Jesse Hake on the Living Patterns of Reading, Naming, and Belonging

Christine Perrin: This is Christine Perrin, host of Composed, A Timeless Way of Living, a podcast of the Humanitas Institute that explores living patterns of virtue, craft, community, and delight, and draws the classical tradition into contemporary times. Welcome to Composed. I'm Christine Perrin, and I'm interviewing Jesse Haake today, having a conversation with Jesse Haake. Jesse is the director of Classical U for Classical Academic Press. And as such, he is a professional conversation haver and interviewer.

He has a job that I think I would enjoy. He does a lot of gathering of content, of rich content, and sharing it with other people. He himself has a podcast, called Classical You podcast show on truenorth.fm. So please look him up. And we've done this before on his podcast, so I'm so happy to do it on this one.

He also keeps a rigorous blog, called copious flowers. And I I just wanted to start with a quote from that because, I was really touched by it recently. His latest he quotes George McDonald, who I know is a great, favorite of his. Every life is a vigil. Your existence here is a long patient watching for the morning.

You call it a fallen world, and so it is. But its fallenness is the very laboratory of your creation. So I I wanted to start with that quote, from Lilith. But, before we dive into questions, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you, here.

Jesse Hake: Thank you, Christine. It's a delight indeed to be on your show as well. And I, you know, started out as a pastor's kid and missionary kid, and those experiences were very blessed and rich for me. I know that there's a wide variety, you know, with pastors, children, and and kids that grew up on the mission field. But I really had a rich rich experience.

And so I have that kind of countercultural. I'm sorry. Not counterculture. I may I might have third culture. Sorry.

That yeah. That's a separate topic. But the third culture kind of experience, love relating and getting to know, you know, people across. And I think that extends into my reading habits and and life, which I know you you wanna talk about, but those are kind of analogous things in a certain way, being third culture and and loving reading. I went to college as a history student thinking a little bit of law school, ended up interning in a law firm and deciding I wanted to be a teacher instead, and went to graduate school in St.

Andrews in Scotland, continuing to study history, and took a job teaching in a private school about a year after finishing that master's degree. And I was a carpenter for a couple of years in between as we first got married. I didn't want to jump into classroom teaching right away as a newlywed. And my wife says she wishes I had stayed at Carpenter sometimes. I came home with less on my mind, you know.

But I wasn't like the foreman of the crew, you know, so it was just go and work hard and do, you know, do do your work and come home, which was great. But I started teaching several so maybe going on three decades ago or something like that, and have been teaching at some adjunct college level adjunct teaching, but primarily high school, and then have been a principal in a Christian school in York, Pennsylvania Logos Academy for seven years, and work now with Classical Academic Press and supporting their teacher training platform, classicalyou.com.

Christine Perrin: And I should mention as well, you have two daughters and a son.

Jesse Hake: Yes.

Christine Perrin: And with your wife Elizabeth in in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Jesse Hake: Yes. We've been now going on twenty years in the Harrisburg area, and our all you know, our children, this is all they've known. So this this is a 100% their home, our three children. And for Elizabeth and I, we're beginning to feel like natives. You know?

Christine Perrin: They're not third culture kids.

Jesse Hake: No. No. They they are not.

Christine Perrin: Well, I'm interested in you said that you said something about third culture kid being analogous to reading. Did you say that?

Jesse Hake: Yes. Did.

Christine Perrin: Could you explain that? Could we start there?

Jesse Hake: Yeah. I think, you know, the comparison to reading and traveling is often made. I think that's kind of a a well recognized way of talking about experience of reading, the ability to live, you know, multiple lives or go go multiple places.

Christine Perrin: Interesting. Okay.

Jesse Hake: A thought

Christine Perrin: Never met a frigate as a book. Right? Like a book. Mhmm. Is what Emily Dickinson says?

Jesse Hake: Yes. Yes. Exactly. That's traveling as as reading. Yeah.

You know, as a as a child growing up on the mission field, going back and forth for furloughs, you know, coming back to extended family in The States, and then spending the the most of my time. But that traveling back and forth, the culture shock was very real. Going in both directions at a at a couple points. But I think diving into a really wonderfully developed world, you know, that an author is giving to you is is you're meeting people, but the whole setting, the whole, you know, the whole potentially, you know, with fantasy literature, almost the whole metaphysics and cosmos is, you know, is different. So I I love that sense of exploring and maybe being a little disoriented.

