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Composed: A timeless way of living. A podcast for women exploring living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.
Hi, this is Doctor. Brian Williams. I'm 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 2:And I'm Christine Perrin in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hosting the podcast Composed, and I am we are exploring what are the patterns, that compose our lives that help us to flourish.
Speaker 1: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. Absolutely. When you think a well, just when you think of the word composed, what does what does that mean to you and why is that the name of your podcast?
Speaker 2: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 1:You are very composed though, I will say that.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad I've fooled you. But this notion that we are homo viatur, 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 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 1: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 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.
Speaker 1:And then everything else had to complement that melody line. And so it just reminds me of what you've just described. They're having those kind 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. It sounds similar.
Speaker 1:Is that similar to what you're describing?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That's a very beautiful analogy. I'm curious about how old you were when that happened.
Speaker 1:Oh, I was young. I 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 composer make silent music in my front room. But he would dink on the piano and then write notes. It was that melody line that really was the I think was the core for everything else.
Speaker 1: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 2:That is fascinating. I'm thinking about parallel experiences in my own life. Mhmm. 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 a the head of a classical school, which meant that our kids were gonna be going to school there.
Speaker 2:Our oldest daughter was in first grade. And all these things fell into line around that decision and that pattern in our lives, which involved a community, a daily rhythm, and also just a lot of commitments on our part for what 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 1:Yeah, so how did you write the melody line, if you will? Sorry, I'm going with the music metaphor here. Know you're a poet, you compose 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?
Speaker 1:How did you decide what notes you were going to lay down or what you were going to be committed to, I guess, as you composed your own life? As you were composing your life with your family?
Speaker 2: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 or needs that we have that we have to solve. And this was no different from that. We had a daughter who was in kindergarten who had that precocious oldest child started observing the first grade teacher and started telling me things about the first grade teacher.
Speaker 2:So then I went and observed. So we realized we needed a school. And we had read an article about classical education. It sounded great to us. Education mattered greatly to both of us.
Speaker 2:We wanted to do it differently than the way that we had been raised.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:so we applied. And that happened before Chris was actually hired to be the headmaster.
Speaker 1:You applied to put your daughter in the school?
Speaker 2:We did.
Speaker 1:Yes. Okay.
Speaker 2:That was great. And we knew a few things about it. We knew what was valuable, but that was many years ago. Our daughter's 34. So things have changed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People were trying to explain it, trying to say, Well, it really matters, you know, the kinds of subjects that you study, the the way that people live together, the kind of things that you do in the home. Know, they were trying to grasp at things, but we caught that tune, I think. Yeah. And could envision ourselves pursuing that with our children.
Speaker 1:So were you in a community then where you saw people, you might say, kind of living the classical tradition, not just teaching it? I mean, it a way of life for people in the school and this community, or was that did that develop with you guys there? Did you come into a community that had its own rhythms?
Speaker 2:The school was starting with us.
Speaker 1:Oh, with you? Okay.
Speaker 2:The very time we applied.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You know, it was really a gift to us. Yeah. And and I would say that we all kind of stumbled towards it. We groped towards it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: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 1: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, Oh, yeah, I need to become aware of the patterns that I grew up with because maybe I don't want to perpetuate those patterns.
Speaker 1: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, Oh, 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 2:It It's very seems useful evaluation at that point in their lives.
Speaker 1: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 years and decades to come. 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 thirty two years practicing them. But you're at a moment where you're going to leave university, you're going to start a family, you're going to 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 you came to that realization even before you came to school to just say, What we grew up with or what we inherited is not the pattern we want to set for our family.
Speaker 2:Yes, and interesting, the 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 We gave did lots of reading, we did lots of discussing, hiking, bird watching, learning the names of things, reciting. My dad always recited literature to me. Kept a a quote notebook, you know, and and pulled it out when it was ready.
Speaker 2:Those things. And my mom was a maker, you know, 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
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:In my children's lives. But in terms of what I had experienced formally Oh, at school. I wanted something different.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:At college, I had the education of an apprentice education because I had master writers who were teaching me, and that was instructive. How about you? Tell 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 conversation. But maybe you could tell us about a melody line in your own life.
