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Forged: A timeless way of living. A podcast about forging lives of discipline, delight, craft, and calling that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.
speaker-0 (00:00)
Hi, this is Dr. Brian Williams. Dean of the Templeton Honors College and host of the podcast Forged and I am coming to you today from St. David's, Pennsylvania.
speaker-1 (00:11)
And I'm Christine Perrin in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ⁓ hosting the podcast, Composed. And ⁓ we are exploring what are the patterns that compose our lives that help us to flourish.
speaker-0 (00:28)
⁓ Great. Christine, I'm so delighted to be on here with you and to be co-hosting these two podcasts together for the Humanitas Institute. I wonder if I could get you talking about the name of your podcast, Composed. When you think about a... Well, just when you think of the word composed, what does that mean to you and why is that the name of your podcast?
speaker-1 (00:54)
Well, I actually heard someone else a long time ago talking about the art of composing a life. So I think of it in that form, composing, not necessarily composed.
speaker-0 (01:07)
You are very composed though, I will say that.
speaker-1 (01:10)
Well, I'm glad I fooled you. ⁓ But this notion that we are homo viator, we are on the way, and we are composing something that is whole, that fits together and has integrity, and we want to learn from people who have done that. I find often it's interesting that we...
We put one thing in place in our lives and all these other things follow. And so I'm really interested in the human goods that people have embraced in particular ways that have created flourishing in the life of ⁓ their family and themselves, ⁓ their teaching.
speaker-0 (01:55)
Yeah, that's beautiful. As a child, my dad was a music professor and he had a friend, John Coates, come out from Nashville every year and he, John would stay with us and we had a Steinway grand piano in the front room. And I remember getting up on several mornings watching John compose at the piano. And it was the first time as a child, I realized how music was made, that you could make music from these notes. But one of the interesting things that I remember him
doing is I remember him putting a single line of notes across the graph first and that was the melody line. And then everything else, you know, had to compliment that melody line. And so it just reminds me of what you've just described. They're having those kinds of rhythms and rituals and patterns that are the core of your life. And then they give shape to everything else. And I think I saw that with John Coates composing at the piano, but it sounds similar. Is that similar to what you're describing?
speaker-1 (02:54)
Absolutely, that's a very beautiful analogy. I'm curious about how old you were when that happened.
speaker-0 (03:01)
Oh, I was young. mean, I remember I was probably six or seven and John would come out every spring and arrange music for my dad's musical group and compose it. And I remember coming out and John was already at the piano. And I remember sitting there on these steps, just watching him do that. So I was probably first or second grade, I would imagine, watching a, watching a composer make music.
make silent music in my front room, but he would dink on the piano and then write, write notes. But it was that melody line that really was the, I think was the core for everything else. And then by the time I'd come back in the afternoon or evening after school, the whole page would be filled up with all kinds of other notes, but it started with that melody line.
speaker-1 (03:42)
That is fascinating. I'm thinking about parallel experiences in my own life. One question I love to ask people about is an early memory of beauty, but that's a bit of a different question. ⁓ The kinds of things, for instance, when Chris became the head of a classical school, which meant that our kids were gonna be going to school there, our oldest daughter was in first grade, and all these things fell into line around that.
and ⁓ that pattern in our lives which involved ⁓ a community, a daily ⁓ rhythm, ⁓ and also just a lot of commitments on our part for how we were going to spend our time, who we were going to spend our time with. ⁓ That's another big example in my own experience.
speaker-0 (04:33)
Yeah, so how did you write the melody line, if you will? Sorry, I'm going with the music metaphor here. I know you're a poet. You compose, you know, poems. But I'm not a musician, but I think like one probably. So how did you end up deciding what the melody line was going to be for your family? Like, how did you decide what notes you were going to lay down or what you going to be committed to, I guess, as you composed your own life, you know, as you were composing your life?
with your family.
speaker-1 (05:04)
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because Christopher Alexander, who's been a big inspiration for these kinds of questions, ⁓ said that we all have these ⁓ needs that have to be resolved or conflicts that have to be resolved. And it often just emerges organically from our own lives, the kinds of questions that we have, our needs that we have, that we have to solve. And this was no different from that. had a daughter who was in kindergarten who had
you know, that precocious oldest child started observing the first grade teacher and started telling me things about the first grade teacher. So then I start, I went and observed and so we realized we needed a school and we had read this, ⁓ you know, we had read an article about classical education. It sounded great to us. Education mattered greatly to both of us. We wanted to do it differently than the way that we had been raised. And so we applied and
And that happened before Chris was actually hired to be the headmaster.
speaker-0 (06:09)
Put your daughter in the school. did. Yes. Okay.
speaker-1 (06:13)
⁓ We knew a few things about it. We knew what was valuable. that was many years ago. Our daughter is 34. ⁓ So things have changed. People were trying to explain it, trying to say, it really matters ⁓ the kinds of subjects that you study, the way that people live together, ⁓ the kind of things that you do in the home. They were trying to grasp at things, but...