Yeah.

Christine Perrin: I remember once my neighbor of many years ago said to me that, you know, people are always telling us we should read, and I love reading. But I read these books, and I come back to the world I'm in, and it seems poorer for it. I'm curious about what you would say about that.

Jesse Hake: You know, I I can relate to the experience, but I don't think I don't think children experience that when when they're reading. And I think, potentially well, I don't think we should. I I can relate to it. But even children, there's a kind of withdrawal or a letdown, certainly, you know, when you're really swept up in a story the love of the characters. I remember once my father, this was sort of one of those little legends that you cultivate as a family, you know, that you would tell guests at the dinner table.

But he famously prayed for three characters in a book that we were reading out loud when I was a child. And he was he was doing the regular, you know, dinner table prayer, and he poured his heart out on behalf of these fictional characters. And the rest of us opened our eyes, looked at each other like, what is dad doing? And when he finished, he had no concept that he had just done this, and we pointed it out to him. And so we all love that story, but that kind of so immersed, you know, in in the reality of a story that but, you know, that's a kind of an interesting example of not separating

Christine Perrin: Yes. You know,

Jesse Hake: the story from reality. I mean, for my father, I think they they were experientially enough, they they were equally real. But they they informed each other. We read books based on our experience of our lives that informs our reading. Reading, I think, shines a light into our lives.

So it's very much a two directional kind of they depend on each other. And I think, in that sense, there shouldn't be this sort of alienation or separation between them. They should enrich each other.

Christine Perrin: You're making me think of a moment. I mean, I love that story of your father, and what it must have meant to be that child at the table. I I think I found myself praying while I was reading once without intending to in Cry the Beloved Country. The main character, I just felt his burdens, and they were so immense, and they were so insoluble. And there was so much grief, and, you know, he would go up to the mountain to pray.

And I just remember, like, discovering that I was praying with him. I think that's the only time that's happened to me. I then sometimes consciously felt moved to maybe pray for a character, but, not unconsciously.

Jesse Hake: Mhmm. Mhmm.

Christine Perrin: But it's true that we believe about fiction that it is real. I mean, people have said, you know, famously that it tells a lie to tell the truth. But, all that means is that there's something captured in these characters that is that has verisimilitude. It has the weight of life. It has of reality.

And it tells us back reality in a way that we can learn and name. And I wonder who are the characters in your life or the life of your family. I know that you're that reading aloud both as a father and as a husband is something that you do as a a living pattern in your life. Mhmm. Can you tell us about some of the characters that have done this for you or for your family?

Jesse Hake: Yeah. It is a long list. So my

Christine Perrin: I know.

Jesse Hake: My my initial hesitation, I

Christine Perrin: You could just you don't have to tell us the best or the

Jesse Hake: Yeah. Yeah. You haven't put any burden like that on it. So I, you know, I was just telling this story a few minutes before we got on the call to a colleague. I don't even know how it came up, but I'm the oldest of nine children, so there's enough of a span where our our reading loves have changed, you know, down the line of children, and the family culture shifted from me being the oldest to some of the younger.

So I remember when one of my younger brothers told me he was afraid to tell me this, but he was more shaped by the Harry Potter stories than by JRR Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. And I was I was he he was correct to be a little nervous. I was almost scandalized. You know, the the Tolkien stories, The Lord of the Rings, were definitely a deep part of man childhood, a kind of alongside of life in a way, you know, reality, read and reread them. But first, had them read out loud to me.

And while they were being read out loud to me as a young boy, I was continually being told that my mother and father had read them out loud to each other while sailing together on the Chesapeake Bay before they were married. So they had read the entire the entire trilogy aloud to each other on a sailboat before they were before they were married, and then they're reading it to me as a little boy. So it was just sort of talk about, you know, the the wrapping together of life, real life and fictional life.

Christine Perrin: Exactly what I was thinking.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. It was so deeply interwoven in my in my sort of consciousness as a little boy. So when my when my younger brother said JK Rowling's Harry Potter stories were deeper to him than Tolkien, I was I said, you were right to be a little trepidatious about sharing that with me. But, you know, Charles Dickens actually I'm sort of starting chronologically. My parents read out loud every single word that Charles Dickens ever wrote to each other over the course of their marriage.

