What’s changing is that this wish resembles more of an ache now. It wraps its tendrils around things I never wished it to.

Deep among the valleys of my mid-twenties as I press ever on toward the eventual, inevitable horizon ahead, I find myself treading fertile ground. There are years that wither, years that yield the smallest harvest, years perhaps where one spends every waking hour simply plucking those indomitable weeds. Until one day, the rains come. Life, they say, has a way of springing back to old vigor with the same inevitability as the road before us reaching that far-off town and the one beyond.

Frankly, the planting that must be done in such cases is at times similarly all-consuming. If I have not written since February, it is because the Gardener has planted so many seeds around me, and given me like Adam the grace-kissed toil: to till and to keep. I have cried, laughed, smiled, felt more than ever I could have hoped for in the first half of this year. I am soaked through with the joy of it all. I have thought long and hard about the life I’ve built around me, of what I must do to clean it up, to make it the kind of gift to God and to others I would like it to be. Dependability, discipline, devotion—these are all things I long to cultivate within myself, if in part because I find myself so often lacking in them. We are our harshest critics. But perhaps that’s because we know the kind of medicine we need, even if we don’t know how it works.

I think a lot about silence. More so since moving to a mid-sized city from my small town home of fellow introverts. I live alone and yet the world is full of noise. Cars pass by spreading thick, pulsating beats of stereo percussion and the endless tide of tires brushing asphalt. Alone in my apartment, the fridge begins a monotone symphony, rousing itself to its work before, abruptly as it started, it clicks back to sleep. I put on a podcast. I put on another podcast. It’s 4:30 again.

Many others have had these thoughts, and I don’t pretend to flaunt my own originality. “The world is loud, the internet distracts us, we’re too busy, we spend too much time on our phones, and we need to get out into nature, slow down, and just… be.” Well, yes. No doubt I do, but what’s changing is that this wish resembles more of an ache now. It wraps its tendrils around things I never wished it to. If I try to stay in touch with all 500 of my Facebook friends, I will end up feeling like friends with none of them. I’ve made true comrades, colleagues, co-conspirators, and confidants through the internet. I wouldn’t trade that for the mere idea of tranquility. But earth’s mundane blessings I must achieve through tidying up and making doctor’s appointments and savvy financial planning: areas that aren’t so academic and where all the tests are practical, fields of study where I feel I barely achieve a passing grade. To be honest, living my life takes a great deal out of me. Everyone’s experience of this is different, true, and all things come in seasons. But more and more I find I must prune that which grows relentlessly to have a chance of seeing through the greenery and be there for the people around me. Fertile ground bears much fruit, but only if you care for what you sow.

It takes humility to admit that I ought not try to be all things to all people. No one can. I think the people who care for me will feel my affections more clearly reciprocated were I to write to or call them, individually. Few people I have ever met would be excluded from the garden, should ever they pass through, but there is only so much ink in the bottle and oil in the lantern. (Note: if you are reading this and think I am planning to stop talking to you or being your friend, you are almost certainly safe from this.)

So when the rain calms itself into lakes of still waters on my street, when the cars have gone to bed and their drivers parked themselves for the evening, my mind turns ever to that quote of Kierkegaard: “purity of heart is to will one thing.” That I who am so easily distracted might hope for this is a testament to God’s grace, perhaps. I want to love wholeheartedly, to serve with joy, to have the energy and mental bandwidth to delight in creation deeply. There is comfort for me in the radical communion of the life of the Trinity. No matter what passes, I am never truly apart from those who also live in God. We live in the hope that one day, we shall all see Him as He is, face to face.

The challenge for the Christian lies in not mistaking these ideas for the Gospel.

In the first decade of this brave new millennium, the internet was a very different concept to me than it is now. For starters, my grandparents still subscribed to AOL, so every Christmas when we’d visit, I got to experience a World Wide Web that inspired a great deal of patience. Or, perhaps could inspire patience were I not a young boy. To me, born as I was to a tech-savvy father who worked remotely long before it was cool, the technology was both immensely fascinating and deeply inconvenient. The otherworldly song of the modem, the fact that we couldn't take a phone call while I used it: simply mind-blowing. Why would we need to take a phone call when I was engaged in the much more important task of waiting for Flash games to load on the BBC's Doctor Who webpage? (Some of these games were legitimately excellent. Shoutout if you remember the Dalek one.)