We caught that tune, I think, ⁓ and could envision ourselves pursuing that with our children.
speaker-0 (06:50)
So were you in a community then where you saw people, you might say, of living the classical tradition, not just teaching it? I mean, was it a way of life for people in the school and this community, or was that, that develop with you guys there? Or did you come into a community that had its own rhythms?
speaker-1 (07:08)
The school was starting with us. ⁓ The very time we applied, it was really a gift to us. And I would say that we all kind of towards it, we groved towards it. We didn't know what that first line of music was, except that we very much wanted it to be different than what we had had and different than what we were seeing.
speaker-0 (07:10)
with you,
Yeah,
that's interesting. I teach a class called the ordinary life to graduating university seniors. And we think about the various parts of an ordinary embodied human life. We think about work and money and sex and family and art and play. And we often start class where I go around and say, what did you inherit from your mom and dad about this topic?
What kind of patterns were laid down in your family and what are you bringing with you into the ordinary life you're about ready to start living? And it's that first moment for many of them where they realize, ⁓ yeah, I need to become aware of the patterns that I grew up with because maybe I don't want to perpetuate those patterns. Maybe I do. Maybe they were really life-giving, healthful patterns, but it's a moment week by week for my students to stop and think and say, ⁓ this is...
This is how mom handled money. This was dad's relationship to money. Now let's read something about money and then make a decision about how I want to relate to money going forward or romance or sex or whatever it happens to be. ⁓
speaker-1 (08:38)
useful evaluation at that point in their lives.
speaker-0 (08:41)
Oh,
right, because they're going to and they're getting ready to leave university and start to set down some of those habits and patterns that will either sustain them or drain them in the in years and decades to come. And so I tell them, hey, I'm 54. It's a lot harder for me to change my habits and patterns than it is for you, because I have an extra 32 years practicing them. But you're at a moment where you're going to leave university.
You're gonna start a family, you're gonna start a career, and you have the opportunity to lay down some new rhythms and patterns and habits with respect to all of these topics that we're discussing related to an ordinary life. But it sounds like what you got, you came to that realization even before you came to school to just say, we grew up with or what we inherited is not the pattern we wanna set for our family.
speaker-1 (09:29)
Yes, and interesting, language that Alexander uses is living patterns and dead patterns. I would say almost all the patterns that I had that were good came from my family's home practices. So it wasn't a rejection of what they did. We did lots of reading, ⁓ we did lots of discussing, bird watching, learning the names of things, reciting. My dad always recited literature to me. ⁓
a quote notebook and pulled it out when it fell. Those things, and my mom was a maker. She did gardens and she did art and she did food. ⁓ And so those were things that somehow intuitively I wanted to be more central in the children's lives. in terms of what I had experienced formally, I wanted something different. At college, had the education of... ⁓
an apprentice education because I had master writers who were teaching me and that was instructive. How about you? Tell us a little bit about the forged name and maybe you've given us this beautiful metaphor of learning the melody line as part of a composition, but maybe you could tell us about a melody line in your own life. I know you well enough to suggest a few.
I'll let you take your course.
speaker-0 (10:57)
Sure, sure, sure. We'll see. once I stumble through an answer, you can help ⁓ me recover, I think. Yeah, I mean, the podcast name for my podcast is Forged. And it's similar to Composed, but I maybe a little, I don't know if it's more violent, if it's hotter, if there's a greater struggle there. But to Forge, I think of like, you know, a sword forged.
You know, heated up, made pliable, made soft, hammered into shape. The forge, or I remember growing up, there was a place near where I grew up in the Ozarks of southern Missouri called Silver Dollar City. And it was kind of an amusement park, but really a kind of arts and crafts kind of community. And I remember watching glass being blown in a forge. And glass, is hard, being put, heated up.
being made soft and pliable and then created because it was heated and subjected to that kind of pressure was made into something beautiful. And so I think with the idea of forge, the idea for me is what are those, not just what are those negative pressures, but what are the ways that we are forging our life? And what are the, yes, what are the hard?
challenges that we might face that shape our life, but also what are, how are we intentionally subjecting our lives to a certain kind of form? Because when you are forging something, the artist obviously has something in mind, right? He has some image that he wants this, you know, this horseshoe or this sword or this plow ⁓ or this piece of glass. He has a form he wants to take this.
material and shape it into that form. And so I think for me, that's what we're thinking about. What is the form of that life that I want to be formed into or that I want to be impressed upon my life or imprinted upon my life? And that could be very many, lots of things. Like, you know, I have a real penchant for hand thrown pottery and I love hand thrown mugs and I love hand thrown wine goblets and every single one of them in our.