And they read a lot of that out loud to us as children as well. So volumes and volumes of Charles Dickens read out loud to me as a boy. And that was well, in a sense, I think that might have been the strongest thread in their whole adult lives, you know, from sort of as their first child my mother's passed away so kind of seeing, to a large extent, the entire course of their marriage from a child's perspective, that looked looks to me like one of the, you know, most continuous and strongest threads was their shared love of reading Charles Dickens. They read many of his novels out loud multiple times together. So there's there's a good bit there.

Christine Perrin: Could you back up to Lord of the Rings and tell us what, you know, what characters in particular were with you? Maybe it was different ones at different times in your life.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. It was it was at different stages of my life. You know, in college, there was a group of young men, just five of us, but we called ourselves the Dunedain. After, you know, the rangers of the North from which Aragorn comes as their chieftain. So we spent, you know, several years of college gathering together under that name.

And, obviously, Aragorn you know, there's these little hints among Tolkien nerds of the connection between the the legendary history and then our, you know, our our own recorded history. And Tolkien sort of, you know, makes these fictional connections between his history and real history chronologically. So we would, you know, imagine that we had kingly blood or, you know, the blood of some in Aragorn's line, there's the you know, one of his ancestors had to make the choice of whether to be, you know, a fairy or a human. They had to make that decision. And they chose the human lot, and I think there were two brothers, and the other brother, Elrond, actually chose to remain among the fairy people.

So that idea of having, you know, fairy blood or kingly blood was something that we imagined as we enjoyed this this we we talked about theology and literature and that kind of thing together in college.

Christine Perrin: And you lived together after college and carried that to one more step, I think. Yeah. That Dunedin.

Jesse Hake: It was a summer a summer of working together. Yeah. So it was actually during college. We did live together. We we all ended up all five of us ended up serving as resident assistants and somehow managed to end up three of us as resident assistants in one dormitory at one point.

But during this summer, we all decided to live together and work together and save up, you know, as most college students do for tuition, helping out with tuition payments. And we lived at my parents' house. They had a big beautiful lodge in the country, and we took several different jobs, but we all opened just one bank account together. And it was a little rural Pennsylvania town, and the the lady behind the desk, as these five five young men walked in, college aged boys, and said, we want one account, one card. We're gonna all deposit money, but any of us can withdraw it indiscriminately.

She had she had to go and call her manager, and then they're they had they didn't have the apparatus to set this up. But they did. We actually got our bank account. The funniest part of that summer maybe was several of us, not all of us, but were on a roofing crew together, and our boss wanted to promote one of us substantially and make him the foreman. He was trying to talk him into quitting college and working for him full time.

And he was offering him a very substantial raise and he turned, my friend turned from the boss who was negotiating with him to all of us and said, we're getting a raise, boys. And the boss was just flabbergasted, like, you know, because we all had one one shared bank account. So, yeah, that that kind of sense of fraternity and community, you know, we tied it to the Rangers of the North, you know, live on the outskirts, kind of hidden away, not visible to the hobbits or, you know, the others that they might be helping to protect. So it's, you know, a very manly aspiration.

Christine Perrin: It's beautiful. Yeah. The book led you I mean, this is a sort of perfect I I did not plan this, but it's a perfect answer to that question of life enriching books and books enriching life, and that kind of mutual enlargement, I guess you could say.

Jesse Hake: Mhmm.

Christine Perrin: Because what strikes me is that these books really formed you. They really Yeah. Composed your life. You lived into them, and and, they gave you a pattern to follow, outside of their pages.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. No. Certainly, I felt that, you know, many times in many ways from different characters and books. They've set standards and connected things together that wouldn't have I wouldn't have been able to see connections between things or feel a kind of wholeness. I don't think apart from some of the insights or connections made that, you know, in books.

Christine Perrin: For me, books have often also cautioned me. I've seen characters that I could see myself Mhmm. Being, or maybe I saw part of myself in them, and then I could follow the consequences of that inclination in their life. I mean, almost to the point where, you know, I'm reading and I just feel so ashamed. Even while I'm reading, you know, I just feel this sense of, like, oh, that's me.

That's where this goes. You know? And Mhmm. Much stronger caution. I mean, the only stronger caution would be seeing a similar pattern in someone's life.

