilling to remind yourself. If not, what might be some ways to find this fulfillment?

Physical Health

1. What is one way you’d like to maintain or improve your physical health?

2. Why is this important to you?

3. What are some tangible, daily choices you could make to improve your health?

Marriage & Family Life

1. What are some areas where your marriage is strong? What are some areas where you could use more strength in your marriage?

2. What is your plan for connecting regularly (i.e., date nights)? How will you handle childcare?

3. Do you have vacation time in mind for this year? What needs to happen to make a vacation a reality?

4. What are ways you’d like each of your children to grow? Consider the following areas:

   a. Physically:

   b. Emotionally:

   c. Relationally:

   d. Spiritually:

   e. Educationally:

   f. Other:

5. How will your children learn this year? What are some resources you’d like to explore to help your children develop intellectually and academically?

6. What are your children’s strengths? How will you help them develop them?

7. What are your children’s weaknesses? How will you help them engage with them?

Money Matters

1. How is your current income? Are you content with this amount?

2. How is your savings, both short-term (i.e., emergency fund) and long (i.e., investments)? Are you content with this amount?

3. How much debt do you have? Are there ways you can decrease it this year?

4. Are you giving regularly? If not, in what way can you give more this year?

5. What are some of your long-term financial goals?

6. What is one area where you’d like to strengthen your financial health this year?

Relationships Outside the Family

1. In what ways would you like to develop your relationships outside your immediate family?

2. What are some ways you can serve your community?

3. Who are some specific people in your life that could use some encouragement?

4. Who are some people in your life that you admire? What are some ways you could positively use their influence in your life?

5. Are there any damaging relationships in your life? Is there something you could do to make these relationships better?

NYD Questions

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“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each year find you a better man.” —Benjamin Franklin

Happy New Year,

-Tsh

Advent always sneaks up on us, doesn’t it? …It does for me, anyway, and I wrote a whole dang book on it.

Consider this your friendly neighborhood reminder that a new round of our liturgical calendar, always beginning with the first Sunday of Advent, starts this year on Sunday, November 30—that’s not this upcoming Sunday, but the one after (the Sunday right after American Thanksgiving). If you’re like me, these days you’re mostly thinking about what you’re bringing to your aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, not whether you’ve got all you need to begin Advent in your home.

Last year I wrote a short refresher on the 101s of Advent, and there’s no need to rehash those details again, so here it is, if you need that pep talk -slash- reminder that you don’t need to feel stressed about “doing” Advent right:

Shadow & Light 📖

Several years ago I wrote the Advent devotional I was looking for but couldn’t find: a family-friendly but not dumbed down, open-and-go (meaning, I was never “behind” if we missed a day), mercifully short daily reading. It includes Scripture reading, a few thoughts from me, a reflection question, a work of art, and a song each day. …Do what works for you from all that and leave the rest.

Playlist & Art 📻

The accompanying playlist and daily art is arguably the thing I hear most from long-time readers as their favorite part of Shadow & Light. I get it (and may or may not be already listening to the music; I’ll never tell).

Candles 🕯️

And finally, we like rolling our own beeswax candles1 around here, but there’s also these, these, and these. As for a “wreath,” we just take a log from our backyard and drill five one-inch holes for the candles, but there’s also this, this, and this.

In short: no need to complicate the matter.

It really is hard to believe it’s almost time for a new year, liturgically-speaking, yet here we are… If you’ve never recognized Advent in your personal or family devotions, perhaps give it a try this year, gently putting a toe in the water with just a few practices—say, music and candles, or reading a devotional and journaling your answers to reflection questions. The last thing you should be during this season is overwhelmed. Remember, Advent, like all the seasons of the liturgical calendar, is a gift, not a burden.

If you want that reminder throughout this season, I got you: it’s why I wrote my book in the first place.

Blessings,

Tsh

All the resources for Shadow & Light 🕯️

Every honest Christian wishes they had some amazing story to tell about how they found Jesus. It is those folks whose stories we elevate with Very Special Evenings to hear their testimony, from drug-addled homelessness to on-fire evangelist; from staunchly argumentative atheist to viral apologist. That is not my story. My story of coming to know Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior is a cookie-cutter copy of millions of Americans roughly my age, plus or minus fifty years.

I grew up in a loving Christian home, complete with nightly family dinners after ballet class and suburban summertime bike rides with drinks from the water hose at the side yard. Now, a “Christian home” isn’t to say my earliest memories are of Wednesday evening tent revivals or post-sermon potlucks in the fellowship hall; mine are mostly the ordinary playing-in-the-backyard, watching Saved by the Bell on Saturday mornings variety, but nonetheless, they were all infused with a base-level assumption that in our household, we go to church and we call ourselves Christians.

I never sensed we were unusual in any particular way. Perhaps this is the Moral Majority-era raised Southerner in me, but my early immature perspective on life assumed everyone around me hailed from a family and home life that went to church on Sundays and found swear words and beer offensive. It wasn’t until fourth grade, when I’d join friends after school in their homes, that I discovered parents whose album collections included hair bands—men in actual tights and makeup and insane hair—and parents who actually swore in front of their children as though they were in a PG-13 movie. Living rooms that allowed a TV parked on MTV debuting the latest Billy Idol.

My parents weren’t strict the way some of my Reformed evangelical counterparts’ were: we had cable TV and junk food, and my latchkey kid status meant mainlining The Brady Bunch, Growing Pains, and The Facts of Life reruns after school until my mom walked through the front door (my brother, five years my junior, preferred Thundercats, He-Man, and Transformers by the time I had any real memory of my own pop culture oeuvre). I was allowed a radio in my bedroom, so I knew of Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys and bragged as much out on the second-grade playground. I was jealous of friends whose parents, in the fourth grade, mind you, took them to see Prince and Bon Jovi live. My first concert wasn’t until the ripe old age of eleven in the sixth grade, when I saved up my own allowance money to see Debbie Gibson with my group of girlfriends, and yes, of course I wore a copy of her ubiquitous hat.

I conjure up these dated names only to timestamp my childhood, as well as to make clear that I did not grow up in a super-strict fundamentalist household. My mom routinely had to go on the defensive with certain extended family members as to why she allowed me to take dance classes that included, in addition to ballet, tap and jazz classes that performed on stage to the latest Top 40. We watched Ghostbusters on HBO and a few weeks later, my three-year-old brother mimicked an entirely inappropriate line from the film right in front of our grandparents.

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But I did want to dust off this essay I wrote last year for the parents of my local students, a shot-in-the-arm of encouragement as we begin a school year. Wherever you fall on the spectrum of ‘living according to an academic calendar’ (or lack thereof), perhaps it’s an encouragement to you, too.

Dear Parents,

I’ve learned that after nine years of teaching classes (and 15+ years of homeschooling my own kids), there’s nothing much better to do to prepare for another year of classes than working on your own interior disposition. I know a straightforward to-do list is usually easier than what I’m about to encourage you to pursue instead, but it’d be dishonest of me to pretend like the most important thing to do is buy the right color binder and use a label maker for the dividers therein.

Because you’ve signed up your student for a class with me, you’re putting your trust in what I have to offer—that is no small thing, because in my estimation, there is no more important subject in the adolescent years than the humanities. What we read leads to what we think about, how we think, and how we form our ideas, and these things ultimately shape who we become. I’m profoundly humbled and honored by your trust in me, and in exchange, I promise to do everything I can to invest my feeble offering into your family’s heart and mind. (Do I promise to never screw up? No. But I promise to do my best.)

However, what I have to offer does require a few things on your part — at least, if you want your student to get as much out of my classes as possible. I mean, consider my flagship class, just as an example: it meets in person for only an hour and a half every week, yet it provides, when done well, two and a half credits for your student’s high school transcript. That’s a lot of credit for a short amount of meeting time! This might seem borderline impossible, save for the truth that most classroom time in conventional school settings is a waste and that most conventional homework assignments are needless busy work. I’m entirely in the school of thought that laser-focused effort and a less-but-better approach to academic work equals a deeper, more satisfying, longer-lasting (dare I say permanent?) education.

So — on to your parental requirements for my classes, none of which fit on a handy to-do list. (Keep in mind that these are my requirements for myself, too, as a fellow parent in the trenches.)

