12 things I consumed in the last month or so
the things to hear, eat, read, and do that have defined this era of my life
To hear
John Denver songs: specifically Eagles and Horses, Rocky Mountain High, and Wild Montana Skies. After reading Live No Lies (mentioned later in this post) I’ve had conflicted feelings about the line “but the flesh must be given its due” in “Eagles and Horses,” but…. have I spent hours listening to just these three songs on repeat? Maybe.
“Irish Eyes” by Rose Betts: My housemate recommended “Irish Eyes” to me because of my Irish folk music phase a couple years ago, and then she played it in the car and it quickly infected our entire house. For a few days there was constantly at least one person singing, humming, or listening to this song.
But I think there’s something to unpack here.Spotify says I listen to a lot of folk music, especially from the 1990s. And what fascinates me about the genre in this era is the theme of young people who leave rural beginnings for the big city but come away disillusioned. They’re coming back to their parents, their small towns, the farms they spent their whole lives trying to leave behind. This trope can be the lyrical content, or it can be the real-life situation of artists using their “folksy” skills and stories to become professional musicians—or somewhere in between. 1
This means that folk music tends to be very narrative-driven, and very place based. It’s about mom and dad and corn fields. It’s about first loves and country roads and mountain tops. It’s about Tennessee and the Rocky Mountains and West Virginia coal mines. It’s about regret for leaving these places, or about the joy of returning to them.
”Irish Eyes,” despite its folksy sound, doesn’t have that. Even though the singer’s world consists of, um, just Ireland and England, she’s proud of being a “map of the world,” of being a “restless soul” with “travelling feet.” And her places aren’t detailed or specific: our image of Ireland is stormy skies. Our image of England is oak bark, a “lake somewhere,” hemlock, an English rose. While a lot of folk music is anchored to land, she’s a wanderer. Easy to catch but hard to hold. One foot in sea and one on shore.
(I don’t have any conclusions here, just observations.)
To eat
Mangoes: We had SO many amazing mangoes this season. Eating mangoes was literally the highlight of my day.
Multigrain bread: I just love multigrain bread. With peanut butter! With almond butter! With avocado! As a sandwich! Even just taking a nibble it raw and untoasted because I don’t have the patience for the toaster oven!
Turkey Meatballs with homemade pesto: My recipe is a amalgamation of several available online, so I can’t link it, but the trick is to use a splash of milk, to replace breadcrumbs with oatmeal, and touch the meat as little as possible. But really, the magic might have been that these served as vehicles for the pesto my coworker made from her end-of-season abundance of basil.
Salads: So many good ones! I particularly enjoyed one with grilled chicken, goat cheese, sweet potatoes, quinoa, tomatoes, red onions, cucumbers, and sunflower seeds—but this is the only one I took a good picture of:
To read
Live No Lies, by John Mark Comer: I’ll be honest, I kind of expected this to be a trite self-help book. But… can I be John Mark Comer when I grow up? I really did love this book. I appreciated that Comer has both spiritual and intellectual rigor while also being conversational and entertaining. The truth shouldn’t be boring!
Live No Lies identifies the lies that Christians believe: lies from the devil, lies from our flesh, and lies from the world. But I almost hesitate to give that description because it makes this book sound like the manifesto for a superstitious, ascetic, suspicious life. And it’s not.
It’s about naming the lies we believe about God and about ourselves, and acknowledging a spiritual reality beyond our material one. It’s about living in true freedom. And in a world that’s so self-gratifying but unsatisfied, superficially tolerant but deeply polarized, anxious but uncommitted, scarred with evil but in denial of anything we can’t see—Live No Lies offers a new perspective. This book helped me rethink my assumptions and interrogate the truth about community, about commitment, about the worlds within and around me and about the world beyond.2
Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek: I’ve read the first two parts of this book so far, and really really enjoy it. Although Sinek’s vision for companies (and thus societies and economies) is extremely idealistic, you have to dream big to be inspiring. “Leaders eat last” means that the people with the most power make the most sacrifices. Leaders put their followers before themselves. And organizations succeed when their people know that someone is looking out for them. Sinek uses the example of Marines: after they go through boot camp together, they’re “better equipped to confront external dangers because they fear no danger from each other.” They operate within a “Circle of Safety.”
Sinek’s frequent use of military illustrations is also part of why this book inspires me so much. Both my parents were army officers, so these are the type of stories I grew up on. I was raised in the shadow of an institution that does have a lot of problems, but requires a willingness to sacrifice for your fellow soldier, for your nation, for the freedom of people you’ll never meet and nations you’ve never known. And I’m coming to realize that’s very countercultural. I do think that “leaders eat last” is an attitude that makes the world a more productive and less anxious place—and Sinek makes me want to become someone who enacts that change.
Sinek’s book is also redeeming business, as a concept, for me. Particularly after writing my thesis, I was mostly aware of the ways that modern corporations exploit people and destroy communities. And while the abandoned Winchester building, being gentrified into lofts just a few blocks away from my apartment, makes me doubt that we’ll ever go back to the days of company baseball teams—I do have a hope now for businesses that could bless people.
Duck, Death, and the Tulip: I just find this so charming and discomforting. If I wrote a childrens’ book it would probably be like this.
Culture Study. Anne Helen Petersen writes about the economics and significance of random “cultural” things—which often means academic-style analysis of, like, TikTok trends. Most of journalism deems TikTok trends unimportant, but social media reflects what our society is actually thinking about. A critical perspective on that content can provide a really telling temperature check on our world.
Petersen frequently has a lens on motherhood and femininity, which are interests of mine as well. Her posts have given me a lot to think about concerning women and social media—about what we think women are supposed to be, about the economics behind femininity, about the ongoing captivity behind what we call freedom.
I think the role that Christianity (and other religions) play in these women’s lives is much more complicated than Petersen assumes and I’d love to unpack that someday, so I’m kind of just saving these here for future reference:
The Edenic Allure of Ballerina Farm: this one is particularly interesting for the commentary on like innocence and goodness and what we’re all aspiring to…I think Petersen does really well at naming our society’s idols.
To do
Biking on the sidewalk. It’s illegal but biking in the streets is just kinda scary sometimes!
Swimming miles in the long course pool. A mile is 1609m, so it’s roughly sixteen laps in a long course pool—which is an easy enough number to count, so I’ve been focusing on training for distance.
And there’s something about long course that just feels right. I’ve learned the size of my soul’s habitat and it’s 50 meters long.
I do think there’s more going on here—the beginning of that impulse to go back to “simpler times” during an unprecedented era of globalization, that desire to go back to the farms society as a whole was trying to leave behind… One contemporary (non-song) example of this ethos is Ballerina Farm, which I mention later in this post.
Maybe I need to write a whole post about folk music? Or about this attitude?
I also read Carl Truemann’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self before reading Live No Lies, and Truemann’s academic approach to our current view of truth and self was helpful background—but I found Comer a much more accessible and applicable read.