5 Quick Things #316 🦚

winter, metaphors, feast days, & loving by doing

Hey there,

I’m coming to you from somewhere in the E Concourse of the Charlotte Airport, in between flights where I'm headed to a women writer’s weekend! Four of us have gotten together over Zoom for several years now (two of us seven-plus!) once a month to talk shop about our work. This month’s meeting is live, and I’m super stoked! We’re sharing a guesthouse in historic Savannah, and it just feels right to talk about writing with other Catholic women near Flannery O’Connor's childhood home, you know?

I don’t want to miss my flight, so I’ll get right on this week’s list…

Peacock in a Garden, by Mildred Anne Butler #

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. New episode of A Drink With a Friend! You are a tree. You are also not a tree. You are on a journey. You are also not on a journey. We use metaphors all the time to describe life, and funnily enough, so does the Bible. Joy Marie Clarkson ☀️ unpacks why we use metaphors, and she and I also get into why we need to be rooted—and open to change.¹

2. We learn to love by doing... Smart words here from Sara Dietz : “Not only do we learn to love by loving, as St. Francis de Sales says, but we also learn to love what, specifically, we are doing… by doing it. What we are doing might be good or bad, for our benefit or to our detriment, but because we are doing it regularly, we come to love it. There is comfort in familiarity.”

3. Speaking of “learning to love,” Katie Marquette shares a great perspective about the cold winter months: “Life is all about the balance of extremes, of the promise of reprieve. I’ve tried to explain this to friends less enthused about the cold - how much of my love of the cold is tied up in my love of blankets and books and a warm fire. How to love these things I need to first be a bit uncomfortable, a bit raw and challenged. How I need to long for something and hope for something again. How the cold asks me to do all these things.”

4. It’s time for another lovely issue of Signs + Seasons , the collaborative Substack dedicated to the liturgical calendar! This one's about celebrating your patron saints, family feast days, Candlemas, and a good reminder during these ‘blah’ months that there's a good case to consider for more parties.

5. And finally, I love both father-son writers Spencer Klavan and Andrew Klavan² in their own rights, which means I'm terribly stoked about their new joint newsletter, THE NEW JERUSALEM. The father has written the first letter. Get ready for some serious nerdery... I'm here for it.

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📺

Doctor Who! (we’re currently in the David Tennant era…)

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Quotable 💬

“Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’”

-C.S. Lewis

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You’re part of making a movie. What role would you most want to play? 🎬

At first blush I'd think I would naturally choose screenwriter, but that sort of writing is a whole beast of a thing that requires a certain skill. I think it'd be fun to be a location scout — I mean, it sounds pretty much like travel + saying, "Yep, this is a good place for that scene." Right? I'm sure I know what I'm talking about.

I'd be the absolute WORST at acting. ...Truly terrible, I tell you.

• Crew (cameraman, set design, costumes, etc.): 30.6%

• Acting: 20.9%

• Pre-production (location scouting, casting, etc.): 20%

• Screenwriting: 11.7%

• Directing: 7.1%

• Post-production (editing, foley art, etc.): 5.6%

• Producing (financing, big-picture oversight, etc.): 4.1%

Find this week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• 📐Create your own Rule of Life

• 🎧 Listen to A Drink With a Friend

• 📖 Read my books

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

How do you revel in the day when the weather is dreary?

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Have a good weekend,

- Tsh

p.s. Imagine walking into a hotel lobby and walking past this.

1. Here's the previous episode, which bypassed quite a few podcast feeds!

2. no relation.