T.S. Eliot finds space for meaning in The Backrooms. open.substack.com/pub/worthyof...

Who is the American counterpart to Hirokazu Koreeda? Or is that even a possibility?

No one prepares parents for how many hours they will spend searching for water bottles.

Coming tomorrow morning: T.S. Eliot finds space for meaning in The Backrooms In which I process many of the incredible ideas I’ve encountered on Substack. So many amazing thinkers and writers! www.worthyofimagination.com

I don’t think the Church takes itself seriously as a family. But if it did, what power would be available to it? Much of the dialogue in the church about the wider church is about division. But if, like Jesus commanded, we focused on unity, I can only imagine the change that would take place.

A blessing for your monday open.substack.com/pub/worthyof...

It’s incredible to think that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien went to the movies to see Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs together. They didn’t like it. Nor Walt Disney’s work generally.

In a world flooded with cheap, fast and artificial products, we need more amateur practitioners of things. Etymologically, an amateur is “one who loves,” from amare, "to love.” We need people approaching their work because they love it.

Forgiving someone 70×7 times to a child means that if a sibling hits them 70×7 times, they need to forgive them each time.

A Blessing for your Monday. open.substack.com/pub/worthyof...

A complicated, but beautiful state. Happy West Virginia Day!

June 20th is West Virginia Day. On September 12, 1952, a group of youths and an adult in Flatwoods, West Virginia, investigated a fireball that landed on the Bailey Fisher farm where they encountered “The Flatwoods Monster.”

Studio Ghibli celebrates it’s 41st birthday today. Time, attention, beauty. Take the time to enjoy the day.

A Blessing for your Bloomsday. open.substack.com/pub/worthyof...

I wonder what generation was the first to regularly feel the desire to buy something without a specific thing in mind. Like, “retail therapy.” I feel like it existed before the ambient, non-targeted desire that life on the internet mainstreamed.

Jesus tells us that our first love is to be Yahweh, Creator and Sustainer of all things, then, next on the list is the guy who lives next door, blasts classic rock every Sunday morning at 7am while he washes his car and blocks your driveway with his trashcans.

As you prepare to go from no children to a life with children, you have to prepare and guess and speculate about what is best and what will be best for them. But the reality is you have no idea what’s coming. Truly.

If the death and resurrection were all that mattered, Jesus could have jumped into life at age 32 and speed-run the last year of his life. But he didn’t. He instead chose to spend 33 years in mostly ordinary time. Orindary Time is not to be disdained.

Working through the idea that many Gen Z artists are working out a similar project to some of the Modernists, like Eliot, Yeats and Joyce, in trying to establish meaning in the present by going back into the past.

Stay away from anything    that obscures the place it is in.    There are no unsacred places;    there are only sacred places    and desecrated places.    - from How to Be a Poet, Wendell Berry

My kids will never have the experience of looking at the distorted image from a VHS tape and realizing how much they loved that story. Analog media, like us, carries scars and tells a story. There is a greater burden on us now to remember.

I keep seeing things about Gen Z that make me hopeful.

“Synths and Slow Zooms: The Story of Film in 2026”

Shenmue was the original Ordinary Time simulator. It honestly taught me ways to find joy in the everyday.

Music and film are related in that both are storytelling bound up in time. Much of the language and skill required in each art form is interchangeable.

Music teaches us to see the blessedness of time.

In many ways A24 really seems to be pushing the language of cinema forward. There are films with mass appeal that are doing extremely sophisticated things with editing and cinematography—pure cinema type things.

I occasionally retreat from social media because I don’t want to start filtering experience through what is post-able. But I do find that having a habit of posting forces me to bring many ideas to completion that would otherwise just fade away.

I remember when social media was overwhelmingly mundane things. “This sandwich is delicious!” These still exist, but we’re now living in an age of experience inflation. To present an ordinary life is to lose the game. I don’t really miss the old way of living online, but it was probably healthier.

A blessing for your Monday www.worthyofimagination.com/p/you-may-fr...

“The Backrooms, Cheap AV tech and the Democratization of Nostalgia.” An essay I’ll probably never write because, maybe ironically, I’m too afraid it would be a lot of interesting exploration without any real resolution.

I don’t think the Backrooms amounted to anything except trying to tease some meaning out of it is itself like being stuck in the Backrooms. Running endlessly through memories as they fade trying to figure out if there is any significance to anything.

I wonder if music from the 90s and early 2010s would hit the same way without the retail store reverb.

Every Frame a Painting has always been the gold standard for video essays. I’m so excited it’s back. (though I miss the lofi BGM)

Mr Rogers offers healing. Complete the MR ROGERS CHALLENGE. Watch the whole video. Reclaim your attention. Walk away from the screen and live the life he would have wanted you to.

If you let it, curiosity can do most of the lift in education.

I think it is mark of a living and thriving culture that my children can sing the same songs my grandparents do. That points to a tradition that stands the test of time, has something to offer far beyond the moment it was created. Hymns are an important vehicle in this tradition.

It is absolutely remarkable that Mr Rogers created a wildly successful children’s show that included long segments filled with silence and noticing. I don’t believe a show like this could get past the pitch phase today.