1. Embrace real education.

Continually remind yourself both the definition and purpose of education. It is not career preparedness (though done well, the natural side effect of a good education is job readiness beyond that which is done in a model that focuses on career prep as its end). It is not intelligence (though done well, good education delivers highly intelligent citizens, since the etymology of the word ‘intelligent’ is ‘to read between the lines’ — that is, someone who understands things beyond what’s merely on the surface). It is not box-checking and hoop-jumping and pleasing the teacher in order to get on with the day (because, regardless whether we’re aware of the phenomenon, education happens 24/7, inside and outside a classroom, whether we want it to or not).

Here’s the correct definition: true education is the formation of loving the right things in the right way. I’d love to get into the details as to why (sources: Plato and St. Augustine), but to keep this from turning into a book, and to keep this helpful, simply remember that the goal of any education is to order our loves. We can wish it were otherwise, or we can write this off as hoity-toity or too lofty an ideal, but it doesn’t make it not true (because what’s true is simply what is; our belief or lack thereof doesn’t make it so). Bad education orders our loves poorly. Good education orders our loves rightly.

Therefore, the purpose of education is to rightly order our loves, and as parents, our divinely-appointed goal should be to provide what we can to help rightly order our children’s loves. This is my goal in all classes I teach: to invite the pursuit of an atmosphere, discipline, and life resting on a foundation of rightly-ordered loves. The happy by-product of this endeavor, Lord-willing, is a young adult who’s indeed ready for college or the job market or some other noble pursuit, able to better read between the lines as the world presents its ideas to them. That is to say: a responsible adult and engaged citizen of the world.

As we start this new school year together, please remember: real education is the formation of loving the right things the right way, and your goal as a parent should be to help this happen for your child.

2. Embrace reading.

Do not underestimate the value of reading. All the current statistics show that fewer and fewer people are reading, especially those in our kids’ generation. Attention spans are growing shorter and language fluency is dropping annually, to the point where more and more schools are no longer even assigning full books. This means that one of the greatest—and simplest—gifts you can provide your student is books: full-length, unabridged, old and new, easy and challenging, honest-to-goodness books. In some ways, this is a sad commentary on our culture: we can change the trajectory of our kids’ lives simply by having them read more than Instagram or TikTok captions. But in other ways, this should remind us of how we so often make things more complicated than they need to be, and that we humans really are innately hardwired to learn. We’re also hardwired for stories and have been telling them since literal recorded history.

I’ll spare you all the statistics floating around out there, even though they’re compelling, because I want to emphasize the heart of the matter: the best thing you can do to help your student do well in my classes is provide the time, atmosphere, and family culture of reading. This doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s simpler than you might guess (not easy, necessarily, but simple). There’s quite a bit of reading in my classes, and this is intentional. This is practically because we cover a lot in a short amount of class time, and reading is the primary vehicle for ingesting all the information, but idealistically, this is also because it’s imperative we help build stronger attention spans for Gen-Z. In fact, it’s been said that those in our kids’ generation who can simply read a book will become the stand-apart leaders.

Here’s how to help do this:

• Create a home environment that values reading. Slowly build a home library and keep books in your home’s shared spaces.

• Have family reading nights. It doesn’t need to be every night, but instead of defaulting to nightly gatherings around the television, declare a weekly reading night—everyone can bring a book of their own choosing to the living room for some shared quiet reading (a good way to do their class reading assignments!), or do a shared read-aloud. No one is ever too old for story time (even you).

• Let your kids see you reading. In fact, I encourage you to read what I assign your kids to read!

• Talk about what you’re reading over the dinner table. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Simply take turns sharing what you’re reading and what you’re learning from it. It’ll feel awkward at first if it’s new, but it’ll become more natural with time.

• Put away the screens. They’re the primary competitors to the act of reading, and they’re intentionally addictive. Designate a parking spot at home for all screens and turn them off at least one hour a day.

Will you do all this perfectly? No. I still look at my phone more than I like, and have a feeling it’ll be a lifelong battle as long as I live in this culture. But don’t succumb to the limiting belief of “I’m just not a reader” or “my kid just isn’t a reader.” In our culture, cultivating a habit of reading isn’t a nicety—it’s essential.

(By the way: audiobooks count! That’s just reading with your ears vs. your eyes.)

3. Embrace writing.

Do not underestimate the value of writing. Now, I know not everyone loves to write. I’m a writer by trade, but all three of my children run the spectrum of writing skill and desire, so I don’t say this to pretend like our collective goal is to produce children who become authors. The simple reason that writing is so essential is that writing is communication, and a well-educated person loves the truth. But in order to communicate truth, whether that’s in story form or in a conversation at the coffee shop, we need to communicate well. Writing is the primary conduit for learning to communicate well. (If you’ve ever experienced the phenomenon of not knowing what you think about something until you start writing, this is why.)

In a world ever-more saturated by AI, shortcuts abound to bypass the human need to write. Soon, human beings will default to letting robots do the work of writing speeches, to-do lists, or fan mail unless we intentionally do the hard work of learning to write well.

Just like it’s good for children to learn math even though (thanks to smartphones) they could ostensibly always carry around a calculator, it’s good for children to learn how to write even though (thanks to smartphones) they could soon ostensibly always carry around an AI tool that will do the work for them. Why? Because we need to be people that have done the work of learning how to do these hard tasks. Like a workout, we need to do tasks that form stronger minds that lead us into deeper maturity and formation. We need our children to learn how to communicate so that they become the culture’s truth-tellers. The act of writing helps us love telling the truth. If you like: we need our kids to write well so that the robots don’t win.

When (not if) your student complains about writing, don’t fret, commiserate, or push back. Just acknowledge that it is, indeed, hard, remind them that writing is simply communication, and still have them write a little every day. I assign Charlotte Mason-style writing, which is to say I mostly assign frequent, short, writing usually by way of narration. The more they write, the easier it’ll get.

4. Embrace the long game.

Remember that you’re playing the long game. This year may very well be a detox year for your family, which might mean the entire purpose of this school year for your students might be simply for them to not hate learning. Previous school years might have been rough—either too needlessly rigorous and full of busy work, or too painfully easy and also full of busy work, or simply taught with a different definition of and objective for education altogether. Unlearning old beliefs, habits, or attitudes may be just as essential as learning new ones this year, and it’s okay by me if this is the bulk of what happens.

I tend to have the same students over multiple years because my class topics rotate, which means I get to see these young men and women slowly grow and mature. I’ve had a student who could barely write and hated to read in freshman year; by senior year he was writing twenty-page stories and reading Dostoevsky for fun (and going on to an honors program at his university of choice). This trajectory isn’t a guarantee, of course, but it’s an anecdotal observation to remind us parents the thing we so often forget: parenting means playing the long game. Keep your expectations reasonable, remember your ultimate goal for their education (see number one), and embrace the reality that this year—especially if homeschooling is new for your family—might look more like shedding old beliefs than taking on new ones.

5. Embrace your role as primary educator.

Finally, embrace the truth that you, the parent, are in charge of your student’s education (and always have been). We humans learn 24/7, we’re meant to be raised in families, and we’re slow-growing mammals that take almost two decades to mature. Parents are divinely-appointed stewards of their children, and “training up a child in the way he should go” during these years is our primary mandate.

Yes, this means that even though I’m technically your student’s humanities teacher, you’re still in charge of this part of their education—you’ve simply outsourced their learning in this subject matter to tutelage under my mentorship. The potentially “bad” news here is that the responsibility falls on you: you need to create a home atmosphere, discipline, and life that fosters true education. Attending my class won’t magically make your child love reading and writing if they’re not being fertilized in good soil at home.

The very good news here is that the privilege falls on you, too: you get to create a home atmosphere, discipline, and life that fosters true education. Welcome to arguably the best reason to homeschool! Your child gets to learn without the constraints of long days tethered to an uncomfortable desk, under the weight of needless administrative classroom management, and staying up way too late night after night doing busywork disguised as homework. You get the privilege of providing your children the environment in which they can grow in the most natural way possible, the way we were each made to learn. You get the privilege of surrounding them with great books, beautiful art, good conversation, as well as a truly scholé approach to learning1. What a gift! And with a delightful bonus: you get to join in on this with them.

If I were to contradict how I started all this by giving you a simple to-do list as you prepare for this school year, it’d be this:

1. Write out the definition and purpose of true education, then put it somewhere prominently where you’ll be reminded of it daily (helpful for those days when you’re tempted to chase after that yellow school bus when it ambles by).