But in someone's life, you just it takes so long to see these things play out and you miss so much of it. But in a book, you get the whole thing, you know, from start to finish. And, in the most beautiful form and language. And, like you're saying, you know, you you also are being exposed and having experiences you've never had that you could never have in the life that you're leading at that moment, you know, as a 13 year old or or whatever it is. So it's it is quite remarkable that you're sort of transfixed by the story and not thinking about it as instructive until it is.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a wonderful way to be, corrected and

Christine Perrin: So wonderful.

Jesse Hake: And fed, you know, both the kind of positive and the negative instruction is such a wonderful way to receive it because it's it is unconscious to a large extent. I mean, it becomes conscious at points. Mhmm. I felt that probably most keenly when reading out loud with my wife, you know, because within marriage, you have already that intense kind of exposure, you know, and you can't get away, you know, from your own incapacities or failings and such. So that's sort of perpetually before you as a part of marriage anyway.

And then when reading out out loud in as a married couple, I think we've we've both felt Elizabeth and I both felt that sense of But either about each other, you know, in a character or about ourselves. But we can almost always see it coming or understand, you know understand it on both on both sides. So that's quite a powerful

Christine Perrin: kind of,

Jesse Hake: yeah, ex example of that, I think.

Christine Perrin: Yeah. I was a few weeks ago, I was at a book group. I was a visitor. It's not local. They were reading a book that I really love, Kristen Lavrin's Daughter.

And, I just couldn't resist the invitation to talk about it again with another group of people. I could talk about it till the day I die without retreading anything. But what was interesting to me was they were, it was a university model school, and all the parents, husbands and wives, were invited to read together once a month.

Jesse Hake: Wow.

Christine Perrin: And, then to gather and discuss. And so there they they had done that. And so it was really amazing to hear these people who you know, some of them are also the educators in the group, not not all. But to hear them to see them have that practice together both as spouses and families, but also as a community educating children, it was really powerful.

Jesse Hake: That is incredible. Yeah. What a what a rich thing. You know, occasionally, you see that in churches or schools, and what a gift when there's something that extends even, you know, beyond the family circle that offers those kinds of connections between lives and then facilitated by great literature.

Christine Perrin: The people I read with, I feel very close to. Mhmm. I it turns out I there's a group of people I've read with for many years, and it turns out that you it unearths you, you know, in a way that you can't not share yourself with others. It's almost I mean, I remember reading somebody saying once, if you just wrote down your thoughts about one book every year, you would have your biography. Mhmm.

Yeah. Which for you is probably the Lord of the Rings or, like you're saying, Charles Dickens. But, because you change and you see new things, but the as you see, it's also this mirror, reflecting back on you. And how can you see those things? Because of the book, but also because of the life that you've lived.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. That's very true. That'd be a beautiful kind of biography.

Christine Perrin: Yeah. It's too late, you know. Do you wanna go on with the list, or would you like do you think is that enough of the the characters that have really

Jesse Hake: Oh, I I I think it's a good a good sampling. I I would say on the books that Elizabeth and I have you know, there's a list a a sizable list there, but one that's come up between us again a number of times after we've read it, which is one kind of fun indicator, is The Buried Giant. Let's say Ishiguro. Ishiguro. Yeah.

Yeah. I can't Oh, I haven't

Christine Perrin: read that one.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. It is extremely sad, but that kind of sense of memory continually slipping away or almost not even having understood enough of what you were living to remember it. So you're kind of anyway, we've both felt multiple times and kinda gone back. It's it's about a couple as well. So an older couple who's navigating memory loss, to put it very simply, suppose, but in a very wild fantasy landscape.

Arthurian setting, actually. But anyway, we have both circled back to that couple a number of times in our own lives. That was quite a few years ago that we read that. But yeah. So there's a really wide range of characters from so many different kinds of books.

Christine Perrin: It seems to me that one aspect of your reading life, in addition to all these things that you've shared with us, which are tremendous, is the life that you've that's it's built over into your writing. So writing is a part of your reading. And I wonder if you could speak about reading and writing, the overflow, and also what that gives to you or does for you as a reader to write about what you've read.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. I think it's become sort of essential to my reading that I write about it. And I like to yeah. I love to put different authors that I'm reading into conversation with each other by means of my writing, and that is just reading. Like, that I mean, you do that as a reader, I think, even if you don't write something.

