5 Quick Things #418 š«
rootedness, symbols, terrible chocolate, and remembering to play
Earlier today (technically yesterday as this lands in your inbox) two of my kids and I went to a friendās house to work out in her garage (the one who recently wrote about the benefits of living geographically near your friends), and right now itās evening, and our family just got home from dinner with another nearby familyā¦ 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.
Iām spending most of actual today (as in, the day this lands in your inbox) finishing some stuff for next yearās pilgrimage so that I can get it ready to share with this yearās pilgrimage participantsābecause we leave for Scotland in seven days! Wild how itās now here. ā¦With that in mind, Iāve got to keep this brief so I can get back to it. I really am so stoked to tell you about next summerās locationāI think many of you will be just as excited! Iāll pull back the curtains soon.
Onward!
5 Quick Things āļø
1. Earlier this week Commonplace subscribers shared what they read last month and whatās on their reading stacks nowāif this is you, join in and add your lists (and give me a Scotland read suggestion!). Iām still seeing Theo of Golden and Emma M. Lion trends, which has been the case for months nowā¦ Interesting.
2. Speaking of local community, I loved Ryan B. Andersonās recent piece on the freedom of rootedness: āOur deepest error, our modern cultureās 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.ā
3. Weāre reading Jason M Baxterās translation of Inferno in my humanities class next year (hereās the full reading list, if youāre curious), so Iāve bookmarked this conversation with Jonathan Pageau on symbolsāwhat they are and why they matterāfor watching sometime in the next few weeks. Both men are smart thinkers.
4. From my not-too-long-ago archives, hereās a piece of mine I myself needed to re-read again: āGod wouldnāt 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 wouldnāt have said that Sabbath was for man, not man for the Sabbath, if he didnāt think it was a gift given to us to enjoy and use.ā
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.
Currently Reading, Watching, Listening šŗ
Ludwig on BritBox
Quotable š¬
āSummer afternoon; summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.ā
-Henry James
Heads up: Book edits are in, but with the pilgrimage rapidly approaching, letās just brush off polls again in Augustāthanks for understanding!
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Question(s) For You to Ponderā¦ š¤
Who can you call and catch up with this weekend, just for friendshipās sake?
Have a good weekend,
- Tsh
p.s. - A portrait of a small boy reading. ā¦May this never change.
That Liberty essay!! š¤Æ
I moved away from my mid-Missouri hometown as swiftly as possible in my late teens, knowing then it was unlikely Iād live there again. But now a new data center threatens the land and community encircling the purported site, just miles from my parentsā rural farm. This essay makes me consider how I might respond if I believed in my roots. I didn't stay to build anything different ā I didn't want to. I was always a wanderer, always building elsewhere. But when I zoom out and think about my lineage of stewarding the land, the local generational farms, and the rural community crushed under capitalism and the fictional promised land of MORE, a question emerged: what liberty do we surrender when we chose unrootedness, especially to make room for the least liberating invention of our time ā the sentient beast of AI? And what lengths are we (myself included) willing to go to to protect a place ā given, chosen, or even left behind?
Thanks for sharing. š
I think you mentioned the John Adams mini-series in a previous post. I took up your recommendation, and we signed up for a month of HBO Max. My husband and I started it last week and just finished it last night. That was such a great recommendation to watch right around July 4th!