I mean, call it a collection, but it's like William Morris's everything, you know, is useful and beautiful in our of our coffee mugs in our wine goblets. They're all different. They're all different shapes. They're all different patterns. They all have different glazes on them. They're slightly different than what I'm holding right now has a really slender shape and it's a lovely bluish green. So when we think about forging our lives after some form, it doesn't mean they're all going to look identical, but it means they all are going to be
Yeah, take some sort of shape. Otherwise, this would be a lump of clay. Yes. And I think sometimes life feels like it's a lump of clay and I have no shape, right? And so there's when you're left going, OK, I feel like a lump of clay. don't have form. I don't have order. I don't have shape. And things don't seem to be going so well for me. So I think that's for me when I think of forged. I think, how do I take the stuff of my life?
How do I take my loves, my passions, my interests, my opportunities and shape them into something meaningful that to use William Morris's phrase again is both useful and beautiful.
speaker-1 (14:21)
That's wonderful, Brian. You make me want to read to you Mewoji's short poem called Blacksmith Shop. I bet you know it.
speaker-0 (14:29)
I do know it, but I'm always happy for you to read the poem, Christine.
speaker-1 (14:33)
All right, I'll be quick. I liked the bellows operated by rope, a hand or a foot pedal. I don't remember, but that blowing and blazing of fire and a piece of iron in the fire held there by tongs, red, softened, ready for the anvil, beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe, thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam.
and horses hitched to be shod, tossing their manes, and in the grass by the river plowshares, sledge-runners, harrows waiting for repair. At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, hear gusts of heat at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this, to glorify things, just because they are.
speaker-0 (15:33)
⁓ that's why everybody should do a podcast with a poet right there. And I think I found my my my theme poem. Christine, that was so beautiful.
speaker-1 (15:43)
You were
saying those things. You talking about your life and I find your image really beautiful. The fact that fire and even like the firing of ceramic, of clay turns it into something usable. And I think of those students that you're talking about that you deal with every year. ⁓ know you teach the good life and you teach the ordinary life and ⁓
speaker-0 (15:45)
just don't quite as eloquently.
speaker-1 (16:12)
you're giving them some forms for their clay.
speaker-0 (16:17)
That's right, because I sometimes think I can't walk you through the hard times when they come. But there is a way in which you can prepare yourself to be the kind of person who can endure the hard things when they come. Right. So sometimes I ask them, what kind of person do you need to start being now so that when the hard things come, you're able to bear them well?
And you're able to enjoy them well. mean, a lot of what we talk about in my class, The Ordinary Life is simply how do we enjoy these things well? How do we live well with our work and vocation and money and home and friends and church and these kinds of things? so that's what we're doing a little bit in that. It's a little bit like taking people on a tour and this is like telling them about where they're gonna go.
Right. When they get there, they have some sense of where they are. Right. Like when you go to Orvieto, Italy, it's like the first time it's like, well, this is what it's going to be like. It's going to, know, but you don't know it till you get there, but you have some sense once you land. Okay. This is, yeah, this was described to me. This isn't my first time to think about what I'm experiencing right now.
speaker-1 (17:34)
Makes me think of Jill Poole when Aslan told her the signs, you know, that she had to remember. And she almost forgot them. You know, she did forget them. And then she got there and fled and dredged them up. What a gift to those students. Do you have a pattern in your own life that you'd like to share that has been one of those forging elements?
speaker-0 (18:02)
that have forged in a way of forged a life or composed life. mean, there are a number of things that come immediately to mind that we've, my wife Kim and I have kind of built into the pattern and rhythms of our lives or that I've done. I mean, I suppose one, a couple come to mind. ⁓ As you know, I'm a runner. I like to spend some time on the trails and on the road running. And I used to do a lot of biking. And I think
That has built a pattern into my life ⁓ of using my body, of being an ordinary embodied human being and the goodness of celebrating just the fact that I have a useful body, that it can do things. And so when I'm out running in the woods, now I have a dog, my dog Luna, Christina and I both have Vishlas. And ⁓ if you know Vishlas at all, we'll take your sympathy, thank you, because there's a lot of dog packed in a little Vishla.
I run with mine and it's just, for 20 years I've probably been a runner and for 10 years before that I did a lot of biking and it's just kind of a regular rhythm. seems to, I mean, in this way, it disciplines me in all kinds of ways. I watch what I eat, because I know, gosh, if I eat all that, it's going to make tomorrow's run harder. I watch my sleep because I'm like, I want tomorrow's run to be really invigorating and refreshing and I need my sleep. And so it kind of forms a pattern for my life, just having this regular occurrence of using my body.
in that kind of way and just really living into being an embodied soul, as I might describe myself. Another pattern is I have a real love, as you know, of art and beauty. And so we have, I'm just looking at some examples from my art collection on the walls right now, but Kim, my wife Kim is an artist and an art teacher.