You're continually, you know, integrating from one story to another. But when you begin to I think it really exposes all writing as just an an extension of reading or a a way a way of reading. And I love how it goes all the way back too. So these things that, you know, from my childhood and then from my marriage, from my own kind of private reading, all of it comes together, you know, when I'm when I'm trying to write. It's almost like the authors are raising their hand or wanting to make a comment, you know, wanting to make make a comment.

Yes. Say, you know, I'm writing about something and it's like, you know, well, Lewis would really insist upon this point being made. And and then that sort of goes all the way back, you know, through my whole reading. Reading life is all kind of immediately present when I'm writing. It's all there sort of simultaneously.

So you're like surrounded by a a cloud of witnesses or a crowd a crowd of all of those voices that you've heard as a reader, and you're almost adjudicating, you

Christine Perrin: know. Their voices.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. Take take take turns.

Christine Perrin: Align it. Conversation leader. Yeah. Yeah. Your turn.

Jesse Hake: Yeah.

Christine Perrin: Now let's hear it again. Copiousness, right, is hearing the same thing again in another way.

Jesse Hake: Mhmm.

Christine Perrin: Flowers is a reference to florologium or a commonplace

Jesse Hake: Mhmm.

Christine Perrin: Notebook that people would keep before there were libraries easily accessible in your own home. Am I right about that? That that's

Jesse Hake: the reference? Yes. That's right.

Christine Perrin: I love that. I love that. So you do consider that your commonplace notebook in a sense. That blog is your commonplace notebook, your trail of your reading life.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. I actually started on a, you know, on an actual blog maybe eighteen years ago, and it was literally just I would just post favorite passages. And it was really just a kind of a sad shortcut way of keeping a real commonplace book, which would be on paper. But for whatever reason, I wasn't capable of that or didn't think I was capable of that. And so I was commonplacing digitally, and that is literally what kind of eventually I ended up when I would comment, would be when I would take a passage and post it, I would be tempted to say something about it.

And over time, over a number of years, I ended up just writing.

Christine Perrin: What advice would you give a mother or a father who, you know, hears this about your life and they think, ugh, you know, I I've missed out. I'm not that person. I wasn't formed that way. How to begin? What is a good way to start enjoying the the riches that you're talking about?

Jesse Hake: Well, I I do think reading out loud is something pretty basic and elemental. And, you know, in another way, every day like, I I do have an unbelievable amount of blessing and heritage, you know, from my parents and and and and accumulation. But at the same time, it's not a given on a day to day basis that I'm gonna read aloud to my child, you know, or or that my wife and I are gonna find a way to make that happen. So in a certain sense, it's it's never a given, you know, day by day, moment by moment. And what I find that if I try to sort of put a stake in the ground or say, you know, I'm gonna make this happen.

If I make the out loud reading happen, a lot lot comes with it. So it is one of those kinds of markers that I try to hold myself, you know, accountable to. And, you know, my wife laughs at me about that because it was it is nostalgic for me. You know, my parents were incredible out loud readers with each other and with us as children, and that's a great gift. But but so, you know, sentimentality and nostalgia comes with that for me a little bit, and that could be negative.

You know, I can get pompous about it in the home. You know, like But still, I think that's been a positive way for me to just keep something small and alive and good going in my own life, and through the good times and the hard times, that's a thread. And then other things grow from that. It's, you know, other thing it's kind of a it becomes kind of a soil that allows other things to grow. Like, your own reading, you know, my own private reading or writing, things like that kind of or conversations.

You know, think GK Chesterton is so good at talking about some of these kinds of things. Like, the point isn't to have a, you know, a blog that people read. You don't read so that you can be a writer. You know, like, the point is very personal things with your own heart, you know, your relationship to, those around you, your family, your friends, point is close to home, the point is, in a sense, kind of small or private. And if you're fighting to maintain a reading life for these small reasons, larger things may show up or accumulate.

But I'm a firm believer in the fact that you should be going for those things, or or something will, you know, just be very disappointing or twisted, you know, in some way.

Christine Perrin: I'm wondering if you would say as a teacher, especially in a as a teacher of the humanities that you were sort of like the chief reader, and how this, bore fruit and vegetables, so to speak, in your own, classrooms over the years.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, a lot of teachers would recognize that you're, you know, you're lighting a flame, right, is a very common metaphor for teaching. If if you have a love, and it's it's alive and burning in your own heart, that's a very important thing for teachers to bring into the classroom with their students. You need to love the subject, and the students need to be able to tell, you know, that you love the subject.

