5 Quick Things #287 🪴

summer reading, swimming upstream, rituals that matter, & the classics

Hello!

Last night I met a new friend who lives on land outside our town and claims not to be a homesteading farmer yet has two cows (with more on the way), five pigs, and a handful of chickens. Perhaps I’m just a lady with eight chickens and four raised beds in her ramshackle fixer-upper backyard, but …that sounds like a homestead to me? I’m so intrigued by farming, and I know I’m romanticizing the idea, but the thought of farm-fresh milk right out my back door sounds like the stuff of my dreams. I never knew I’d be envious of someone with cows, but mid-forties and here we are.

After a several-month hiatus due to all sorts of school and teaching rigamarole that’s not worth spilled ink, this week I finally got back to book writing, and it felt so good to dust off those projects. I’m still working on my novel, yet I may also have a collection of short stories percolating on my brain’s back burner…? And I perhaps also have another non-fiction book in me, which after my last non-fiction I literally said I’d no longer write non-fiction unless God gives me a very specific idea that I feel compelled to write. Did God laugh? I’m still in the brainstorming phase, but it seems I may have a potential idea. We’ll see.

Kitchen Gardens at l'Hermitage, Pontoise, by Camille Pissarro (1873) #

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. New episode of A Drink With a Friend! 👈 Is reading good books, watching good movies, and preferring good art a matter of subjective taste or objective reasoning? And if it’s objective, does that mean there’s a wrong preference for these things? Even a …moral wrong? I talk with one of my favorite current thinkers and writers, Joshua Gibbs, about what it means to wisely know the difference between mediocre, common, and uncommon things, and why it matters beyond mere taste that we love that which lasts.

2. In case you missed it, earlier this week I shared my recommended summer reading list for a rising high school senior, as well as my own (overly ambitious) reading goals for this summer. I recommend an intentional blend of challenge and delight, fiction and non, and all this is on purpose.

3. It's all well and good to want to get rid of your smartphone, but how do you navigate a world that's growing more and more dependent on them? Further still, how do you “convince” a teenager to swim upstream and do without one? Really good food for thought.

4. Why do rituals matter? And why does it matter what we believe about them? Bishop Barron talks with Ben Shapiro (of all people!) about the need for all Christians to acknowledge not only the significance of the Eucharist, but also the transcendental Real Presence of Christ within it.

5. And finally, so far I’m digging Autumn Kern’s new season three on her podcast about why the classics (and classical education) matters today, and that it’s not just elitest fodder for the highbrows among us. Here’s the first episode, and here’s the second.

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📚

• The Once and Future King, by T.H. White

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Quotable 💬

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

— Archilochus #

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At a cocktail party, which person do you prefer to be? 🍸

Even though in theory I'd love to be the host, in reality I tend to be the wallflower guest, happily talking with one or two people in the corner the entire time. Sounds like I'm not alone in this corner.

Find this week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• ☘️ Take the last spot to Ireland with me!

• 📐Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• ✍️ Does your teenager like to write?

• 📔 Releasing August 29, 2023: First Light & Eventide

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What could you do this weekend that, one year from now, you’ll be glad you did?

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Have a good one,

- Tsh

p.s. Wes Anderson’s LOTR.