And so one of the first things we did when we were getting together, we went up to the great Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, near where we were living at the time. And having art in our homes, having Kim creating art, enjoying art, for us often the theater or visual art museums, paintings, those kinds of things. That's been a regular life-giving pattern for us, participating in
Beauty, ⁓ moral philosophers call this one of the basic human goods. Like the kinds of things that are just good for us given the nature we have as humans. Like there are things that are good for our dogs, cause they have the nature they have, right? ⁓ There are things that are good for a plant, just given the nature of plant, has them looking at trees at my window. And things that are good for us as humans. And one of them is health in our bodies. And another one is participating in beauty.
and building those into what Albert Borgman, the philosopher of technology called ⁓ focal practices, the kind of practices that you build into your lives so that those wonderful moments you might have aren't just haphazard and episodic. know, Christine, you guys are so good at hosting great dinner parties. And some of my favorite dinner parties and conversations have been around your dining room table. ⁓ And you know,
We all have those experiences where we have a great dinner party with friends and they're like, that was fun. And it never happens again unless you make it a focal practice for your life or a brisk walk in the woods that's, you you find really invigorating or beautiful, but it just becomes episodic or haphazard unless you make it a focal practice in your life. And same with like beauty and the arts for us, it's a focal practice that one of the things we do
whenever we get the flyers in the mail about all the theaters in the Philly area, their plays that they're producing the next year, we'll kind of say, we want to go see Much New About Nothing there, and we want to go see Raisin in the Sun there, just so we make sure that we are building focal practices around these basic human goods into our life. So those are a couple for me, art and running or being outdoors, mountaineering and stuff, but.
What about you and your what are kind of the either focal practices or kind of the melody lines that you've set down?
speaker-1 (22:18)
Thank you for continuing to establish that metaphor. I have some questions I want to ask about your focal practices, but I'll get started. You mentioned having people over for dinner. I think there's something about feasting with others and...
drawing out conversation that is, like you say, not episodic, not chaotic or haphazard. ⁓ How many times have we all sat in places with people that we just, we really wanted to know what they thought, but somehow just couldn't gather things up. So one of the things that Chris and I have started to do is to ask table-wide questions when we're with people.
We'll do it at our house, but I'm sorry to say we'll also do it at other houses. It's a little intrusive, but...
speaker-0 (23:23)
Beware of having Christine Perrin over to your dinner party. You will start having conversations about interesting things. So if that's not what you want, don't have Christine over. But if that's what you want, you're a wonderful dinner.
speaker-1 (23:33)
That
is such a joy. And we have a few questions that are always wonderful. For instance, tell us about an early experience of beauty, an early memory of beauty. ⁓ you just told us about yours ⁓ with your father's friend moving at the piano. That's an extraordinary experience. ⁓
speaker-0 (23:58)
Yeah, that's an amazing question. Christine, I remember one of my favorite moments with you. We were sitting on a rooftop somewhere in Phoenix, I believe, and there were a bunch of us. We had some takeout dinner and we're on the roof of a hotel. It was a beautiful night. And you probably introduced that question. And there were probably 12 of us. And then, you know, like four hours later, I think we were all like, oh, you know, we should wrap up and call it a night. were just...
We were so we were all caught up in that in that question, but it came about because you intentionally asked us to all think about it and share.
speaker-1 (24:33)
And so much emerges surrounding it. There's the context of someone's life. There's what you find out about. I mean, think one of our friends told us that he grew up extremely poor. And his mother introduced beauty into his life. These things that you just would never know that then also cause you to reflect on your own life, your own context.
and the kinds of things that ⁓ were focal practices, to use your language, of your own family. So for me, one of them was, my parents just insisted, we also didn't have a lot of money, and they just insisted that we were gonna hike wherever we were. And I remember being six and living in Japan and everything being strange and going into the mountains,
I mean, still think of them as misty and experiencing Japan through those green mountains, the forests that had trees with prayers tied to them and coming upon shrines and ⁓ finishing the hike with a bottle of soda that was shaped like a fish in green glass. Marvel in its throat.
speaker-0 (25:55)
no, because i-
speaker-1 (25:58)
For my 50th birthday, I went back and found one of those on eBay ⁓ because I just thought this is such a beautiful object, but it was an ordinary object of my childhood, but contained in it. And I think that's the other thing is you begin to realize, well, these are like containers for my imagination.
speaker-0 (26:18)
Yeah, what were the containers, the objects or those kind of moments and practices?
speaker-1 (26:25)
Well, I think in my case, and maybe this is just, I think it's a little of both, but I think the objects really carry the memories so well. And in the case of the ones I just described, that soda bottle, ⁓ the trees with the prayers tied to them.