My grandparents have long since subscribed to the faster internet of today—perhaps at this point even faster than what my parents have. I recall when I moved to the city, the slowest speed I could choose was 200 Mbps. A great speed when I'm downloading very legal Linux ISO's but hardly utilized the rest of the time. And in some places the “default” speed is significantly faster. The series of tubes flows with more bandwidth than ever.

Partially as a result of this overabundance, the Web is also heavier than it has ever been. Back when it took dozens of seconds to load a single image, developers found many clever ways to optimize load times. As more of the Web has become interactive, the strain has shifted to servers and clients alike as content is generated in real time and pushed to the user. Not to mention ads. If we were to tally the potential energy savings of re-designing the Web according to those 90's principles, I wonder how much electricity we would save. Hell, forget electricity—have you ever looked up how much water it takes to cool all the massive data centers we've built? Talk about a Colorado River…

All this to say, by way of long digression, it's no surprise that reactions to the trend have emerged. Publications such as Low Tech Magazine have written excellent manifestos on the subject. A number of easy-to-use static site generators have popped up in recent years, combining web 2.0 functionality with the speed and efficiency of plain HTML. Probably the most mainstream manifestation of this has been where the “tiny web” interacts with minimalism more broadly. (Ah yes, at last we get to this post's subject. My mistake for starting with a title and then having to pilot my thoughts in that direction.)

Good old minimalism. Darling of the 2010's. Making “less is more” cool again. Arguably the worst thing about the movement is how trendy it became, how many YouTubers who professed its creed began advertising “minimalist” products on their platforms, blurring the line between consumption and its absence. I admit, I’ve fallen into this trap myself. For example, I bought a feature phone to un-tether myself from the internet in my pocket. Legitimately a useful decision, but the lack of functionality also means I need a second device so I can cash checks or use apps like Signal. It's a workflow that works, but it's also rather... “more” that ends up being less, rather than the inverse. Plus I could argue it wouldn't be necessary if a had a little more self-control.

Back in undergrad, I joined a group of men devoted to Franciscan spirituality—not something as hardcore as a third order fraternity, but something akin to it. One of the pillars of that brotherhood was poverty, something Saint Francis himself lived in a radical way. While we didn't go so far as to renounce all our possessions, we did strive to analyze every potential purchase through the lens of whether it was necessary or useful to our vocation as students. For me, that sometimes meant foregoing things I really wanted but knew would ultimately distract me. (I cannot tell you how many times in the past few years I've very nearly picked up a Nintendo Switch secondhand.)

Herein lies the paradoxical nature of poverty, and it’s something religious communities have understood for centuries. Without reducing pious practices to psychological life hacks, there's a very real connection to the simplicity of religious life and the degree of peace it brings these men and women, the freedom they find without so much physical distraction. Minimalism aims, at its best, the tap into a similar mindset. When we un-encumber ourselves from having so many things, we lessen the friction between on thoughts and our actions. That which we do own should support our day-to-day lives in an obvious way. As Kierkegaard might say, these possessions ought to help us “to will one thing.”

Thus we come to the fundamental difference between the minimalists and Francis. Because, while I think the practice of minimalism can be healthy and beneficial, it doesn't tend toward the radical nature of sacrifice that the early Franciscan community embodied. A recurring theme I see in various reflections on the minimalist life is the pursuit of quality. The idea is that if I'm only buying two sweaters instead of eight, I can afford to purchase something much nicer than I would have otherwise. Don’t get me wrong: there are good reasons for doing this. Buying a high-quality item is often less wasteful than buying something that will wear quickly and soon be discarded. But I often find these choices can drift into the realm of excess. One channel I follow recently featured a hoodie that retails for $120. That's practically a third of an iPad.