And almost all subjects are mediated by reading to a substantial extent. You know, I think even mathematicians or scientists, really great ones and great teachers of it are going to love reading other mathematicians and scientists. It's not just sort of an English class or a literature class. Think a love of reading and of learning is basic. So, yeah, that idea of being the chief reader.

I think it's easy to flip that, you know, particularly in a kind of assessment and metrics driven culture and say, I'm here to measure your reading and to analyze your reading. But do think it should really be reversed. The students, in a sense, should be assessing whether or not you're a reader as a teacher. And if they see that love that's the main thing that has a possibility of really spreading and being caught, you know, by them as students. So yeah.

Christine Perrin: What were some of the assignments or habits in your classroom that attempted to cultivate readers?

Jesse Hake: You know, we would definitely I I would try to include some intentional amount of time, often at the beginning of periods, that was either students sharing out loud, you know, reciting reciting things or reading things out loud, or me reciting things or reading things out loud. So that just that simple childish enjoyment of the text, of the story, of the characters, allowing that to actually be experienced and shared in a without any other purpose, you know? It isn't being directly evaluated or so I think simple patterns, practices that would create then shape the time and shape this, you know, the space that we had together. This could become self indulgent as well, but I love storytelling. So, you know, and the students would be onto that fact and try to, you know, try to get me to only tell stories for a period or whatever.

But, you know, I do think allowing some of that kind of relation I primarily taught history and literature and theology, rhetoric. So, it was a lot of things related to storytelling anyway. And I think that students producing things is important. So I think that we you know, this is related to the question about writing as a kind of reading. But I think that when we respond to what we're reading by creating, that's an essential part of the whole reading life and process, and that creation really is a part of receiving in a sense.

So it helps you to receive. So I would try to give ways for students to feel that they were making things to bless others, whether it was a performance or, you know, just an invitation to another class to come and hear, you know, a well read script, you know, from a Shakespeare play, just a portion of a play. So it doesn't always have to be a big production, but try to have a sense that by creating something beautiful and well done and compelling and enjoyable and sharing it with others. So that that kind of was an important part of most of my classroom experiences. And there were lots it took many different forms.

Christine Perrin: That makes me think of the quote that I quoted at the beginning. Mhmm. I'll read it again. Every life is a vigil. Your existence here is a long patient watching for the morning.

You call it a fallen world, and so it is, but its fallen. This is the very laboratory of your creation. And one one of the things I hear you saying is that one of the joys of being a student and of being a teacher and of being a reader is that it is sort of plant food for your own making. Mhmm. Mhmm.

And that making can be another book, but it can also be, like, I'm thinking of my friend, our friend, actually, Valerie McClymon, who took Leonardo da Vinci's drawings

Jesse Hake: Mhmm.

Christine Perrin: Of the womb and made it into a sculpture. And, you know, that was a form of reading and responding to art Yep. With art. But like you're saying too, just, rendering a recitation recitation, you know, reciting a poem at the right moment, or, at the beginning of class, a quotation, a Shakespeare's play, a a and I know another thing that, you and I did from time to time was we created poetry liturgies that involved art and music where people could we invited people in for an hour to contemplate a certain season of the year or subject through poems. And something that I hear you saying about teaching that I don't hear very often and that I'm thinking of when I think about those poetry liturgies is that we want the things we make to not just be for evaluation.

They are for evaluation. That's true, and we need evaluation. But we also need them to be in their own right sometimes, something worthy of doing and an invitation into, the reason that we study and learn and become proficient in these things. So in this case, you know, using poetry to think about Thanksgiving. What is Thanksgiving?

Or what is a lament? Or Mhmm. What is the epiphany?

Jesse Hake: Yeah. It

Christine Perrin: it leads us into a kind of a different way of thinking, not just ratio.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. Absolutely. I you know, the, the purpose of learning as something that is about our own hearts and how we, you know, can expand and grow them and be more receptive to the world around us and ultimately to God. If those kinds of things are the purpose of education, you have to give the students an opportunity to experience the output of their learning in the in that kind of way. Even, you know, it is being evaluated.