2. Take a few steps toward making your household one that loves reading: add some bookshelves in the living room, remove tech devices and screens from the bedroom, designate a weekly family reading night, or begin a read-aloud. Go easy at first (and go easy on yourself), especially if it feels awkward.

3. Begin reading something assigned to your student so that you can chat with them about it once they begin.

4. Talk as a family about any of the five points I’ve mentioned above. Ask your students if they agree or disagree with any of them. Ask them to back up their responses with reasons.

5. Pray, rest up, enjoy these last few days of summer, and take a deep breath: because you already care a great deal about your child’s education enough to take the road less traveled, chances are slim you’ll radically screw them up. God’s given you your specific children specifically to you for a reason. Trust in God’s sovereignty over all details, big or little.

Be encouraged! We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. I look forward to rolling up my sleeves alongside you this year and doing the hard work of pouring into our students so that, Lord-wiling, they grow more in virtue and better order their loves through the magic of good books. May it be true for us all.

In the trenches with you,

Tsh

I’m hitting publish on this casserole of thoughts after a bit more than six weeks offline, but really, in practice it's more like a mental break from thinking about anything of substance related to my online work since late May, when my menfolk and I boarded our flight to Amsterdam to lead this summer’s pilgrimage.

What a summer it’s been! One for the Oxenbooks.

First of all…

To get to the meat of it: My oldest, Tatum, is officially engaged! 💍

You know, the little girl who was two years old when I started writing online from my apartment’s dining room table in Turkey. That little blonde thing? She's ENGAGED to the young man she's longed for since childhood and never knew it (and the young man for whom I've prayed for decades).

I remember her as a four-year-old regaling me with her wedding plans as I cleaned, she creating a bouquet of flowers out of scrap paper and fabric to hold as she walked down the imaginary aisle of our Turkish high-rise’s galley kitchen, white t-shirt on her head as veil. That little girl — she’s engaged.

I’ll share more over the coming months with Tate's permission, but I’ll at least regale you with this... I was in the toilet paper aisle of the grocery store when I answered her call and she first told me, breathlessly, that she thinks she met the man she’d one day marry. They’d just spent hours upon hours walking all over Rome, talking about any and everything, after having met1 under the Sistine Chapel. Yes, that Sistine Chapel. 🙄

His name? Brian. So yes: I got a call from my daughter that sounded more-or-less like, “I met a man in Rome, and he's wonderful, and brilliant, and we're getting maaaarried.” ...And then later, “What's the name of this genius?” “Brian.”2 🤯

Our clan has since spent considerable time with Brian, both at home and while traveling, and he already feels like family. We just love the guy and couldn't be happier for them both! More reflections to come on how ridiculously upside-down and whirlwindy I feel about this course of events as a mother of a young woman I'm honored to also count as a dear friend.

Secondly…

I’m also thrilled to finally announce next summer’s pilgrimage: Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Every time I poll you guys asking for your top places, Scotland tops the list as first, so I have a feeling this trip will fill up fast.

If you’re remotely interested, go ahead and make your deposit now. This trip will be intentionally smaller than my previous two pilgrimages, so don’t delay!

A pilgrimage to Scotland is an invitation to let Jesus meet you in a surprising way through its mystic islands, rocky landscapes, historic stories, and rugged way of life, reflecting over all this with like-minded pilgrims over sips of local whiskey. It’ll change your perspective on… well hopefully, everything.

Head here to learn more 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Thig còmhla rinn air turas!

And finally…

This summer I formally signed a contract with my publisher — it’s the book I’ve been working on for months now, so this is less Brand New Information and more Now the World Knows. But it’s official! 🍾

I’m stoked to work with Image Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House — here’s a screenshot of their formal industry announcement:

The title is a working one; we’re not settled on it. In fact, it needs something else, something less Aquinas and more …well, not Aquinas. Something normal person and approachable. I may poll you down the road for your ideas.

Coming to your bookshelves, Lord-willing, in fall 2026!

///

…And now that I’ve made my three big summer announcements: here’s a fragment of my latest reflection, written a few days ago and fresh off my relished screen sabbath.

Five Re-Learned Lessons from This Summer

Currently ridiculously tired at 8 a.m. after having crashed into bed at nearly 3, running on roughly fifteen hours of sleep total from the previous three days of journeying 2,000 miles home, this morning (as everyone else in the household blessed with the ability to sleep in, in fact, sleeps in) I’m reflecting on a few random thoughts about my six weeks offline.

1. I am always, always surprised at how much better I can concentrate after a brief respite from the internet. I can read with much less distraction. I can read harder things (books — what a concept!). I can look out the passenger window at the farmland and windmills passing by, and just be with my thoughts. A brief look into something online feels loud, frenetic, fake.

2. I don’t miss staying in the know. I'll hear rumors of Trump saying this or that, something-something Sydney Sweeney jeans, whatever latest take is about or from the current online Catholic influencer, and my general response is — so what? Who cares? I've got coffee to sip, a dog to scritch, and a sunrise to witness.

3. I pay better attention to the people in front of me. I hear Kyle’s full declaration of the birds around us — oystercatcher, caracara, nuthatch — and while I don’t know the particulars about his observations3, I actually hear him making them. My son’s dad joke, my daughter’s twinkle in her eye as she shows me her engagement ring for the 485th time in one week, my future son-in-law’s unabashed consumption of a fourth cinnamon roll... The point is I notice these things without trying.

4. I better gauge the weight of things, particularly online contributions to the real world. A quick example is my ever-evaluative stance I take each summer on the purpose of my long-running podcast: I enter June with a wonder of why I still do it, what is its objective, who is its primary audience; I end the summer with, who cares? Just do it if I want to. It’s only a podcast. It's ephemeral. ...This, plus a hundred other small things in life that are better-ordered after my brief internet respite.

5. I look forward to enjoying truly lovely things found online. So-and-so’s Substack newsletter, this person’s art, that one actually-funny video …those things add enjoyment to the time I do spend online, and I’m grateful for them because they make the place not an entire dumpster fire.

Related to point number 4, above, is my tendency every break to over-evaluate my game plan with certain pieces of my work — notably and meta-bly, the newsletter you’re reading right now. At the end of this break, though, I feel a lighter, freer laissez-faire approach to The Commonplace. ...Not a “who cares?” necessarily but a “do whatever I need to do with it” tactic. Let the newsletter serve the purpose it has long held, and let the readers who need it come however they do: Notes and reflections, from a Catholic convert in the stage of parenting adolescents and young adults, on the beauty, goodness, and truth always out there for those who choose to see.

I hope to be more forthright this next year: more Catholic (whatever that means), less hesitant to express what’s stuck in my brain before I dislodge it via writing, free from any apology for not being such-and-such a way (or for being such-and-such a way).

In practice, for the next few months this may look like a more sporadic newsletter than I’d prefer, due to this not only being my typical busy season as I start a new school year at a co-op I run and with classes I teach, but also with a book deadline looming October 1 🤯 and a daughter's wedding to help plan (again: what? 🤯🤯).

C’est la vie... After 18 years of publishing online, I know the only way to not burn out is to let the creating serve my real life, and not let the creation become my monster.

I want to write a really good book for you, so the bulk of my good words will be channeled there for the next few months. I’m only given so many in a day, and if I use them up in newsletter essays, I’m afraid my book chapters, which last much longer and are much more important to my overall oeuvre, will be left with dregs.

Which is a long-winded way to say I may not publish as much as I’d like for the next 8-ish weeks, but per my statement above: no apologies. It is what it is, and I’m grateful for the work I get to do.

That said, a few ideas of what I'd like to share with you this next school year: some thoughts on why it matters that we read classics as adults with busy schedules, why the Catholic Church is indeed the one given to us by Christ (warts and all) and what a gift and inheritance she is to every one of us, what it feels like to marry off your firstborn even though you feel like you yourself barely married not that long ago, how to cook a damn good steak, why people should still just get off Instagram and TikTok already, why we should heed more wisdom from classic books and less from online influencers, and why I still wish more of us women would let our natural gray hair shine.

I guess in other words, more of what I've already been saying for years. Again with the no apologies.

As much as part of me still wishes my upcoming days included more mornings on the back deck of our Oregon guesthouse and floating down the clear, chilly Deschutes River: I’m glad to be back. I’m glad to have this corner of the internet to share with you. I’m honored you’d read my words, as curmudgeonly as they may come across sometimes (I promise I’m almost always happy when I write). I’m grateful for the grace of the Holy Spirit to animate my life in spite of myself.

