four things for spring

better late than never?

Family bike rides are my happy place.

We took a two-week (heavenly) spring break, and we returned to full-speed sportsball and school and work schedules, plus our oldest finished up middle school. I feel like I am just now catching my breath, so I’m making this a four things for spring post since summer is already in full swing. 

❤️Bike rides. Spring means family bike rides. I love how something simple like going out to dinner can become a much more exciting experience by riding our bikes there. It makes me daydream of what it might be like to have enough margin in my schedule to ride my bike most anywhere I would need to go in a day. 

Related: I sorta went down a rabbit hole earlier this month about generally how stupid it was for America to build our entire infrastructure centered around the automobile, and now I’m pissed off. If you would like to join me, start off by reading

Antonia Malchik

’s amazing A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time and chase it with this recent article in Plough, which seems to be about much more than just the automobile.

📚Cut and paste history. If you have a computer running on Windows, you can press the Windows key + V, and it pulls up the history of stuff you’ve cut. This is embarrassingly life-changing for me because of the number of times I’m cutting a link to something, forget to paste it, and then cut something else and have to go back and do the whole process over again.

❤️Grab-some-herbs sun tea. When I was pregnany with Jasper, we went on a little babymoon to our favorite place. It’s no longer there, but at the time, there was this little garden shop/cafe that had this herbal iced tea that, to this day, was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. On the trip, I made Grant go there every afternoon just so I could have as much of this tea as possible, but each day, it was a little bit different. I asked for the recipe, but they said they didn’t have one - that they just picked whatever herbs looked like they needed pruning in the garden to make that day’s batch.

I’ve tried to recreate it ever since, and some days’ versions are better than others. I grab a handful or two of herbs from the garden - I prefer basil varieties to make up the bulk of the herbs if I have enough of it - then put it in a gallon mason jar, top with water, and leave in the sun all day. Then I strain it, add a squeeze of a whole lemon if I have it, and maybe a little bit of honey if I’m feeling extra.

Obviously, all of the mint varities are delicious too but tend to takeover the taste very quickly. I like thyme, rosemary, lavender, sage, lemon balm, and chamomile too.

📚Everybody hurts. I went WAY down the Gabor Maté rabbit hole over the last few months by listening to many, many hours of his interviews. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this, but one thing that has really come to the forefront lately is how we minimize our own and others’ wounds by comparing them to something worse. In The Myth of Normal, Maté writes, “It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—‘You haven’t suffered like I have’—or as a cudgel to beat back others’ legitimate grievances when we behave destructively. We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others.” 

While having perspective is, of course, helpful, I am betting that if we we could try to just accept our own pain without measuring it against anyone else’s, it would open up more space for compassion for ourselves. In my experience, whenever I can find more compassion for myself, it has a spillover effect and grows my compassion muscle for others too. 

Honorable mentions. “Every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis.” This piece from Rebecca Solnit is from last summer, but I missed it the first time around and it’s worth reupping because it’s true about the climate crisis, yes, but also true about most of the crises we’re facing too. The data coming out of Covid shows that most of us think the government did a decent job, acknowledging that a novel virus requires pivots, but the noise from the small minority of people is so loud that it seems otherwise. I’m still thinking about this interview with Soraya Chemaly weeks after my first two listens.

Grant and I are totally sucked into the new season of Bridgerton, and I’m trying to talk him into reading the books. Our family loves the drama of the Netflix Tour de France docuseries, and we’re trying to save the newest season for our upcoming summer vacation. I loooved Talking at Night. I raced through the Friend Zone series of books by Abby Jimenez, and I’m annoyed because they would have made great reads for our upcoming summer vacation if I had saved them. I’m almost finished with listening to Non-Violent Communication and 🤯🤯🤯 - also I really wish they would re-release it with a new title like, “Communication Basics to Improve All of Your Relationships” or “Life Would Be Better If Everyone Read This Book” because I avoided it for years because I thought it wasn’t applicable to me.

Now it’s your turn: what are you loving and learning lately?!

Happy summer solstice!

Sara