Speaker 2:I know you well enough to suggest a few. I'll let you take your course.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, sure. We'll see. And once I stumble through an answer, you help me recover, I think. Yeah, I mean the podcast name for my podcast is Forged and it's similar to composed but maybe a little, I don't know if it's more violent, if it's hotter, if there's a greater struggle there. To forge, I think of like a sword forged, heated up, made pliable, made soft, hammered into shape.
Speaker 1: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, which 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 not just what are those negative pressures, but what are the ways that we are forging our life and what are the hard challenges that we might face that shape our life but also 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.
Speaker 1:He has some image that he wants 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 lots of things.
Speaker 1:I have a real penchant for hand thrown pottery and I love hand thrown mugs and I love hand thrown wine goblets. Every single one of them in our, I'm going to call it a collection, it's like William Morris's Everything is Useful and Beautiful of our coffee mugs and our wine goblets. They're all different. They're all different shapes. They're all different patterns.
Speaker 1:They all have different glazes on them. They're slightly different. The one I'm holding right now has a really slender shape and it's a lovely bluish green. 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 take some sort of shape. Otherwise, this would be a lump of clay.
Speaker 1:And I think sometimes life feels like it's a lump of clay and I have no shape, right? So there's seasons when you're left going, Okay, I feel like a lump of clay. I don't have form. I don't have order. I don't have shape.
Speaker 1:And things don't seem to be going so well for me. 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' phrase again, is both useful and beautiful.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful, Brian. You make me want to read to you Miwoj's short poem called Blacksmith Shop. I bet you know it.
Speaker 1:I do know it, but I would always happy for you to read a poem, Christine.
Speaker 2:Alright. 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, eaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe, thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam, and horses hitched to be shod, tossing their manes.
Speaker 2: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 1:Oh, that's why everybody should do a podcast with a poet right there. And I think I found my my my my my my theme poem. Christine, that was so beautiful.
Speaker 2:Well, were saying those things. You were saying all these things your life. I find your image really beautiful. Fact that fire and even like the firing of ceramic clay turns it into something usable. And I think of those students that you're talking about that you deal with every year.
Speaker 2:I know you teach the good life and you teach the ordinary life and you're giving them some forms for their clay,
Speaker 1:some heat. 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? 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?
Speaker 1: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 these kinds of things? And 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 going to go, right?
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1: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. You don't know it until you get there, you have some sense once you land, Okay, this was described to me. This isn't my first time to think about what I'm experiencing right now.
Speaker 2:Makes me think of Jill Poole when Aslan told her the signs that she had
Speaker 1:And to
Speaker 2:she almost forgot them. Did forget them. Then she got there 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 Yeah.
Speaker 2:Elements.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that have forged in a way of forged a life or composed life. I mean there are a number of things that come immediately to mind that 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.
Speaker 1: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. So when I'm out running in the woods now, have a dog, my dog Luna, Christina and I both have Vizslas and if you know Vizslas 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 for twenty years I've probably been a runner and for ten years before that I did a lot of biking and it's just kind of a regular rhythm. I mean, 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.
Speaker 1: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 forms a pattern for my life, just having this regular occurrence of using my body in that 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. I'm just looking at some examples from my art collection on the walls right now, but 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.
Speaker 1:There are things that are good for our dogs because they have the nature they have. There are things that are good for a plant, just given the nature a plant has them looking at trees out my window. 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. Christine, you guys are so good at hosting great dinner parties.
Speaker 1:Some of my favorite dinner parties and conversations have been around your dining room table. We all have those experiences where we have a great dinner party with friends and you're like, Oh, 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 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 say, Oh, we want to go see Much Ado 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.
Speaker 1: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 2:Thank you for continuing to establish that metaphor. I have some questions I want to ask about your vocal practices, but I'll get started. You mentioned having people over for dinner.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:you know, 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. And we'll do it at our hospital. I'm sorry to say we'll also do it at other houses.
Speaker 2:It's a little intrusive, but
Speaker 1: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 it, but if that's what you want. You're a wonderful dentist.
Speaker 2:That is such a joy. And we have a few questions that are always wonderful. Instance, tell us about an early experience of beauty, an early memory of beauty. And you you just told us about yours with your father's friend moving at the piano. That's an extraordinary experience.
