One For the Books! 📖

what a summer it's been...

At the Summer Cottage, by Ivan Shishkin (1894) #

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).

Tate and me, sometime in 2005…

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.

Summer 2007, the three of us in Thailand (well, four of us — I was pregnant with her oldest younger brother). I began writing online a few months later.

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 🤯

at the top of Black Butte, where he proposed

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.

My clan this summer, who I love so much I can hardly stand it.

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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.

Thig còmhla rinn air turas!

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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!

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…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.

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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.

my rapidly-growing boys on Sparks Lake three weeks ago

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

1. Well, sort-of; apparently they’d briefly met already on campus back in Ohio but he doesn’t remember it.

2. Click the link to name that movie. You know you know it.

3. He has fulfilled the classic stereotype of suddenly noticing and caring about birds once he hit his mid-forties.