You know, even just the feeling of getting out into the woods and getting going and that fear of being bored, you know, the green all around, that sense of quiet that was all around you that was at first unwelcome.
speaker-0 (27:04)
Yeah, it's unsettling if you're not used to quiet. mean, it's often I've read several reports of folks who grew up in the city, know, city kids used to subway buses, trains, and then going out into the woods and being, yeah, profoundly unsettled by it because they've never actually heard quiet before or heard silence before.
speaker-1 (27:25)
Yeah,
and Wendell Berry even in his essay on Entrance into Woods talks about the fact that does this as a focal practice every month or so. He'll go for 24 hours into the woods and he talks about the almost profound despair that settles on you at first when you are leaving a place and you're trying to, you realize how maybe unimportant you are.
speaker-0 (27:54)
What you realize is that when you come back from those moments that the world just went on living without you just fine. know, I used to, one regular practice I've had over the years, I don't get to do it every year, but I've done it probably 12, 15 times over the years is to take four or five days away by myself somewhere. Where I used to, when I could, my mom and dad have a cabin down in the Ozarks ⁓ of Southern Missouri.
And I've gone there several times by myself and I've just been alone for four or five days. And you settle in, your spirit calms and you settle into the silence so that when you come back out of that and you hear voices, on the one hand, when you hear voices, you're like, ah, that sounds hard. I want to hear all this noise again. But yes, you also realize how small you are because you're like, yeah, everything went trucking along in the world just fine without me.
But it's also encouraging because you're like, you know what? I can take three or four days away by myself. I can take two days away by myself and the world is not going to fall apart. And so I have that kind of freedom, you know, if I can. I think about that, Christine, and one question I have for you is, you know, what will your children say or what do your children say were the
the focal practices or the melody line of their lives growing up in your household. mean, one for us, we lived, well, we did this before we moved. We lived in Kansas and in Kansas City, there was a great Shakespeare festival every year called Free Will. And it was free Shakespeare in the park, not from the Nelson Atkins. And you would just bring your own picnic and a bottle of wine and you'd set up and you'd, you you'd see some pretty fantastic ⁓ Shakespeare plays. And there was always a,
puppet show version for kids before the real version. That's great. And so like, you'd see a puppet show version of Othello and Iago would be green because he's envious, you And then our kids would come over and we'd watch the real one and they'd fall asleep halfway through. But then when we moved to Oxford, we were living close to Stratford-upon-Avon, so we'd go up to the Royal Shakespeare and we'd buy nosebleed seats. But even when our kids were five or six or seven, we'd take them to see live Shakespeare.
and I would provide a little kind of running commentary in their ear and they didn't catch all the language, but they knew who the bad guys were and they knew who the good guys were, right? And so one time we're driving through Oxford after we had recently seen Hamlet and my six year old son said, hey dad, who's that guy with the sword? And I was like, well, there were a lot of them son, who do you mean? said, oh, the guy in that play. And I said, oh, Hamlet. And he goes, oh yeah, I like that guy. I want to see him again. Right?
speaker-1 (30:45)
cold and so you're right.
speaker-0 (30:47)
% of what was said, but yet he had the experience and he knew, you know, who the who the central character was. And so we've just done that over the course of our lives. And I'm doing that with my nine year old daughter. Now we recently saw 12th night and we recently saw much to do about nothing. And, know, so we buy cheap tickets to live Shakespeare. And and then, you know, my my kids are old enough. They've have enough friends now and they realize that not, you know, a lot of their other friends don't have that experience.
And it wasn't that we were spending lots of money to do this. We were just trying to give them the experience of seeing live theater and, and, know, seeing good stories told well. that's one of the, one of the rhythms of that. think my kids will look back on and say, yeah, mom and dad took us to see some pretty great Shakespeare ⁓ plays.
speaker-1 (31:34)
That's fantastic. It's so nice to hear what other people do and to watch and inhabit other people's lives and make your list. ⁓ I hate to speak for my children. ⁓ My parents had a little cabin without running water up at Pine Grove Furnace, the Michaux State Forest. We started to go there once a week in the summers, the K-9, during the day. We would hike.
And then we would have our rest time. We always had a quiet time, you know, ⁓ where people would read or think. And, you know, we'd have rest time there and sometimes we would stay overnight, but often it was just being in the woods, playing in the woods. There were bows and arrows. ⁓ That was, again, similar along the lines of what we're talking about of just getting away, being in nature, being immersed. ⁓
⁓ People call it forest bathing. ⁓
speaker-0 (32:37)
Thank
you very much, but I get the idea. That's really lovely. ⁓ That was my mom. My grandma would walk a mile after dinner every night out on the farm in South Central Kansas. And she did that until she was well into her 80s. And so we grew up walking a mile with grandma into the back pasture. And then my mom carried that on. so, you know, that's when we weren't watching TV. There was nothing to distract us. And it was just us and mom and mom had named the flowers and we look at trees and we look at the sky. And I happened to grow up near some woods. And so
you know, walk the deer trails and stuff like that. But with that just sense of being, and you don't, nobody, you weren't mall walking as we call it. You weren't walking for fitness, right? You were walking to be together in God's good creation. And that's a really lovely, simple practice, isn't it?
speaker-1 (33:25)
It is. I like, especially in the suburbs, you can learn so much about flowers because people have gardens and you can start to name those flowers. It's interesting, some of your children are more interested in those things than others. ⁓ But it sticks, you know, just the rehearsal of it.
