This Week's Miscellany (08/19/23)

Is building contentment just settling?, Flannery, Calvin & Hobbes, and whether homeschooling is the right choice

Hi, I’m Haley! Book midwife (editor) and author. Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.

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Mailbag

Occasionally, I get a great question via email. I’ve been saving some of these up and I may try to tackle one weekly for the ol’ TWM. (Or I may lose steam and not grab a letter from the mailbag for months—time will tell!)

I really loved thinking about this question (condensed for space and identifying details removed):

Awhile back you wrote about your move back from Texas to your native Florida...and I was wondering if you could write more about that. That piece resonated with me because HOME is one of the things that has the deepest meanings for me. I had a hard time reading Hannah Coulter (LOVED it, but hard), because it talks about cherishing your roots and building a legacy of generations in the same geographical space. I have a hard time reconciling wanting so deeply to live in the place I grew up, where my heart still lives, yet the only home my kids have ever known is here in another part of the country, and multiple things make it clear that this is where we're supposed to be right now. Is this going to be for my kids what my home was for me? How do I reconcile feeling like I'm not exactly at home, while also wanting to bloom where we're planted and nourish these new, younger roots? How do you learn to love a place that you don't love as much as other places? Other spots I've lived in for less even hold more real estate in my heart than this place does, even though I see its beauty and the tremendous blessings we have here. These are the questions my thoughts circle back to time and time again.

I think about this all the time. In fact, I often struggle with the conundrum of not being able to live everywhere all at once. There are so many places I want to experience—not just as a tourist but as a resident. But that scattered FOMO can really mess with my mind if I let it run wild. It’s not reality.

What’s the difference between blooming where you’re planted and just settling when it comes to where you live? There’s a lot of things I miss about Texas. And to be perfectly honest, if I were to open a map and point to the spot I found most appealing to reside in, it wouldn’t be Tallahassee, FL. However, I am certain this is where we’re supposed to be to raise our children.

It can be easy to focus on the negatives:

• Lack of walkable neighborhoods. (There are none and every month we have pedestrian and cyclist deaths because the roads are designed for cars, not people.) I HATE THIS. We also don’t have good public transportation options.

• Ugly architecture and lack of historic charm. (Almost everything was developed post 1970, the very worst era for architecture. The lack of beauty kills something in my soul.)

• Bad traffic and long driving times.

• Absolutely mind-bogglingly hot and humid summers.

• Hurricanes.

• The coffee shops and book shops are wildly inferior to Waco’s.

But zeroing in on what I don’t like is unhelpful. There is also a lot to love:

• Giant live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. On foggy mornings, it looks enchanted.

• Great city park system.

• Cultural and fine arts events (because it’s a university town).

• Lush, natural beauty everywhere—and many glorious nearby state parks.

• The perfect house for our family—three minutes away from my oldest kid’s school.

• Great job for Daniel in his very specialized field (distilling).

• Same town as family!

• Good friends.

• Awesome place to grow up.

• Church with wonderful priests and community.

We have roots here and we’re currently in a season where we get to cultivate even deeper roots. This is such a blessing. Is it perfect? No, but it really is great. I have a tendency to live in my imagination and can easily fall into: Wouldn’t it be better if we lived somewhere with more history, charm, and culture like New Orleans? Wouldn’t it be better if we lived overseas in Scotland? Wouldn’t it be better if we had stayed in Texas? What if we moved somewhere we’ve never even seen—is it time for an adventure?

I’m currently curbing that wanderlust with some travel (now that it’s so much easier due to our kids ages than it used to be). But I’m putting down roots here. I’m enjoying the fresh seafood we can eat so close to the coast, the temperate winters that barely require closed-toed shoes, the memories we’re making with extended family, and the special events and blessings that are particular to this one place on the map.

I think the important thing is to carefully discern where you’re called to be right now. When you’re confident in that decision, then don’t look back (or too far forward). Build home right where you are, revel in the things that make that place special, really become part of the community. It may not be forever, but cultivating contentment isn’t the same as settling or giving up on dreams. There are positives and negatives to every single place.