Speaker 1:Remember a crazy question. Christina, remember one of my favorite moments with you, we were sitting on a rooftop in Phoenix, I believe, there were a bunch of us grab some like 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 four hours later, I think we were all like, Oh, we should wrap up and call it We a were all caught up in that question, but it came about because you intentionally asked us to all think about it and share.
Speaker 2: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. His mother introduced beauty into his life.
Speaker 2:Know, 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. Because- And I remember being six and living in Japan and everything being strange and going into the mountains, I mean, I still think of them as misty and and experiencing Japan through those green mountains, the forest that had, you know, trees with prayers tied to them and wow. Coming upon shrines and, finishing the hike with a bottle of soda that was shaped like a fish in green glasses.
Speaker 1:I don't know because I would
Speaker 2:marvel in it, though. For my fiftieth birthday, I went back and found one of those on eBay. Yeah. You know, because I just thought, oh, this is such a beautiful object. But it was an ordinary object of my childhood, but contained And in I think that's the other thing is you begin to realize, well, these were like containers for my Yeah,
Speaker 1:what were the containers? The objects or those kind of moments and practices?
Speaker 2:Well, I think in my case, and maybe this is just I think it's a little of both, I think that 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. Even just the feeling of getting out into the woods and getting going and that fear of being bored,
Speaker 1:you
Speaker 2:know, the green all around, that sense of quiet that was all around you that was at first unwelcome.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's unsettling if you're not used to quiet. I mean, it's often I've read several reports of folks who grew up in the city, city kids used to subway, buses, trains and then going out into the woods and being profoundly unsettled by it because they've never actually heard quiet before or heard silence before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Wendell Berry even in his essay on Entrance Into Woods talks about the fact that he does this as a focal practice every month or so. He'll go for twenty four hours into the woods And he talks about the almost profound despair that settles on you at first when you are leaving and a you're trying to, you realize how maybe unimportant you are. What you realize
Speaker 1:is that when you come back from those moments that the world just went on living without you just 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 twelve, fifteen times over the years, is to take four or five days away by myself somewhere
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1: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 don't 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, Oh, you know what?
Speaker 1:I can take three or four days away by myself. I can't take two days away by myself and the world is not going to fall apart. And so I have that kind of freedom if I can. I think about that Christine and one question I have for you is what will your children say or what do your children say were the focal practices or the melody line of their lives growing up in your household? 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 Fest ival every year called Free Will.
Speaker 1:And it was free Shakespeare in the park, right
Speaker 2:from
Speaker 1:the Nelson Atkins. And you would just bring your own picnic and a bottle of wine and you'd set up and you'd see some pretty fantastic Shakespeare plays and there was always a puppet show version for kids before the real version.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1:And so you'd see a puppet show version of Othello and Iago would be green because he's envious. 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, 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.
Speaker 1:Right? And so one time we're 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? He said, guy in that play.
Speaker 1:And I said, Oh, Hamlet. And he goes, Oh yeah, I like that guy. I want to see him again. And he's six years old and so you're like
Speaker 2:That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:98% of what was said but yet he had the experience and he knew who the central character was. So we've just done that over the course of our lives. I'm doing that with my nine year old daughter now. Recently saw Twelfth Night and we recently saw Much Ado About Nothing. And so we buy cheap tickets to live And chick then kids are old enough, they have enough friends now and they realize that a lot of their other friends don't have that experience.
Speaker 1: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 seeing good stories told well. So that's one of the rhythms that I think my kids will look back on and say, Oh yeah, mom and dad took us to see some pretty great Shakespeare plays.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, 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 talk speak for my children. We did have My parents had a little cabin without running water up at Pinegrove Furnace, the Michaux State Forest. Okay.
Speaker 2:And we would we started to go there once a week in the summers, the kids and I during the day. Oh, lovely. We would hike. Okay. And then we would have our rest time.
Speaker 2:We always had a quiet time, you know, where people would read or think. 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, as similar along the lines of what we're talking about of just getting away, being in nature, being immersed.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:People call it forest bathing. I think that's a little
Speaker 1:a little too 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 South Central Kansas. And she did that until she was well into her eighties.
Speaker 1:And so we grew up walking a mile with grandma into the back pasture and then my mom carried that on. And 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 would name the flowers and we'd look at trees and we'd look at the sky. And I happened to grow up near some woods and so would walk the deer trails and stuff like that, but that just sense of being, and 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.