Even though there’s still a few weeks left of summer, I hope you’ve been able to look back on the past two-ish months and have seen a few bright spots here and there. I know I have, and I’m so joyful because of them. Yes, it’s hot as hades out there, but I just love summer’s rhythm of life. May we all take what we can from it and embed it into our school years, too.

Here’s to more lazy days on the river with a drink in hand, even the metaphorical kind. ...Because metaphorical lazy days are all I have left on my calendar right now. And that’s perfectly okay.

Peace,

Tsh

Dusting off the keyboard, pulling the cord on the dangling light bulb in my brain, reminding myself how to log on to Substack…

Hello! I’m back from my summer screen sabbath. And what a summer it’s been! I’ll share details, both professional and personal, in a few days when I write to everyone, but I first wanted to greet you fine folks, you paying subscribers of The Commonplace who make my work possible. I’m so grateful for you. 💛

As always, the summer has absolutely whooshed by. Every year I begin these seasonal sabbaths with an assumption I will get So Very Much Done, and every year I return from my break with a humble awareness that I needed a break far more than I realized, I didn’t get as much done as I assumed I would, and yet there is very little to do but shrug my shoulders, say “life goes on,” and re-enter the delightful fray with the renewed perspective that is my valuable prize.

Did I get book-writing done? Yes, absolutely. As much as I needed or wanted? Not by a long shot. Did I enjoy some precious family time? Yes, for which I’m beyond grateful. Did I have all the deep conversations I hoped I’d have with each of my kids, one-on-one? Of course not. Did I finish some house projects? One or two. Did I cross off that list entirely? Hah!

Such is life.

It’s the dog days of summer around here, hot and humid, wherein we praise the high heavens for swimming and the modern marvel of air conditioning. Heat or no heat, though, summer remains a beloved season of mine in spite of the weather, not because of it. I love summer because of its rhythms. As a teacher and co-op leader, I so appreciate the break from my brain being constantly on in school mode. As a mom of olders, I relish in letting my kids’ giant bodies get the sleep they need and the brief respite from me harping on their schoolwork.

And the trope remains true: we have 18 (ish1) summers with them. It goes by so fast, and I know crossing off my to-do list pales in comparison to quality time with them. My youngest has only three years until he graduates high school, and I know from experience with my olders that when it’s over it’ll have felt like nothing. I genuinely don’t feel old enough to be a near-empty nester, yet here we are. 👵

The sheer volume on my plate this week is laughable, and I need to make some headway on it, so this brief hello is short. You’ll get a longer update from me in a few days, so keep your eye out for it in your inbox — yet I wanted to leave you with two things…

Read more

There are so many essays and notes on Substack about going analog, ditching the smartphone, loving your offline life, and most tiresome to me—why Substack is “so different” than the rest of the internet and is therefore The Place to Be because it’s for people who believe all the above—that I hesitate to write yet another piece explaining why I love my annual screen sabbaths so much.

You’ve already read my words about these breaks. I’ve had multiple discussions on podcasts about why I depend on these hiatuses (hiati? Ooh, good new word). I don’t need to belabor the points yet again. So I won’t. Not really, anyway.

Before I bid you a fond farewell (for a mere six weeks this time), I’ll leave you with a benefit to screen breaks that I don’t think I’ve explained much in writing yet. To set the stage, I’ll quickly remind you (and me) of the general parameters of a good screen sabbath—or, at least how I do mine:

• No social media—including Substack Notes (I swear, people wax poetic on there how it’s so very different from Instagram or X, and while yes, generally the conversation is more pleasant, I promise you its still built on the same addictive rubric and still delivers the same facade of connection without real, in-person community </rant>).

• No internet scrolling in general (except for book-writing research in my case this summer—which will indeed require some hard parameters). This means no YouTube, Pinterest, Wikipedia, or what-have-you rabbit holes that serve no purpose other than blatant curiosity (in the worst sense of that word).

• No screens as downtime, within reason. Meaning, the good-ol’ standard family movie night on the bigger screen is perfectly legit, but not streaming a Home Town rerun on my laptop as I fold laundry.

• These breaks last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, with every seven years an entire summer (like my break last year). The length depends on my mental health, family calendar, and current personal take on the internet. I always regret it whenever I choose to make my breaks three weeks or shorter; I never regret several months or longer. Interesting.

• ...And since I'm book writing this summer, ‘screen sabbath’ is a bit of a misnomer, since I’m really talking about the internet more than a literal screen. Hey, I’m no Wendell Berry (though I am typing this first on my Remarkable tablet1, as I tend to do more and more with writing projects—such as my current book project). “Screen sabbath” just has an alliterative quality to it, you know?

These ingredients comport my annual Summer Screen Sabbath, in a nutshell. With that in mind, here’s a quick unpacking of the benefit I’m eluding to.

Circles of Concern, Influence, and Control

This is an idea featured in Stephen Covey’s famous The 7 Habits of Highly-Effective People.

The Circle of Concern includes things we care about and can become easily influenced by, such as global news, larger community events, and people in our lives with whom we interact at an either superficial or distant level.

The Circle of Influence includes things we can directly impact through our actions and attitudes: think the activities and relationships with members of our household, the lives of our closer friends, people who directly benefit from our work, and the like.

The Circle of Control includes exclusively—well, things we can control. Which is surprisingly little. But this includes our own responses to things in the two other circles, our personal choices and actions, and generally how we think.

For optimal health, we should prioritize first our inner Circle of Control, followed by our Circle of Influence, and finally our Circle of Concern. But investing too much time online tempts to flip this: to prioritize the Circle of Concern, followed by Influence, then Control at the very bottom of the list.

For most of human history, people in, say, Ireland didn’t have one iota of a clue about any current political upheaval in Japan. We didn’t have any access to the opinions or thought processes of someone who lived 10,000 miles away from us. Heck, we barely knew the daily news from the next village over.

Now, the internet affords us the “luxury” of knowing what John Doe said about the such-and-such thing some so-and-so politician said in another country, instantaneously and off the cuff. Interesting, perhaps, but does his thought really affect my personal life? No. Or, at least it shouldn’t.

Likewise, the internet tempts us to believe that our Circle of Influence, the second circle, must include people who only know us through the internet, and therefore we place an unhealthy weight on the things we say and do online to the detriment of our immediate offline surroundings. We (and I include myself here) are tempted to place too much value on something we say online and not enough value on paying full and total attention to our friend across the table from us at the coffee shop.

And with this in mind, because we’ve invested far too much emotional energy on our Circles of Concern and Influence, we have mere breadcrumbs left to feed our Circle of Control, where we should actually invest our best efforts: our interior life, what we consume, how we care for our bodies, and the like.

All this to say: By the time I wind down an annual screen sabbath and return to engaging on the internet, my circles have usually been reset to a right order. Or, at least toward a much more rightly-ordered system. You might even say rightly-ordered loves, a la St. Augustine. Virtue.

I desperately need this screen sabbath because it reminds me what’s mine to control, what’s most important that I influence, and what to do with what concerns me most. There’s a good and healthy order to these things, and I’m too easily swayed by what’s out there to get it out of order. I want to live a life of virtue.

If you find yourself even remotely head-nodding to any of this in solidarity, I encourage you to schedule some version of a screen sabbath soon. It doesn’t have to look like mine; I get that many people aren’t self-employed and can’t set parameters as freely as I can—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still be the boss of you. (This was an interesting recent comment from Lacey, a reader who works a screen-based job yet finds a way to practice regular screen sabbaths.)

Make a list of what you can let go of temporarily, and test out the waters of actually letting it go, even for a short while. You might be genuinely surprised at the benefits, as well as how much less you thought you “needed” to keep yourself in the fray of whatever-that-is.

I promise you, it’s worth it.

With this, I’m briefly closing out the internet and will return in mid-August. I’ll have shortened summer versions of 5 Quick Things sent to your mailbox as usual on Fridays, but otherwise you won’t hear from me for about six weeks. As I experience every single year: you'll barely miss me and won’t care one whit that I’m temporarily gone, and the readers I care about most (the ones who understand the benefits of a screen break) will be there to welcome me back when I return. There’s very little to lose and so much to gain.

