september and october 2021: what I’m learning and loving

I weirdly woke up in the middle of the night earlier this week and realized that I needed to do a WILL list for September and October, so pardon the delay, October was weird, which means I fell off the what I’m learning and loving wagon (among other wagons!) – but I made the list a bit longer to make up for it.

What I’m loving

Good books. After a bit of a lull, I read three really good books in the last several weeks: Christ of the Celts, The Anthropocene Reviewed, If Women Rose Rooted, and Church of the Wild.

Soup cubes. Our schedules this fall have been really hectic with sports. I don’t like complaining about it because WE LITERALLY SIGNED UP FOR IT (side note: someone would make a killing if they started saner sports leagues – not the uber intense travel versions but also more competitive than the rec leagues). Eating together is a family value of ours, so we really try to still eat around the table together most nights of the week, but that gets a little tough between the kids’ sports schedules, Grant coaching, and me teaching yoga. I bought some of these soup cubes, thinking they would be an easy way to share soup with friends because you can just put the frozen cubes in a bag that they can recycle versus anyone having to try to keep track of containers. I’m sure they work beautifully for how I intended to use them, but we’ve actually just been using them for ourselves instead (oops). The ones that I bought are two cups, which is just the right portion for Sterley-sized eaters (but they have smaller versions if you don’t eat as much as we do). We eat a lot of soup, but I usually get sick of it by the third day and/or there isn’t enough to feed the whole family by then anyway. So I just put the leftovers in these cubes, freeze them, dump them in a freezer bag (labeled!), and then, when a hectic night hits, we can each pull out whatever soup “cube” sounds good.  

Following your curiosity. Thanks to reading (and listening to) lots of Martin Shaw, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and Sharon Blackie over the last several months, I have been returned to the rabbit hole of myth and story, a recurring theme in my life that I’m enjoying exploring. But one thing I’ve been realizing lately is how, when you follow your curiosity, the Universe sort of rewards you when you’re on the right path: putting the next right thing in front of you, whether that is a book, a community, or as seemingly simple as a great TV show.

What I’m learning

Eat more of a variety of fiber. I read this book, and while I’m not sure I’d recommend it necessarily (it was a ton of fluff, just listen to a podcast with the author), it did have some compelling science regarding the need for more and a better variety of plant fiber in our diets. Eating seasonally does this for you naturally, over the course of the year, so it would make sense that our bodies still do best on a mostly plant-based diet since we evolved that way. The author is a bit too black-and-white for me with his conclusions, but reading the book has inspired me to get more servings of veg in each day – including plants like wheat (via sourdough) and beans, and to try a few new things from our CSA than maybe I normally would. 

Baggage vs backstory. I read this fun romance over our fall break, and the author used the formula of the romance novel to help the couple in the story find their way back to each other. One of those elements was the backstory of the female character, which, once the male character better understands her backstory, leads to the story’s happy resolution. This rather benign element of this book stuck with me, and I kept thinking about the backstories of the people I love that help me understand them better.

And then I saw this post that seems like writing advice, but is actually really good life advice. Our own backstories and others’ backstories are helpful and even necessary for to better understand ourselves and others, but if we keep lugging them around with all of the associated resentment, expectations, and intensity that come with these kinds of past hurts, they become baggage. As Beth says in the post,

I believe it’s possible to drop the baggage but keep the backstory. Part of that comes from a reunderstanding of the events from the inside rather than the outside. Replacing victimized thinking with accountability. Part of it comes from letting go of regrets. Part of it comes from letting go of the desire to have it be different than it was. Maybe it’s about taking the lug out of luggage and carrying only the parts that seem useful.

I don’t want to carry around the heavy burden of my baggage, but I also don’t think it’s wise to aspire to let go of that information entirely. This image of holding onto the backstory but releasing the baggage is really helpful for me.

We’re living in the age of stars. Grant and I watched this episode of NOVA a few weeks ago, and I keep thinking about it. In it, they explained how scientists think the universe was created, and it’s mind boggling to put it lightly. We’re living in “the age of stars,” which is what has made life possible on Earth. In the episode, the scientists basically explain how life, from what we can observe, has been a pattern of life, death, and resurrection repeating itself in increasingly complex ways over billions of years. Just writing that blew my mind all over again. 

Seven generations, differently. I’ve long loved the Haudenosaunee wisdom of the seven generations teaching, which says that decisions made today should consider and lead to life for the next seven generations. But Chris La Tray wrote about his interpretation of the seven generations teaching:

It is still a seven-generation span, but we — all of us as individuals — are situated in the middle. And in our actions we must consider the effect they would have on the three generations previous, as well as the three to come. That is easier for me to get my head around. It makes me think of the debt I owe to the people who came just before me and how my choices reflect on that debt, and also makes me consider what kind of example I want to leave for those to come in the near future. Three generations doesn’t span that much time, really. It makes the choices one makes more significant. It’s not impossible to eventually know, or to have known, people at either end of the span.

I can’t help but think might serve our time a bit better because, as he says, it isn’t such a long timespan and is easier for us to get our arms around. It also acknowledges the responsibility we owe to the three generations that preceded us, while also wanting to serve the three generations to come, as well.

Mary Magdalene got screwed. As mentioned above, I’ve been digging into the power of story and myth these last few months. It’s like an itch that I can’t stop scratching. Somehow, this itch led me to this series of talks titled “women erased.” They are talks given by theologians or scholars about various women that were erased from scripture or church history in one way or the other.

The first one I listened to was with Elizabeth Schrader, a doctoral student at Duke, whose research shows that Martha was added to the Mary and Martha story in the Gospel of John as a way of diminishing the role of Mary Magdalene as a disciple in the early Christian church. Shrader says,

The Gospel of John is a central text of Christianity, and I believe it intended to give Mary Magdalene a very prominent role. But she may have been just too much for the time…[Adding Martha to the story] distorts her presentation and dilutes it. It makes her one of many women interacting with Jesus, as opposed to her being a prominent figure in the entire second half of the Gospel of John.

Watch the whole thing if you want more of the story, but Shrader’s research demonstrates that the later Gospel writers changed some things around, probably because history seems to show that Mary Magdalene had too much influence in the early Christian church – and the powers to be couldn’t have that as the church increasingly got in bed with empire. (If you want to dig more into Mary Magdalene, I loved this book and this one.)

Tag, you’re it if you made it this long. What are you loving and learning lately?!