Speaker 1:And that's a really lovely simple practice, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It is. 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 1:It does, it does. I mean, is interesting to hear my children reflect on their, 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 Yes. Them, Yeah, they loom like that.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, are the kind of things that make for 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. I think that's what you're getting at with is that Alexander's idea, right? Tell me his name again.
Speaker 2:Christopher Alexander.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2: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. Some That's patterns are alive. And I mean, that that'd be an interesting thing for us to talk about too.
Speaker 2:How do discover which are which and to what extent is that objective and to what extent is it subjective? I mean, a lot of the things that we're talking about are shared goods. Yeah. You know? Nature, the body, feasting, which also comes with fasting.
Speaker 2:It does.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm grateful for a pattern that that was in my life that is sort of strange, but I just had a a sandwich and a piece of fruit every day for lunch. It never was different from that. And that
Speaker 1:That was your that you you you had that every day? A Like Santa?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, was my mom's decision. 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. Know, they're also I remember our family started going to Vespers once a week.
Speaker 1:Okay. Alright. What's Vespers?
Speaker 2:On Saturdays. It's an evening prayer service that lasts for forty minutes. It's the kind of gladsome light or, you know, that evening, like the sun is setting, let's mark this setting of the sun with thanksgiving to God. Yeah. And the church is usually dark, there are candles lighted, so it's it's a very contemplative shutting down of the day.
Speaker 2:And I remember all the things that had to kind of congeal or compose is a better word. Compose around that one choice, that one decision.
Speaker 1:Oh, right.
Speaker 2:You know, you have to stop your Saturday work
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In order to get there at 06:00. And then you don't come home really at seven or something thirty to start your work again and work like a dog into the night. You kind of stop and then you have a meal. And so there's this pattern of preparation. And that's, you know, really historically this preparation and fulfillment is part of what we understand that these things come in pairs.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, when you're thinking about the week, the work that you have in a week, and it's stopping at 05:30 or something on a Saturday, that means certain things about other days. Yeah. 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 wanna put in your life?
Speaker 2:Another Oh yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:I I I mean, there there's a study of time, not to get into this, there's a study of time that's 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,
Speaker 2:right?
Speaker 1:That's like the ticking of the clock, the stick of hand on your watch going around and kairos time, two words for time and kairos is that sense of the fulfillment of time, the moments when time seems to slow down. And sometimes those are those moments of the notes that you've put in place, 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?
Speaker 1:No. Is there anything else I'd rather be doing? No. If you can ask those kind of questions and say no to them, you have, you know, a focal practice or you have one of these kinda, these of focal notes around which you can compose your life, I think.
Speaker 2:That's a really helpful comment. I'm interested in hearing from you, and I'll give you just one example from 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.
Speaker 2:I didn't know what it was, it was, know, 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, 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.
Speaker 2:But this was a Sunday afternoon and everything stopped in his life and he roasted they roasted a lamb and they invited everybody. And you know, I was kind of thinking, well, maybe I'll stop by for an hour. Maybe our family will stop by for an hour. Know? No, you don't go to a lamb roast for an hour.
Speaker 1:Family? No, you don't.
Speaker 2:And it just struck me. I don't ever do this. Don't ever stop everything for a feast that is, you know, that cost me so much and feels so valuable. And it really gave me a crisis. You know, I had a kind of crisis of like, why is my life so governed by that 20 fourseven way of thinking so that even on a I didn't have a concept of feast day.
Speaker 2:And this person's example, you know, because a lot of times you think, well, the kind of people who do that, they're just different from me. 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.
Speaker 2:He doesn't even know that. Then the next thing that happened was he died a week later.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:He had a heart attack with a young man. And that gripped me as well because I thought, what if he hadn't stopped for that feast day? Know, his life would have been that 20.
Speaker 1:And my guess, it could have been that even if he knew he was gonna die in a week, he would have still held that feast.