speaker-0 (33:49)
It does, it does. I mean, it is interesting to hear my children reflect on their, you know, what they remember us doing. Sometimes they think we did certain things a lot of times and I'm like, I think we did that two or three times, but they were like core for them. Yeah, they learn like that. And so, yeah, those are the kind of things that make for...
speaker-1 (34:05)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (34:14)
Well, to use the language, those are the things with which you can compose a life, a beautiful life or forge a life, those kind of rhythms and practice. And I think that's what you're getting at with, that's Alexander's idea, right? Tell me his name again.
speaker-1 (34:29)
Christopher Alexander. Right. Yeah, he's talking about living patterns, habits, or routines, or even literal patterns in architecture, because he was an architect. Okay. That bring aliveness. And he said, you know, some patterns are dead. Yeah, that's interesting. patterns are alive. I mean, that'd be an interesting thing for us to talk about too. How do you discover
Which are which and to what extent is that objective and to what extent is it subjective? mean, a lot of the things that we're talking about are shared goods, know? ⁓ Nature, the body, feasting, which also comes with fasting. ⁓ I'm grateful for a pattern that...
speaker-0 (35:19)
That's right.
speaker-1 (35:24)
that was in my life that is sort of strange, but I just had a sandwich and a piece of fruit every day for lunch. It never was different from that.
speaker-0 (35:33)
That was your path that you had that every day like a Santa
speaker-1 (35:36)
Yeah,
I mean, it was my mom's decision and that ascetical pattern is actually part of what prepares you for the feast. So patterns aren't just the good special things that you introduce into a life. I remember our family started going to Vespers once a week, Saturdays. It's an evening prayer service that lasts for
speaker-0 (36:00)
Alright, what's Vespers?
speaker-1 (36:05)
40 minutes, ⁓ it's the kind of ⁓ gladsome light or Foss Hilarion, that evening, like the sun is setting, let's mark this setting of the sun with thanksgiving to God. ⁓ And the church is usually dark, there are candles lighted, so it's a very contemplative ⁓ shutting down of ⁓ the day. And...
I remember all the things that had to of congeal or compose, is a better word, compose around that one choice, that one decision. You have to stop your Saturday work in order to get there at six o'clock. And then you don't come home really at seven or something, 30, to start your work again and work like a dog into the night.
and then you have a meal. And so there's this ⁓ pattern of preparation. that's, know, really historically this preparation and fulfillment ⁓ is part of what ⁓ we understand that these things come in pairs. And then, you know, when you're thinking about the week, the work that you have in a week and it's stopping at 5.30 or something on a Saturday, that means certain things about other days.
⁓ And so I found that that one commitment helped me to begin to understand time and time, yes, by the clock, but also it was something about time by significant event. What are the things that you want to put in your life? ⁓
speaker-0 (37:48)
Well, I mean, there's a study of time, not to get into this, but there's a study of time is called chronemics. And it's just the study of how different cultures and different nations relate to time and how in different moments in our own life we relate to time. Sometimes we talk about Kronos time, That's like the ticking of the clock, know, the second hand on your watch going around. And Kairos time, two words for time. And Kairos is that sense of like the fulfillment of time.
that moments when time seems to slow down. And sometimes those are those moments of, you know, the notes that you've put in place, you know, the focal practices of your life, like dinner parties at your house. Time slows down. Going for a walk in the woods, time seems to slow down. And you forget that anything else is going on, right? When you ask yourself, is there anywhere else I would rather be? No.
Is there anyone else I'd rather be with? No. Is there anything else I'd rather be doing? No. If you can ask those kinds of questions and say no to them, you have a focal practice or you have one of these kind of focal notes around which you can compose your life, I think.
speaker-1 (39:06)
That's a really helpful comment. I'm interested in hearing from you, and I'll give you just one example for myself, of people that helped to teach you this. Obviously your parents and your own family practices and your wife. ⁓ But I went to a ⁓ names day celebration. ⁓ I had never heard of this. I didn't know what it was, but it was...
this person had received a name upon being baptized, that was a church name related to a saint. And that was what, he was American, but in his culture, he was originally Greek, and in his culture, that's what you celebrated. So this was, I was maybe 30 and had three kids, and he was a Greek immigrant who worked as a painter and had a busy,
you know, normal grind kind of life. But this was a Sunday afternoon and everything stopped in his life and he roasted, they roasted a lamb and they invited everybody. And, know, I was kind of thinking, well, maybe I'll stop by for an hour. Maybe our family will stop by for an hour. You know, no, you don't go to a lamb roast for an hour. And it just struck me. I don't ever do this. I don't ever stop everything for a feast that is
speaker-0 (40:19)
you a great family? No, you don't.
