Our new little puppy! This weekend, Jon and I drove out to Virginia to meet a French Bulldog breeder we’d been in contact with who had a litter of new pups looking for a home. We’ve wanted a dog for a long time, and knew as soon as we saw this little guy that he was the one! He’ll come home to us in 3 weeks when he’s old enough to be away from his mom. More pictures (and a name!) then.
Sorry to the email subscribers who just got the pictures and no text. I got too excited!
On Monday night, Jonathan, some friends, and I went to see Wendell Berry––one of my favorite writers––give the Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities. I’ve been reading Berry since college, when I wrote my International Development senior thesis on his views of development. A farmer-poet-essayist with an uncompromising belief in the importance of “place,” he’s always read like a prophet in our industrial, overly digitized age.
The speech’s title: it all turns on affection. He began by citing Wallace Stegner, who said that Americans can be divided into two kinds: boomers and stickers. Boomers motivated by greed, power, money; stickers motivated by affection for the life of a particular place.
For an hour and a half, I sat on the edge of my seat as he railed against the “incomplete accounting” of our economy (ie. economics that ignore what is lost in the pursuit of wealth and gain); as he pointed out the increasing remoteness of our world (remote control, remote entertainment, remote war); as he cited our increasingly statistical knowledge, as opposed to knowledge gained through relationship and story; as he implored the audience to pursue things on not a global scale, but a human scale (quoting E.M. Forster, he said, “It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.”)
I love Wendell Berry, and I align with most all of this––but there’s a nagging thought I can’t shake when confronted with such a severe view of place. Where in this worldview is there space for travel, for encountering other peoples and cultures, for being stretched outside familiarity? Perhaps not being “thrilled” by bigness, but at least confronting the bigness of the world so as to recognize our own smallness. It’s something I need to reconcile, as someone living in a city that is not my place who also believes in the importance of travel. I think back to the some of the places I’ve been––how those places, in some way, became a part of my place, my story. Not my place or home, but certainly places I have a deep affection for.
The National Cathedral from my rooftop in DC
“Imagination,” Berry said, “thrives on contact, on tangible connection” and we must imagine being able to live in a place without destroying it. Maybe it’s that contact––that tangible connection with the world––that builds an appreciation for the world, a desire to preserve rather than destroy. And ultimately that gives us an appreciation for our place, no matter how small, that knows us and that we know: home.
Read Wendell Berry’s whole lecture here.
Read “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front,” by favorite Wendell Berry poem.
Question: What’s your place? What does “place” mean to you?
I have an obsession with new notebooks. Every page full of possibilities, not limited by inarticulate scribblings that clutter beautifully blank pages, taking you down a path you perhaps did not mean to go down––limiting your options, one filled page at a time.
I simultaneously suffer from an obsessive need for organization, endeavoring to ensure that each notebook be identified with a specific and unique purpose. This is how a girl ends up with work notebooks, blog notebooks, prayer notebooks, notebooks for sketching, notebooks for keeping lists of things to do…it goes on.
The tension between our electronic age and my affinity for putting pen to paper complicates this further still, and before you know it, I’m standing in line at the bookstore about to purchase three crisp new unruled soft-cover moleskines despite having three small jotters and a computer in my bag. It seems absurd, but a new blog feels new-notebook-worthy. So here I sit, scribbling post #1 onto the first page, defining the following pages’ purpose, limiting my options.
There is always too much pressure for the first page. My husband, Jonathan, would relish the options, seekingout the best choice, whereas I launch quickly, decisively forward for fear that a moment’s pause might incite paralysis, for there are no words truly worthy of a first page. But once the writing begins, the anxiety begins to subside. I work my way from idea to idea with a growing satisfaction as I meander somewhere I was not expecting. I delight in the revelation that I am creating a path forward, one word afterr another. The blank pages before me could take me anywhere, just as I arrived here unexpectedly, two pages of path now behind me.
We arrived in DC unexpectedly––or at least, stayed unexpectedly, both Jonathan and I preparing to settle in Chicago. But here we are, three and a half years of path behind us. Delighted––though admittedly apprehensive––to create the path forward.
Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking. –Antonio Machado
I used to blog over here. Now I’ve moved here instead. This doesn’t count as the first post, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, feel free to subscribe to future posts by clicking the Follow button on the right.
Talk to you soon…