I’m grateful for you reading this! Grateful to have work I can control like this, grateful to weave words together as my job, and grateful that you’ve found what I have to say even a smidge interesting. Almost twenty years into writing online, and I still pinch myself that I get to do this.

Many, many blessings on your summer—I’ll see you soon,

-Tsh

How do you summarize two weeks trekking from Amsterdam, Netherlands down to Lucerne, Switzerland, much of it in a river boat, with your husband, your priest (newly-appointed to your parish, the news dropping as you depart the Dutch port alongside him, as a matter of fact!), two of your kids, and sixty-plus new friends? ...You don’t. That's not a thing you summarize; that’s a thing you feebly attempt to highlight with snippets of a few stumbling sentences and a lot of visuals, trusting that those reading who couldn’t join us might gain a mere sliver of delight at what was.

I don’t know if this means anything, but Kyle and I both admit that, compared to other pilgrimages in years past, this one has left us considerably challenged in the be-all-present department since we’ve been back. I have found myself spacing out on the freeway, reliving a laid-back impromptu picnic along the shores of Lake Lucerne with a Pimm’s cup in hand. I’ll wake up thinking about a late-night conversation on the rooftop deck of the boat with the newlyweds, a lovely young man and woman who graced us with their delightful presence mere days after their Florida wedding. (That’s right: this pilgrimage was their honeymoon.)

Two days ago my sons will have gotten a bonafide, typed-on-paper letter in the actual mailbox from a fellow teenage pilgrim, full of good wishes and quickly-deployed reminiscings from a mere ten days ago. It’ll remind me of watching them all wade together into the chilly Swiss lake, daring the swans to come at them and their cups of gelato.

I’ll then watch my sons serve at the altar at our beloved home parish, surrounded by friends, and my mind will wander to watching them serve at the altar in the crypt of Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg, or mere feet from the remains of St. Hildegard von Bingen, or in one of the many chapels at the behemoth Cologne Cathedral. …And I’ll be astonished that we were there at all.

I say it every year in my farewell speech to the group of pilgrims, and I hear the cliché-ness dribbling out of my mouth, but it remains true: the best part of every pilgrimage is the people. We come for the sights; we stay for the friendships. We wake up looking forward to walking through such-and-such village, but we climb into bed with a dumb smile on our face from watching the menfolk smoke their pipes up on the boat’s rooftop late into the night while they discuss purgatory.

Don’t worry, these same men also sing off-key karaoke and dance a mean conga line to Swiss polka.

The confluence of folks on these trips always feels like a coincidence (‘So many from Texas!’ ‘Wow, there’s a fair number of converts this year!’), but you know deep-down it never is. You know God is winking in delight at how he brings his children together, men and women (and children) who would otherwise never in a million years cross paths. Yet here we are, wandering through Germany or France together and looking forward to continuing that conversation over dinner tonight about the joys and challenges of raising teenagers.

As for Kyle and myself, one of our real joys is getting to know repeat pilgrims, some of who have now traveled with us on three-plus pilgrimages; it feels like a family reunion getting to hug them in a different spot on the globe every summer. On the second day, one of these folks said to us over dinner, “So, Oxenreiders — where are we going next summer?” And one of my highlights was near the end of our time together, in Switzerland, when I heard two of our repeat pilgrims-turned-friends hug goodbye to each other and say, “Well, see you next summer in Scotland!” I love that, for them, it’s assumed that for the time being, this is What We Do. They see it ‘meet and right’ to travel with us, and so do we. We are beyond honored.

If you weren’t able to make it this year, know that you were missed—and that there’s a seat for you next year in Scotland.

A pilgrimage is distinct from ‘just a trip’ in one unique way: it’s about going to a particular place to hear from God in a particular way. It was a gift this year to hold near those reasons from the pilgrims who chose to share them with me. I also often end our time together reminding participants that we often don’t know what God wants to tell us from our time together until after we’re back. This has indeed been the case for me this summer, and I can’t help but stand in awe at the wonder of it all... That God met me just where I was, in particular places like a café in Amsterdam on a rainy evening, so he could whisper things to me that I’d only understand once I sat back here in my usual seat at my neighborhood coffee shop where I am right now.

Places matter. They shape us more into who we are, telling us where we belong now and simultaneously from where we find our ultimate citizenry. Places whisper certain truths to us we’d otherwise never hear in our own backyards. It is indeed worth the effort to leave our armchairs and go on adventures, even for us Bilbo Bagginses.

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” -Terry Pratchett

I love that even though Lent is long, clocking in at 46 days (minus those six Sundays as brief reprieves), the season of Eastertide is even longer — a full fifty days. It’s a beautiful thing that the Church sees it fit that the season of feasting that follows our long fast is even longer.

But what does this look like in our ordinary lives? What does it look like to truly feast for fifty long days? Surely not endless jelly beans and chores thrown out the window? No, gratefully. …As much as I’m here for the simple delights of life, the laundry doesn’t fold itself and no one should eat that much sugar.

Feasting is much more of a posture than it is a particular activity. To feast means to savor the joys of life, not to gorge on its easily reached-for pleasures. God made pleasure and made it so that life is full of them — but we as humans are meant to hold them in their rightful place, in their divinely-appointed good order.

A season of feasting in the Church calendar means to purposely recognize the appointed reason for celebration — and in the case of Eastertide, the season following the holiest day of the entire year — we celebrate that our God is living, active, merciful, universal, and has conquered death through Jesus’ resurrection. Death has lost its sting! That is a reason to celebrate, for fifty days at least.

Broadly speaking, feasts are meant to help focus the faithful on community ties and personal faith. Specifically, here’s how this could look for us ordinary folks during Eastertide.

1. As mentioned above, feasting is largely a posture more than a set prescription of activities — so in all the below, consider starting each morning with a list of three small things you’re grateful for. It’s a simple way to recalibrate your daily perspective. (This could help.)

2. Enjoy the spring weather with a daily morning walk. Even ten minutes around the block can do wonders.

3. Dig in the dirt. Plant tomatoes, a pot of flowers, or a little window box of herbs.

4. Take your morning coffee outside.

5. Open the windows at home when there’s a lovely breeze.

6. Go barefoot in your front or back yards.

7. Choose a daily devotional read, perhaps a bit lighter than something you read during Lent. Make sure it’s on the short side so it doesn’t feel like a lengthy burden to your morning or evening routine.

8. Read the book of Acts as we move toward Pentecost.

9. Invite some family friends over a few times for a simple potluck dinner and game night.

10. Schedule in intentional pizza (or your pizza equivalent) and family movie nights during Eastertide — plan ahead which movie so you don’t spend an hour debating.

11. Keep inexpensive grocery store flowers in a vase on your coffee table.

12. Keep any Easter or spring decor up through Pentecost.

13. Keep springy candles lit in your home.

14. Or make beeswax candles! This is on my to-try list.

15. Go camping — or, go on a local day trip to enjoy the outdoors.

16. Intentionally watch your body language out and about — no need to smile like a goofball everywhere you go, but work on putting on a pleasant countenance as you run your errands. And say hello to strangers.

17. Buy a simple extra treat on your usual grocery runs — a wedge of fancy-ish cheese, ingredients for homemade ice cream on the weekends, or fizzy drinks that feel bougie with a splash of cut fruit.

18. Visit a local farm and pick fruit, flowers, or veggies.

19. Visit your weekly farmer’s market and buy part of your staples there.

20. Pray for something intentional over the next fifty days — this year I’ve visited this Holy Spirit Novena several times and it’s been a blessing.

21. Declutter stuff — pick a closet or room and fill a box for your local thrift store donations.

22. Write a few letters of encouragement — handwritten postcards or letters are truly a dying art, which makes them all the more special.

23. Eat several meals outside. There’s something about taking what you’d normally do anyway and making it al fresco that makes it feel more special.

24. Intentionally enjoy a weekly Sabbath. If your weekly work tends to live in your head, make extra effort to use your body on this day of rest. If your weekly work tends to keep you physically active, use the day of rest to enjoy something more contemplative, like reading a novel or fiddling with a crossword.

25. End your day with three more small things you’re grateful for. (Again, you could make this a regular habit with this.)

I find it a bit ironic that Eastertide falls during a typically busy season for many of us parents — the end of the school year is often chock-full of events on the calendar and final academic pushes to final exams and projects. Instead of shooing away a season of feasting, make your common busyness all the more reason to make time to feast. Consider 1-3 things from the list above and intentionally schedule them in for the next fifty days — no need to do too much. Or, add your own ideas to the comments below — I’d love to hear them!