speaker-1 (40:30)
that cost me so much and feels so valuable. And it really gave me a crisis. I had a kind of crisis of why is my life so governed by that 24-7 way of thinking so that even on a... I didn't have a concept of feast day. And this person's example, because a lot of times you think, well, the kind of people who do that, they're just different from me. They have more resources or they have more...
sophistication or something. And that was not the case here. And it was so instructive. It really made me, it was a great teacher for me. He doesn't even know that. Then the next thing that happened was he died a week later. ⁓ wow. He had a heart attack with a young man. And that gripped me as well because I thought, if he hadn't stopped for that feast day? You know, his life would have been that 24-7.
speaker-0 (41:27)
And my guess could have been that even if he knew he was going to die in a week, he would have still held that feast. Because that's the kind of thing that makes for a life worth living is why you see and just think of literature, all the significance of feasts and festivals throughout history and throughout literature. It's when you stop working. I all the feasts that are in
speaker-1 (41:35)
even more so he would have.
speaker-0 (41:54)
Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, right? All the feasts that are in Homer's Odyssey. Yes. All the feasts that just like mark the time when you stop laboring, you're with other people, you're sharing a meal that costs you something. So there is that kind of, you know, discipline and cost that allows you to have this moment. But that moment is feels like a I don't want to say a distinctly human moment, but it is is it is a moment, it seems like of this kind of either.
where time slows or time stops or something like that. And to have to build those into your life and to build the other rhythms of your life around those kinds of opportunities or activities or practices seems like how you compose or forge a well-lived ordinary life.
speaker-1 (42:39)
Yes, again, when you create that melody line, then other things gather around it. And I would go back to that language to a preparation and fulfillment. ⁓ It's costly, but it's also an organizing principle. And what is worth organizing around is a question that I think we're all asking ourselves.
speaker-0 (43:03)
That is true. you know, I mean, again, to come back to me as a runner, I want to, why do I do that? I want to be able to run 20 miles through the woods if I want to, or 10 miles through the woods if I want to and feel good. But there's a cost to be able to do that, right? There's a cost with respect to kind of training and eating and discipline and sleep. And it's almost like when I go out for those kinds of runs, that's like the feast. That's the rhythm. Like that's when I'm really just out.
running and enjoying moving, it comes, it requires preparation. It requires cost. And it means that I have to, I'm not able to do some other things. Cause that's, that's the good that I want. One of the goods that I want to pursue. don't think that's too far off.
speaker-1 (43:47)
Not in the least.
People also use the language of trade-offs, which I think is less health. I mean, it's less distinctive language. ⁓ I think that feast and fast preparation and fulfillment, ⁓ even focal points or organizing principles or life-giving patterns or another language that Christopher Alexander uses, the quality that cannot be named.
and.
speaker-0 (44:20)
The quality that cannot be named.
speaker-1 (44:24)
Yes, and that patterns can amount to. And he's speaking literally about architecture and about the way in which you can build a room that resolves certain human goods and needs that is not subjective.
speaker-0 (44:46)
Yeah, that's interesting. The quality that cannot be named. We're thinking about architecture as well. When I think about one of the classical defining properties of beauty that we get from the classical medieval tradition is harmony of the parts. Right? Now we're back to that musical metaphor again. And what makes something beautiful in part is the various parts of it being harmonized somehow. And that's what you're doing when you're designing a building. It's making a harmony of all of these.
parts and I think there's something there for our lives as well, though, you know, some of the parts are a little uglier than others and don't harmonize very well. so, you know, it's also, but that's a little bit some of those dead patterns to come back to another thing, you another idea that you mentioned, like what are those things that, yeah, you know what? These aren't bringing a harmony to my life. This pattern of my life, you know, whether that's a...
a certain bad habit or a certain addiction or a certain practice, these aren't life giving to the kind of ordinary well lived life that I want to live with my family or in my own life and having the courage to recognize those and then just say, you know what? I need to let that go.
speaker-1 (46:01)
Yeah, and I think Alexander would use language like wholeness, aliveness, spirit, human well-being, our flourishing in these well-made places. And I think one question we can ask ourselves is, ⁓ what is the yield? What is the fruit of that pattern that you've, know, of that focal pattern?
And typically we all want to keep doing the things that yield good fruit and life.
speaker-0 (46:35)
the the melody, the beautiful music that compose, that forge something useful and beautiful. Yeah, and I think that's what we're exploring in these two podcasts. How has, if you will, how has the tradition, the literary tradition, philosophical, theological tradition, how have the patterns and exemplars that we've received ⁓ before us
speaker-1 (46:47)
That is what we're trying.
speaker-0 (47:04)
how do they help us compose a well-lived ordinary life and forge a well-lived ordinary life? And I think that's what we're exploring.
speaker-1 (47:11)
Which reminds me that you haven't said who your exemplar is. I gave you the example of this friend.