Speaker 2:Even more so he would Right,
Speaker 1:because that's the kind of thing that makes for a life worth living is feasting. Why you see and I mean, think of literature, all the significance of feasts and festivals throughout history and throughout literature, it's when you stop working. All the feasts that are in Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, right? All the feasts that are in Homer's Odyssey.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:All the feasts that just 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 discipline and cost that allows you to have this moment. But that moment feels like a I don't want to say a distinctly human moment, but it is a moment, it seems like, of this kind of either where time slows or time stops or something like that. And 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 2:Yes, again, when you create that melody line, then other things gather around it.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:I would go back to that language too of 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 1:That is true. And you know, I mean, again, to come back to me as a runner, I wanna why do I do that? I wanna 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 training and eating and discipline and sleep.
Speaker 1:It's almost like when I go out for those kind of runs, that's like the feast. That's the rhythm. That's when I'm really just out running and enjoying moving. But it requires preparation, it requires cost and it means that I'm not able to do some other things because that's that's the good that I want one of the goods that I wanna pursue. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's too far off.
Speaker 2:Not in the leads. Not in the And, you know, 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.
Speaker 1:Okay. The quality that cannot be named.
Speaker 2:Yes. And that patterns can amount to. He's speaking literally about architecture and about, you know, the way in which you can build a room that resolves certain human goods and needs that is not subjective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. The quality that cannot be named. 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. 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.
Speaker 1: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. Some of the parts are a little uglier than others and don't harmonize very well. That's a little bit some of those dead patterns to come back to another thing, another idea that you mentioned.
Speaker 1:What are those things that, Yeah, you know what? These aren't bringing harmony to my life. This pattern of my life, whether that's 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 to say, You know what? I need to let that go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think Alexander would use language like wholeness, aliveness, spirit, you know, human well-being are 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, you know, of that focal pattern? Typically we all want to keep doing the things that yield good fruit and Life, right?
Speaker 1:The harmony, the melody, the beautiful music that composed, that forge something useful and beautiful. And I think that's what we're exploring in these two podcasts.
Speaker 2:That is what we're How
Speaker 1:the literary tradition, philosophical, theological tradition, how have patterns and exemplars that we've received before us, 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 2:Which reminds me that you even said who your exemplar is. I gave you the example of this friend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hadn't come up with somebody so I was gonna keep talking and hope you just forgot that I hadn't mentioned mine yet. So yeah, I think of several people, I mean, 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.
Speaker 1:Just saw her rhythms and one of the rhythms that we always had that even Kim, my wife, will comment on or people who have come into the family is that after dinner, 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. Oh, that's
Speaker 2:a lovely thing
Speaker 1:to 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. 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.
Speaker 1:You know, Wendell Berry would say they were part of our membership. Right? They were part of our membership. They were part of the story of our own lives. And 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, I still as a 54 year old, I'll sit on the kitchen counter and talk to mom like I did when I was five.
Speaker 1:And we tell stories and we laugh 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. But 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 life time for stories and laughter and walks in And the 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 2:And I would say your students' lives because 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, 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? You've answered that question, but that's another way of thinking in terms of hospitality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the ways we've received, I mean, your question about who were your exemplars, in a way the exemplars, and I can think of professors who, professors come to mind having spent a lot of time in school. A lot of my models are professors. But what they've given me, they've given me those kinds of gifts, given you those kinds of gifts and in a way that's hospitality. Part of the ancient practice of hospitality called zenea 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 2:Oiled their skin beard. Oiled skin and beard.
Speaker 1:Oiled their skin, sometimes bathed them. Then after all of that hospitality, would say, Oh yeah, and who are you?
Speaker 2:Now tell us about you.
Speaker 1:It's right. 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.
Speaker 1:So it strikes me that those people who 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, 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 2:Absolutely. There's absolutely no, nothing sui generis, you know? You you people offer something to you and you flourish because of it or thrill because of it, and you turn around and desire to offer it to someone else.
Speaker 1:That's 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 Cronos time watching the second away. Wonder if we should should should wrap it up and you know this has been really wonderful and I look forward to listening to your podcast and how you you converse with people about how to compose a life through living rhythms and melodies and patterns and habits.
Speaker 2: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
Speaker 1:I I am too.
Speaker 2:The shape and the the useful beauty that come.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I am too. That's great. Well, with this, I will sign off. Again, this is Brian Williams, dean of the Templeton Honors College and the host of the podcast Forged.
Speaker 2:And Christine Perrin, professor in the Honors College at Messiah University and host of the podcast composed. Thank you. It's great to talk.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Christine, as always.