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Here’s to Eastertide! To remembering that death no longer has the final word and that we are invited into a relationship with a good, loving Father.

Easter blessings,

Tsh

• Dear Tate, Vol. 1

• Dear Mom, Vol. 1

• Dear Tate, Vol. 2

• Dear Mom, Vol. 2

• Dear Tate, Vol. 3

• Dear Mom, Vol. 3

Dear Tate,

This is the last letter I’ll write to you while you’re studying abroad... Goodness, this semester has flown by in some ways, but in other ways it seems like so much has changed, it’s hard to know where to begin. You’ve got two and a half weeks left there, and I want you to soak up every minute.

As you know, I’ve been sick the past few weeks, so a lot of my thoughts are mush at the moment... Even if I weren’t sick, though, I don’t think I’d have much more in the way of brilliant epiphanies for you — there’s something about this time of year that just screams “no more!” when it comes to deep thoughts. You’re taking Metaphysics and Theology of the Body; the last thing you need from your mom right now are philosophical musings on the sacramental act of traveling or in immersing oneself in another culture or on learning to love well. If you’re like me right now, you’re thinking about what novels you’re hoping to read by a body of water in a month’s time.

Because of the State of My Brain, I’m going with the ol’ standby when one’s disposition isn’t able to conjure up paragraphs of flowing coherence: a list. So, here you go: here’s a list of my final thoughts for you, a young twenty-something, living abroad in Europe for her last few weeks.

1. You think you’ll remember all the details — the feel of the forks there, the sound of the ground as it crunches beneath your feet, the aisle of miscellaneous sundries at the local store — and some of it you will. In fact, some of what you remember may be utterly unimportant, yet your mind will choose to hang onto it for some reason. But much of what you think you’ll remember, you won’t. Soak it all up right now — be fully present for the little things and how they feel, smell, taste, and sound.

2. You’ll miss certain people, so take time for them, even if you’re Generally Over It. It’s easy at the end of any semester to check out socially, but hang on and stay fully there with other people as best you can. With some of these folks, you won’t be living near them again. You’ll miss them.

3. Exchange contact info with some of those people, and then do your best to stay in touch this summer. Some relationships will organically fade away, and that’s okay — remember the Aristotelian hierarchy of friendships; some are there for seasons and that’s just how it is — but there might be one or two you need to hold on to. Don’t neglect those. Cultivating these friendships is worth the effort.

4. Spend some time with one or two of your favorite professors, even though there’s not much time left. You’ve told me about a few and they sound like delightful human beings; you’ll look back and wish you soaked up more of their wisdom when you were there in person with them. I get that it’s almost finals season, so time might be short, but even just a brief chat for nuggets of wisdom during office hours might be just the thing you tuck away in your pocket and take home with you as a delightful, unexpected souvenir.

5. Take photos of everyday life. I’ve loved seeing all the pics of you traveling to Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, and Italy, but several months from now you’ll find yourself missing the walls of your campus, the courtyard, the views from the windows, and everyday life in the village there. Snap those photos while you’re there, even if you think they’re uninteresting — your future self will thank you.

6. While you can, take a few minutes to journal your thoughts about this semester (even though I know you’re about to be neck-deep in cramming for finals). Reflect on the surprises God has put on your doorstep, the unexpected life lessons, the highs and lows, and perhaps a list of little things specific to this semester abroad you’re grateful for. It’ll be something you’ll read years from now, and you’ll be surprised at the things God used this semester to form you more into who you are.

7. Enjoy the European baked goods for a few more weeks. ...I’ve been using Italian flour here at home for pizza dough and bread (and the boys haven’t noticed a difference), so maybe you’ll be able to stomach it here, who knows. But just in case — enjoy the digestibility of European carbs while you can.

8. Start preparing yourself for re-entry, but without pulling yourself away from being all there. As you know (because I’ve told you many times), re-entry is often rougher than culture shock, because you’re returning to familiar things yet you’ve changed — in ways you don’t yet know, and certainly in ways that other people here won’t expect. This is an inevitable part of extended time abroad, but as much as I wish it were avoidable, it’s part of what makes cross-cultural travel so great. It’ll get bumpy, and that’s normal.

9. Be fully present for your last quick trip to Italy next weekend, even though you’re road-weary. And get in as much gelato as humanely possible.

10. Finally: give yourself lots of grace for these next few weeks. Your body, mind, and soul are all processing this semester’s wind-down and your impending return in ways you don’t fully realize, and you therefore might respond to things in surprising ways. You might find yourself impatient about the silliest things, or perhaps weepy at really inconvenient moments. You might find yourself wanting to push off responsibilities, or the opposite — using those responsibilities as excuses for not making time for little pleasures. Regardless what happens in the next 18 days, give yourself plenty of room for being however you need to be.

...I know you’re ready to come home, and I’m eager to see you! I’m excited to hug you again, to feed you, to hear you wake up in the next room and get ready for your coffee shop shift, to see you planted in your spot on the couch with Ginny snuggled up next to you. All in good time.

In the meantime — enjoy Austria. You’ve got just a little time left, and you’ll look back on this as the most formative semester of your entire college experience. What a gift God has given you, as He gives with all sorts of pivotal seasons in life.

I look back on the season of you and your brothers as babies and toddlers, and I long for those days — something I never, ever thought I’d say. But it’s only after you live through seasons that you realize how short and life-giving those blips in life are, even though they’re also insanely hard and exhausting. You realize after the fact how formative they were to your whole person-ness, and if you’ve got the right posture, you’re both grateful for those days and bittersweet that they’re gone for good. I’m sure I’ll feel the same about these last few years of your brothers at home and you as a young single adult.

You might feel like you’re in a waiting room season right now — ready to be fully an adult and looking at the second half of college life, ready to get it over with already. I know you’re eager to be home, but I won’t be surprised if in a few weeks of being here you’ll be ready to be back on your own (as you well know, parents and siblings have a funny way of annoying the heck out of you when you’re a college student in-between semesters). It’s all expected.

But if there’s anything I’d tell past twenty-something me, it’s to be more fully present. Stop living so much with the future in mind. It’ll get here anyway, and you won’t ever get these days back. Good things are hopefully in store for you, and I’m excited about them! But in a few weeks, you’ll be in your old bedroom for the summer, taking classes and working. And right now, you’re wrapping up your semester abroad in Austria.

Be fully there in Austria for these last few weeks. You won’t regret it.

Love,

Mom

• Dear Tate, Vol. 1

• Dear Mom, Vol. 1

• Dear Tate, Vol. 2

• Dear Mom, Vol. 2

• Dear Tate, Vol. 3

Dear Mom,

It’s interesting how you say that my semester reminds you of our big trip because I feel there’s more differences than similarities. Sure, I’m living overseas and traveling to amazing places as we did over ten years ago (wow, how time flies…), but things feel quite different this time.

First of all, to state the obvious: you’re not here with me. I don’t have my parents or my little brothers coming along with me on my excursions, which is a little bittersweet. I miss making up stories with Reed and Finn to amuse ourselves in the backyard and our English lessons in the little libraries we would find tucked away. But it’s also kind of fun being on my own... I get to be the adult this time, (which is once again, bittersweet) and be in charge of myself, where I go on weekends, how I spend my “grownup money,” and figure out situations on my own. And since you aren’t here to entertain me, I’m forced to make new friends from the 175 other students here with me. Like you said, these are some of the friendships and relationships that will last or change a lifetime, so I’ve been soaking them up and looking for more constantly.

Another obvious difference is that I’m mostly here to study. My classes take up a decent amount of my schedule and cause me to have busy weeks with little travel, such as this one (hence the shorter letter). Albeit, traveling often teaches me more than most classrooms ever will, but while I'm here, I'm a full-time student with midterms, tests, essays, assignments, classes, and registrations often happening in one week. But luckily I’ve found that I feel better when I have a full plate, and I’m even luckier to have a full plate of quality readings (Dante, Augustine, Wojtyia, and Aquinas aren’t too shabby), somewhat chicken-scratch notes I’ll keep and use forever, and overall fascinating class topics.