And if you feel like you’re not in your forever home (I don’t want to retire in Florida, for example, but I do want to launch my kids from here), do a little wandering when you have the opportunity and keep dreaming. *Cough cough join our pilgrimage to Belgium next summer* But don’t fall into the misconception that all your problems or discontentment will be magically solved by moving. It may solve some problems (and maybe it’s an option you should consider!) but as they say, “wherever you go, there you are!” If I can’t find contentment in Tallahassee, FL, I’m not going to find it somewhere else. Is it settling? I think it’s more the chance to experience the peace of being settled and learn to love a place on the map and the people who live there.

What do you think? How do you embrace the limitations of where you live? How do you cultivate roots and contentment even in imperfection?

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Literary Links

This exquisite review of Amy Alznauer’s and Ping Zhu’s children’s picture book, The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor: A Life is a delight. I’m so glad Dappled Things takes children’s books seriously!

She Took to Staring by Jess Sweeney for Dappled Things

Alznauer traces Flannery’s attention to the odd to her childhood, but in particular, an experience of fame: “In that brief moment of fame, Flannery had a revelation. People didn’t want to see any old chicken; they wanted a weird one. There was something about strangeness that made people sit up and look.”

And for my fellow Calvin and Hobbes fans:

Why Bill Watterson Vanished by Nic Rowan

When Bill Watterson walked away from Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, he was exhausted. The comic strip had consumed ten years of his life, the latter half of which were spent fighting his syndicate for creative control and warring with himself as he fitfully came to realize that he had nothing left to say about a six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger. And the decision couldn’t have come at a worse time: Calvin and Hobbes was at the height of its popularity. To quit then seemed like career suicide. 

And this piece is a good read if you’re considering homeschooling. Homeschooling can be amazing! It can also be a bad fit. When homeschooling stopped working for my oldest kid, it was difficult for me to overcome a lot of the messaging that I’d ingested that homeschooling is always best. It might be! Or it might not. Don’t be scared to try homeschooling. It might end up being the best decision you ever made (and I’m still very glad we homeschooled our oldest three kids during the early years). But don’t romanticize it, either.

Hard lessons from a veteran homeschooler by Larissa Phillips

The outcome? My daughter went back to school in ninth grade, behind in math but caught up by October. She is now twenty, in college, and will graduate a year early. Always pragmatic, she is sanguine about her homeschool years. “Some parts were good, some parts were bad,” she says.

And my son? I regret homeschooling him. Taking him out of school did not meaningfully alleviate his struggles or nurture his gifts. He remained isolated, unregulated, and in need of more structure. I asked him, now twenty-four, what he thought of homeschooling. “One hundred percent a mistake,” he says. “I’m still catching up.”

And my friend Katy Carl has a new collection of short stories being released by Wiseblood Books!:

John-Paul Heil on Fragile Objects for Fare Forward

Katy Carl sees and articulates the workings of grace in the body with an attentiveness that surpasses perhaps any other author writing today. Her new collection, Fragile Objects, explores this theme through Carl’s own twist on the Southern Gothic in short stories purposefully evocative of Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, and, of course, Flannery O’Connor.

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Listening

I’ve been listening to a lot of Phoebe Bridgers and Elliott Smith. (This is not a cry for help, I promise!)

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The Year of Jane

The second reflection for Sense & Sensibility drops tomorrow! Keep an eye out for the weekly reflection and discussion question email.

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Coming Soon!

-An Interview with playwright Laura Pittinger about her new play about Servant of God, Dorothy Day

-Excerpts from my recent talk on G.K. Chesterton’s detective fiction

-Mini book reviews (for paid subscribers)

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Upcoming Events:

Together in Holiness Conference, October 21st, Fort Myers, FL

REGISTRATION NOW LIVE: Heavenly Hops Pilgrimage with Fr. Harrison Ayre to Belgium and Germany.

Got questions? I’m happy to answer them. Let’s go to Belgium!

And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. And a huge thank you to Raine for upgrading to a paid subscription. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.

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Thanks for reading!

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)

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