5 Quick Things #418 🍫

rootedness, symbols, terrible chocolate, and remembering to play

Jul 10, 2026

Earlier today (technically yesterday as this lands in your inbox) two of my kids and I went to a friend’s house to work out in her garage (the one who recently wrote about the benefits of living geographically near your friends), and right now it’s evening, and our family just got home from dinner with another nearby family… Both these friends are a 5-to-7 minute drive from us, us never having to leave our side of town or get on a highway. It really is lovely living near friends and building actual, physical community. 10/10, would recommend.

I’m spending most of actual today (as in, the day this lands in your inbox) finishing some stuff for next year’s pilgrimage so that I can get it ready to share with this year’s pilgrimage participants—because we leave for Scotland in seven days! Wild how it’s now here. …With that in mind, I’ve got to keep this brief so I can get back to it. I really am so stoked to tell you about next summer’s location—I think many of you will be just as excited! I’ll pull back the curtains soon.

Onward!

*Summer*, by John Henry Twachtman (1897-1899) #

5 Quick Things ☕️

1. Earlier this week Commonplace subscribers shared what they read last month and what’s on their reading stacks now—if this is you, join in and add your lists (and give me a Scotland read suggestion!). I’m still seeing Theo of Golden and Emma M. Lion trends, which has been the case for months now… Interesting.
2. Speaking of local community, I loved Ryan B. Anderson’s recent piece on the freedom of rootedness: “Our deepest error, our modern culture’s deepest lie, is this: we should wait for a stable place to justify our commitment. Stability has never been the precondition of rootedness, however. It has always been the product. The good town you cannot find anywhere in America is not found. It is made by people who stayed and made it, none of whom had a guarantee of success. To look at the risks and walk away is merely asking to inherit what you refuse to build.”
3. We’re reading Jason M Baxter’s translation of Inferno in my humanities class next year (here’s the full reading list, if you’re curious), so I’ve bookmarked this conversation with Jonathan Pageau on symbols—what they are and why they matter—for watching sometime in the next few weeks. Both men are smart thinkers.
4. From my not-too-long-ago archives, here’s a piece of mine I myself needed to re-read again: “God wouldn’t have made us to sleep a third of our lives, to need to stop and eat (as well as cook beforehand) several times a day if we were put on earth only in order to get stuff done. Jesus wouldn’t have said that Sabbath was for man, not man for the Sabbath, if he didn’t think it was a gift given to us to enjoy and use.”
5. And finally, why did the chocolate ration bar of World War II taste terrible? We got into a side chat about this recently when watching Band of Brothers for the week leading up to Independence Day, and lo, one of my favorite creators, Max Miller, goes and posts about this very thing. Delightful.