Also, I might’ve touched on this briefly in previous letters, but where I go and what I do has significantly more meaning to me now than it did when I was ten years old. Back then, the Great Barrier Reef was pretty much cool rocks and fish in the ocean, Victoria Falls was just a massive waterfall, and even Normandy (which I hate to admit, I barely remember) was simply another beach. But now a decade later, I can begin or continue to truly enjoy and imbibe the depth and significance of the world. Rome isn’t just good pizza, it’s central to my faith and is teeming with beauty only appreciative eyes can see. Assisi is now the home of saints, fond memories, and key moments in my life. And wonderful Poland has some of the most remarkable and tragic history and art in all of Europe. I don’t think at ten I would have even begun to fathom the beauty of seeing the sun set over the train tracks Auschwitz and Birkenau, but I’m honored and grateful I do now.

I’m about halfway through the semester now, which is hard to believe, but I’m anticipating what the next seven or so weeks have in store for me. One of those things is Spring, which is certainly here in the little town of Gaming!

Back home we get a blissful two weeks of Spring weather before it gets rather toasty, but so far, the warm weather and sunshine are slow to approach. We had about a week of spectacular 60° weather and beaming sunlight, but as of my time of writing this, it’s a high of 35° and drizzly. But luckily, the few green patches and dainty flowers that have popped up are more used to the back and forth of weather than I am and have persisted through the smatterings of snow and wind. …I’m trying to do the same before I’m scorched with the Texas sun and long to be back here.

All this to say, dearest Mother, is that I miss you and I miss our travels. But I’m also having fun growing up and doing cool things like you and Dad did. I can’t wait to tell you all about it when I get home… Enjoy the relative silence while it lasts, because I fear I won’t shut up about “while I was abroad in Europe” for quite some time.

Missing you in the mountains,

Tate

• Dear Tate, Vol. 1

• Dear Mom, Vol. 1

• Dear Tate, Vol. 2

Dear Mom,

Holy cow — SO MUCH has happened since I wrote last month. I visited Rome and Assisi, met new people, averaged 22,000 steps in one week, and I’m no longer a teenager… It’s astonishing to look back at my previous letter and see how I’ve progressed dramatically in those three goals I set for myself.

In getting out of my head and into my life, and therefore forcing myself to walk through the doors God opened (including the literal holy doors of several cathedrals), I’ve already changed so much and made such good friends. And in the theme of your letter to me, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed sucking the marrow out of life by making memories, gathering stories, and taking the photos I’ll share with my kids someday.

I think I have a new favorite birthday memory that might just top my tenth in Kenya… odd how it seems to be every ten years. After a chill day having only one class — one of my favorites (Visual Arts & the Catholic Imagination), fourteen of my friends (close enough to a hundred, in my opinion) threw me a semi-surprise dinner party in the mensa. My desserts were four Austrian donuts called “krapfen,” and they were delicious, even split into quarters to allow everyone to have a bite. It was beautiful to sit at the end of the table wearing a makeshift birthday crown, beaming as I absorbed the love of others as they sang ‘happy birthday’ as loud and out of tune as they could, then went around and shared things they loved about me. What a wonderful and warm welcome into a new stage of life as an “official” adult.

I’ve also been loving the simple pleasure of being out in nature and going on hikes. Albeit, busting my knee in the parking lot on the way to one of those hikes was definitely a brick in my foundation I could’ve done without. But being up in the trees on the misty hills of Gaming perpetually reminds me of God’s beauty and how he’s physically designed us to be creatures of the earth, meant to climb every mountain and ford every stream, and to need movement and fresh air. Plus, it’s a great way to let off steam, and get some sunshine and exercise after a tense week or a restless class.

And as you know, I visited Rome and Assisi ten years older and wiser than last time, and to say the least, seeing everything, especially the Basilica, as well as countless other beautiful cathedrals and churches through a Catholic perspective, is mind-blowing. I don’t think if I went to the Papal audience, had Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, or saw the bits and pieces of saints as a ten-year-old, would I have appreciated it as much as I do now.

Assisi was a wonderful shift from the hustle and bustle of Rome and was full of so many good conversations and mediocre wine tasting. It's interesting to think of all the connections our family has to that little town… Previously the most I remembered of it was the place where Finn lost his red Disneyland jacket on the bus and the setting of the painting with the sunny street corner by our front door back at home (which I then found on a late-night walk). And now — what memories were made there this time.

Italy has this wonderful habit of making everything into art. From its literal art, architecture, and literature, to its landscape, food, and people… It’s all beautiful.

I’ve been learning so much about friendships and relationships, and at the risk of sounding stupidly obvious: good friends really are so important, especially women friends who motivate you, don’t judge you, and know how to have good fun. So far, I’ve made two close friendships with women like these, and I’m so grateful for them and our wine nights, chatting about boys and vocations. Even the travel mishaps we’ve endured will stick with us forever and become inside jokes (I still slightly resent that particular bus driver). My friendships with men have also been delightful, what with their silly shenanigans and bewildering appetites — they bring a certain carefree energy to those who need to let loose a little.

And I don’t think this is news to anyone, but God works in such mysterious ways and on His own time. And what a sense of humor He has! As you said, one moment you’re in the glorious Sistene Chapel trying to sneak a photo without the guards shouting at you, and the next day you’re getting JPII’s favorite gelato (more on this in a bit) and standing in front of the Colosseum, not knowing how much your life has just changed. It’s all a good reminder that God ultimately has a way better plan than our puny human brains can imagine.

I think it’s particularly beautiful that He uses relationships to draw us closer to Him. Going back as far as our creation, we see that we are not made to be solitary creatures, and through rightly ordered, true relationships, we honor Him and are drawn closer to Him. We also honor Him by trusting that He has a plan and that we will never be forgotten… This is something I’m working on daily, and am grateful for the opportunity to stretch my faith.

On a lighter note, I did indeed indulge in gelato from St. John Paul II’s favorite shop, and I’m convinced that from it I’ve found the perfect combination of flavors¹. Gelato is another one of Italy’s greatest art forms that differs from ice cream (how dare you assume they’re the same). Ice cream is made from cream (shocker) whereas gelato, in its superiority, is made from milk and is mixed with more air, hence why true gelato has an almost gooey consistency and melts faster. To tell if it’s high-quality and house-made, one must investigate the colors of the cold goodness: if there are any bright Superman-like colors, you’re in the wrong spot because if they bring in one factory-made flavor, odds are, the rest of the flavors will be, too.

Now, to my point, I’ve found that while countless wonderful flavors are also top-tier, there is this one simple combination that trumps them all. The first flavor is some sort of berry, be it straw, rasp, or mixed; it simply must be berry. This brings the lighter, naturally sweet, and perfectly tart notes to your palette. The second, which many don’t appreciate, is pistachio. The high-protein and peculiarly green legume makes a surprisingly delicious flavor that adds an earthy, caramel-like saltiness to our combo. The third needs the least amount of explaining, yet plays a key role: dark chocolate. The richness united with the berry and pistachio creates a beautiful cacophony on the tongue worthy of Remy the Rat.

Clearly, I’ve learned an extensive amount about gelato, only a mere snippet about relationships, and sure, things here and there in classes about metaphysics, theology, Epics, and architecture. I’m curious: what have you been learning lately, Mom? In your work, your parenting, your teaching, your nerding, etc., what’s new and interesting to you? I want to hear about it.

Yours from afar,

Tate

¹ I know at least one person disagrees with me greatly, but they are wrong. They know who they are.

As a reminder to the readers:

• Dear Tate, Vol. 1

• Dear Mom, Vol. 1

Dear Tate,

We’ve obviously already talked multiple times since your last letter, but I wanted to reread it to see where we left off before I wrote you back here… If you haven’t in a bit, kiddo, go back and read it again. I think you and I would both agree that more has shifted in your life in the past few weeks than you ever thought possible. So. Much. Has. Happened! And it's been less than a month. My mind is blown, but I’m sure not as much as yours is.

Of course, the specifics of this shifting is for us right now — or, for you to hold onto and enjoy for what it is, and to share with others only when you want — so I’m not really going to directly address it here. But this shift does make me think about how things shift, change, and get built in the world overall.

I’ll get onto the shifty business in just a second. But first: happy birthday! Speaking of blowing my mind, how is it that I have a twenty-year-old? I know every parent says this, but it really does feel like yesterday when you were the toddler drama queen at our dining table in our apartment in Turkey, pouting that you were, and I quote, “bored.” You were annoyed that your dad and I were just hanging out at home enjoying the sweet nothing of a weekend afternoon, dutifully letting you figure out your own entertainment options. This was also the era when you came into the living room and proclaimed, “I just want a hundred people in our house all the time.” Boy, how things have changed, eh? May your birthday celebration be delightfully full of the people you want to spend it with there, and may you not have a hundred people in your house.