speaker-0 (47:18)
Yeah, I hadn't come up with somebody so I was gonna keep talking and hope you just forgot that I had to mention mine yet. So yeah, I think of several people. mean, honestly, it is a little hard. The first people that come to my mind are my grandmother and my mother. My grandmother on the farm, she was a farm ⁓ wife. She was trained as a teacher at Emporia State Teachers College and had a lifetime teaching certificate and taught a few years, but then became ⁓
⁓ a farm wife and mother. And I just saw her rhythms. And one of the rhythms that we always had that even like my, Kim, my wife will comment on, or people who have come into the family is that after dinner, we just, nobody leaves the dining room table. We sit around and tell stories. And what everybody would say about both my mom and my grandmother is that they laugh well. And there's always more to do on a farm, right? There's always more stuff to do. And the dishes were there to be done.
but we always took time to sit around the dining room table and tell stories and laugh. So much so that my wife, Kim, knows stories about dogs that died before she ever entered the family. Why? Because we told stories about these dogs, because these dogs were part of our history. know, Wendell Berry would say they were part of our membership, right? They were part of our membership. They were part of this story of our own lives. so sitting around telling stories and what's my favorite thing to do now with my mom?
is sit around with a cup of coffee or while mom's making dinner and sitting still as a 54 year old, I'll sit on the kitchen counter and talk to mom like I did when I was five. And we tell stories and we laugh and that's what we do. And so I think that is my mom and grandmother are exemplars for me about people who had baked into the rhythms of their lives, these kinds of practices, know. But you know, my mom.
It wasn't like she had nothing else to do. She was a nurse. She was a university nurse and she ran the Sunday school program at church and she was always involved in all kinds of things, but she knew how to build into her lifetime for stories and laughter and walks in the woods. And I think that set a kind of pattern for me that ⁓ have been part of the way we've been forging our family's life as well.
speaker-1 (49:36)
And I would say your students' lives, because all of, I've been present with you when you've had your students come to your house to do the same thing, whether they're undergrads or graduate students and seeing you with your schedule, which is like no other schedule, ⁓ you know, show up for people when they're doing their senior recital and, you know, staying afterwards and talking to their family and friends. ⁓ so it strikes me another way that
this question could be asked is what hospitality has been offered to you to enable you to live this way towards others? ⁓ And you've answered that question, but that's another way of thinking in terms of hospitality.
speaker-0 (50:21)
Yeah, the ways we've received. mean, your question about who were your exemplars, you know, in a way, the exemplars and I can think of professors who, know, professors come to mind having spent a lot of time in school. A lot of my models are. But, know, what they've given me, they've given me those kinds of gifts, given you those kinds of gifts. And in a way, that hospitality, right? Part of the ancient practice of hospitality called zinnias, certainly you see in the Odyssey is one of the things you do. And I love this.
When somebody would come to your door in the ancient world, certainly in Homer, you would welcome them in because they had a need and you wouldn't ask them who they were until after you had relieved them of their burden, after you had got their feet washed, after you had set them down for dinner, after you had given them the best food.
speaker-1 (51:08)
oiled skin and beard.
speaker-0 (51:12)
over skin sometimes bathe them. And then after all of that hospitality, you would say, yeah. And who are you? Right? You. It's right. It's and it wasn't predicated on who they were. They didn't matter if they were important. But then when they would leave, often you would give them a host gift to take with them. And so you were giving them a gift. So it strikes me that those people who
kind of were models for us or maybe some of the people that we'll have on our podcast and talk about how they have composed or forged their life. One of the things they're doing by sharing their stories with us in a way is showing hospitality to us, right? Welcoming us into their lives and then giving us the gift of some of the ways and patterns and practices that have helped them compose and forge their own lives. And so I think that's one of the things that maybe you and I want to explore with the people that we...
Have on our little podcasts here.
speaker-1 (52:06)
Absolutely. There's absolutely ⁓ nothing sui generis. People offer something to you, you flourish because of it or thrill because of it and you turn around and desire to offer it to someone else. ⁓
speaker-0 (52:25)
but also part of, that's another focal practice of generosity, hospitality and generosity, right? Sharing our lives with others. Well, Christine, I'd love to keep having a conversation with you, but watching the clock tick down here, we're back into Kronos time, watching the second episode of the way. I wonder if we should wrap it up. And you know, this has been really wonderful and I look forward to listening to your podcast. Likewise. And how you...
converse with people about how to compose a ⁓ life through living rhythms and melodies and patterns and habits.
speaker-1 (53:04)
And likewise, I'm looking forward to hearing about the forging that goes on in the lives of the people that you talk to and the shape and the useful beauty that
speaker-0 (53:13)
I am too.
Right. Yeah, I am too. That's great. with this, I will sign off again. This is Brian Williams, Dean of the Temple and Honors College and the host of the podcast Forged.
speaker-1 (53:31)
and Christine Perrin, a professor in the Honors College at Messiah University and host of the podcast, Composed. Thank you. It's great to
speaker-0 (53:43)
Talk.
Thanks Christine, as always.