So, as often as I can, which is to say imperfectly and too infrequently, I try to ask myself, “Do I really need something this nice?” If it’s something career or passion related, the answer might be yes. (E.g. by far there are more expensive pens out there, but my Twsbi Eco goes with me everywhere and was well worth the $35 I paid for it.) But in other areas, it’s worth asking, do I really need the best of all hoodies? Could I perhaps find a suitable alternative at the thrift store? (Ultimately, it is impossible to create a design process as sustainable as buying something used.) Can I accept I might not look as cool? Could I instead devote the money to the cause of people who need it much more than I do?

I suppose the gist of this extended ramble is that in finding the synthesis between the timeless truths of faith and the cultural atmosphere of today, we often discover there's something to be learned of both. The tiny internet, minimalism, related ideas of slowing down and living with intentionality, these can all be valuable things. The challenge for the Christian lies in not mistaking the idea of “owning the right things” for the good news of the Gospel, which asks us in many ways to leave all we have and follow after Him. In the words of Sierra Demulder and Waveney Yasso’s track “Self Care”

“If you were to ask the world, which is to say, the internet, what self care looks like, it would tell you: candles. Hundreds and hundreds of candles … It would tell you it’s drinking your weight in water. It’s buying a new set of nice, fancy sheets. It’s a gym membership. It costs money. It doesn’t spill or stain or fray. It would tell you nothing about how hard you have to cry to break a blood vessel. … These days, self care seems to come with a price tag or a filter. Healing is rarely so photogenic.”

Everything we own from bookshelves to bones will one day pass into dust and be gone. When we go—and we're all gonna go—what legacy will we have prepared to take with us?

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“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.”

In the brief but explosive history of the Internet, platform fatigue has made itself a recurring theme. I started blogging when I was fourteen, back when Wordpress.com seemed like the cool kid on the block but a lot of people still used Blogger. And Wordpress was delightful, but unfortunately as a terminally online person, all my Twitter mutuals are now on Substack, and I too have been wooed by the clean, minimal aesthetic. (50 years ago existence had foisted none of these concepts upon any of us and probably things were a lot quieter and more peaceful for it. But c’est la vie!)

If you are reading this, I can only assume you are someone I know, or at the very least someone who knows me. How else would you have stumbled across this corner of the internet I’ve only just begun to inhabit? I do hope you will forgive the mess. I have many boxes and thoughts and questions that have yet to be brought in and set in their proper place, so for now it is just the two of us.

I did unpack some boxes of tea and a few of the mugs that haven’t been chipped in the shuffle of moving. The kettle is on the stove, rumbling as it steadies itself to let forth the ghostly wail that announces the time has come to take a break and thoughtfully infuse. For such an unnerving sound, it has a lot of pleasant connotations. Strange, isn’t it?

There’s a great deal of moving to do in your early 20’s. Some of us end up moving more than others. I am far from the only one to find it an exhausting endeavor, but it is exciting to find yourself in a new place, so long as you also find places that feel like home. They don’t have to be physical places—sometimes it’s a person or a song or a recipe passed down on a weathered index card. But often they are.

Sometimes home is the concept of a place with many variations, like a cozy bookstore or a park with a swing set. Or a particular cobblestone sidewalk.

This? Well, this is perhaps part resting place and part workspace. I spend a lot of time up here, watching everything down below. Watching what I’m doing certainly when I’m working. The flutter of the keys and weight of the pedals, the split-second swoop of dashing my hand up to pull the bombarde for the last verse of the hymn. But when all is quiet and it’s just me and a couple of people praying in the church below, few spaces feel as reflective as this one.

In a universe distinctly observed, it seems a prayer to simply be. To inhabit a space that is only itself and nothing more. I almost feel I desecrate it whenever I check my phone between services. It is the liminal space between the mundane and the sacred for me, as someone whose work touches both spheres. Where do those planes interact for you? Where do you find God walking the nomad’s walk in the busy street outside?

Come then, let’s step into my office so we don’t bother the folks downstairs. Earl Grey or mint?