Okay, back to shifts and how things get built.

After all, you are in Europe, land of cathedrals and castles, so right here’s a good example. Last week (has it only been a week? —good gosh) you were in Italy, and you walked into more than a few mind-blowing churches and cathedrals. Several you had been to before, but you were ten years younger and there’s a seismic shift in perspective at that age — plus, we’re Catholic now, and I’m guessing it’s fair to say that has radically shifted your worldview regarding the role played by objective beauty, goodness, and truth in the material goods we humans create and sustain.

So, you have these cathedrals. Take St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, for instance — whose foundation is 1,700 years old, considered by some the most beautiful, largest, and definitely the most awe-inducing with its history. That building took 120 years to build by countless people (mostly nameless, but also, you know, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini) — craftsmen and laborers who, through blueprints and bricks and mortar and mental math, committed to centuries of hard work to collectively create this masterpiece. Entire generations chose to dedicate the work of their hands to labor for which they’d never see the final fruit. They were willing to play a small part in a great project — one dedicated to the greater glory of God — and die while it was still under construction, with no signature attached to their handiwork when it was done.

Cathedrals took literal centuries to build1, and they were built one brick at a time. One rolled-up sleeve slapping the mortar on the cut stone, put in its place just-so, and left to dry — repeated again and again, ad nauseam, for miles to the sky until they met in the middle as a perfectly configured dome. Our modern mind can’t comprehend this accurately — at least mine can’t. In a world where we’re2 annoyed that the construction on the bridge as we leave town is still going on three months later, my microwaved perspective cannot fathom the idea of committing to building a thing that will not only outlive me, it won’t have yet been born before I die.

What is it we are building? Neither you nor I are in the business of literal buildings, but we do build things. We build relationships and the stories that flow from them, and those stories form the foundation of our human flourishing. The stories of your childhood — both the good ones, like meeting Caroline and Meg and them becoming your cherished girlhood friends, and the not-so-good ones, like you throwing up on the sweaty sardine-packed Beijing metro — are bricks in the foundation of your life. These moments are scripted by God, the absolute best (and really, only) storyteller, written just-so in order to tell the bigger story called Your Life. Which, of course, is but a paragraph in the much, much bigger story called God’s Love for All People, but that’s too much of another mind blow for this letter. I’ll stick with bricks here. These bricks are perfectly carved and scripted to shape you into the cathedral, the temple of God, that you are. ...And as you and I have said more than once in the past few weeks, what great scriptwriting in this season of Tate. 10 out of 10, Jesus.

The bricks God is currently slathering with mortar and placing just-so in the beautiful cathedral of your life are the bricks that, Lord-willing, you will look back on with awe. There are cornerstone bricks — pieces of your foundation so crucial that the walls and windows depend on them to stay in place, and then there are smaller, much more commonplace, much more frequently forgotten bricks. There are those monumental conversations, like the one you first had under the Sistene Chapel and later in front of the Colosseum. And then there are the bajillion smaller conversations, like in between bites of gelato as you’re walking down an unnamed cobblestone path in Assisi or as you’re lounging on the couch in the commons area till 1:30 in the morning, chatting about anything and everything. All these bricks are foundational.

Sometimes it’s hard to stay in the moment when you’re told to “cherish the moment,” but as best you can — as you live out all the short vignettes in this season of Tate, take a mental snapshot. Notice the sights, the smells, the sounds, and how they resonate in your mind, body, and soul. Every now and then, go quiet and let the silence resonate in your ears. Witness the awe of your life unfolding. Let the Holy Spirit whisper true things. And also take literal snapshots, because you’ll be glad you did later (I know you’re rolling your eyes at this one, but I mean it — your future self will thank you).

I can imagine you’re wrestling with a daily challenge of staying fully present in the uniqueness of this semester of living at the foothills of the Alps while relishing all the new relationships you’re cultivating, and also having to, you know, study and stuff. But do that part, too — don’t forget to suck the marrow out of all those classes you’re lucky enough to take in an old monastery this semester. Take good notes and share them with me. (I mean, literally — share those notes with me when you get back, because I want to take the classes you’re taking this spring).

I told your dad the other day I’d like to find the button to some physics-altering button apparatus thingy that would allow your time this semester to slow while somehow allowing our time here to speed up. As a teacher, the middle of the second half of the school year is always the most challenging for me, so I’m here in central Texas, already eager for the wildflowers to sprout their spring colors, but not really wanting that yet because it means your semester would be rolling along too fast. I want your February to go slow as molasses and mine to go as fast as microwaving butter from solid to liquid3. If you find that button over there in Austria, push it for me, will you?

Here are the questions I’d love you to answer in your next letter: What have been the highlights of what you’re learning in a purely historic, I’m-studying-abroad-in-Europe sense? And what have been the highlights of what you’re learning about relationships? And in both of those: what are you learning about God and who he is? And also, what was your favorite gelato flavor in Italy?

I love you so much, kiddo. Don’t forget to study, but also don’t forget to hop on that train and see wherever it goes. You’ll learn a ton doing both.

Oh, and eat some fun Austrian dessert for your special day …It’s on me.

Love,

Mom

Dear Mom,

Indeed! Here I am, once again, in beautiful Europe! I feel so incredibly blessed to call this 14th-century Carthusian monastery my home for four months and collect my own stories of “traveling in my 20s.” I’m so excited to see and do so many wonderful things, meet new people, learn new things, try new coffee (I had some of the smoothest coffee over the weekend and it was wonderful), and to become the woman that God has called me to be. He’s already been so good and loving to me during these first few rough weeks.

Going from driving down I-35 and passing ugly office buildings to walking to the local SPAR in snow and going to classes where monks and royalty used to reside is quite a big jump. But, yes, as you’ve mentioned, I’ve been surrounded by the simply complex European life before, so how surprised can I be? Spoiler alert: very.

While my culture shock may not look the same as some of my peers, I’ve been rather forced into a different sort of shock that I think makes this travel experience so different than when I was younger. I’ve come to recognize in the past few days that God truly is everywhere. In the beautiful architecture of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in the moonlight while trailblazing a hill, in the children stuffed into winter garb toddling alongside their mother, in the old woman half my height sitting with me in Mass, in the food and drinks served in the Mensa, in the people laughing so hard you feel it in the floor, in the pain, sorrow, and darkness, in the love, peace, and light.

I absolutely love when God shows me the little things that make life so wonderful and fun, don’t you? It’s not always easy to remember or to find sometimes, but even knowing that they are there and He is there regardless of what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, or how my relationship is with Him.

Yes, while I’m eager to see the holiness of Rome again (especially from a Catholic perspective now), Salzburg and all its musical glory, and the solemnity of Auschwitz, what I’m most excited for is how God is going to use this time to change and shape me. He’s done so much in ten days, imagine what He’ll do in a hundred! And I can’t wait to bring the newer me back home with all the wisdom and knowledge (and empty pockets) I’ll earn from being here. I continue to love the quote from Terry Pratchett, “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors.” Always apt for a college student.

I think I have three primary goals for this semester. The first being to continue finding peace and rest in God’s love and mercy. I find myself so caught up in the whirlwind of life and worrying so much about things that I forget what’s true — I can feel God calling me to rest in Him more this semester, even among the hubbub of travel and exams.

The second goal comes from a great source of earthly wisdom for me: Get out of my head and into my life. I’m missing out on so much of my life by worrying about it and not just doing it. While it’s easier said than done, I want (if not need) to grow in this department.

And the third goal is to make good friends. There’s not too much to say on this goal, but I see so many doors that God has been opening for me and I’m going to push my introverted self to walk through the doorways and see where they take me. I’m curious if you have any goals for yourself during this period while I’m away?

To conclude this inaugural letter, I’d like to encourage (if not remind) you to continue to find the places where God is, especially while I’m away in Austria and you are in the beautiful mundane life of home. I’m having my adventure, but you still have yours! It doesn’t quite look the same, but even Bilbo came home and enjoyed the Shire for a while before returning to Rivendell. Love you so much, Mom!

Yodeling from the mountains,

Tate