I mean, we're we're evaluating each other in a book group when we're we're sharing, you know, we're sharing, we're pouring ourselves out. It's relational, it's deeply personal, it's profoundly enjoyable, but, you know, there is also evaluation. They're not antithetical or in opposition, but they have a rightly ordered, you know, a rightly ordered loves, you know, in Augustinian terms. Need to be in the right relationship and priority. So yeah, the poetry liturgies that we collaborated on, I think you were coming from a college teaching setting, and I was in a high school teaching setting, and we would invite parents and members of the community in for this hour.

And we would combine different artistic mediums. We would have students sharing some visual, beautiful visual art, you know, for master artists up on the screen, you know, with a projection, high quality image. And there were some reflections on that, and then poetry recitations, and some short, thoughtful reflections again from the students on that all around the theme. They loved the students so loved bringing people into this set apart space and this set apart time. And the students were, you know, the ones giving this event to the to the community.

We did little or no talking. Mhmm. And people were just so blessed too to receive this, you know, to it's Thanksgiving, and what a wonderful way to meditate on a season like that to be stopped and, you know, to be blessed with beautiful poetry and and painting and the real thoughtful insights of students into these things. So, yeah, that that was a a standout example of this kind of thing that I I love to try to try to find ways to allow my students to to do and to experience. We did I was teaching a medieval literature class to eighth grade students in York, Pennsylvania, and Prince we read Prince Caspian.

And most of the literature we read was actually medieval literature, but this was, you know, a more contemporary story, obviously, but it illuminates a lot about medieval literature, I think. But the at the end, you know, all of the natural world kind of rises up and joins in the uprising with restoration of the Narnian creatures, including a river god who rises up and helps, you know, in the vanquishing of the evil Telmarines. So we took a walk outside along a local stream, and the students, we spent about half a day just following the course of this local stream through this city. And then the students had a few different class periods and stages they went through, but they wrote speeches in the voice of our stream in our city, imagining what that Oh, what that what that stream would would say to us should it ever be called, you know, called up into a kind of a, like, its local river god rise up and address us, what would this stream say? The Caldorus Caldorus Creek, which flows into the Susquehanna.

But, yeah, so these kinds of connections to our place and an opportunity for students to share with a community outside of the classroom. But even within a class, you know, when students are sharing with each other, that's the heart of the community of learning. Mhmm. You know, obviously, it's not the grade book, and it's not the red marks on your paper or the number that you get at the top, which tends to be so, you know, front front and center, sadly, in our experiences of schooling. Mhmm.

Christine Perrin: This makes me want to ask you before you have to go a little bit about, walking as a pattern in your life and naming, the natural world and the world of animals and the kind of role that that's played as a living pattern that's timeless.

Jesse Hake: Yeah. That it's the first thing Adam is asked to do. Right?

Christine Perrin: Yes.

Jesse Hake: Just about. So and it leads fairly directly to Eve for Adam. It is definitely in my own life one of those threads, you know, I talked about my parents reading Charles Dickens as kind of a thread that connects things together over the course of a lifetime, and it's that kind of thing has been that for me. I think I some of it I received very strongly from my mother. She was a science major in college, a biology major.

And she loved taxonomy and naming things, and I received a lot of that from her. And then growing up, you know, in Taiwan, we were properly in the tropics. I think twenty two degrees latitude is sort of equivalent to Havana, Cuba, actually. Or maybe between that and Key West, you know, further south than than the tip of Florida. So in the tropics, there's just so much flora and fauna.

So I I grew up just deeply immersed and loving the natural world in rather astonishing ways. And then as a man, you know, living in Pennsylvania most of my life, at one point, it was actually the year before I got married, I just I decided that I would not ever pass by a wildflower without identifying it. And I sort of made the and that, you know, it's before I was married, be before there were children. So you could make these kinds of rash rash vase. So I made a rash vow, and I stuck to it.

And it it was actually quite inconvenient. I I, you know, sort of sort of like a a madman. I would stop my car. It applied in the automobile as well. So Oh.

It was the I I had the right kind of job in life at the time, but I would everywhere I went, I was constantly identifying every wildflower that I saw. And and then I've lived in this same this was just, you know, two hours north of here in Pennsylvania. That year kind of set it created a baseline that was really a blessing. So I could I love identifying wildflowers. And one of the things I I've noticed about wildflower names is that there are so many common names, you know, for each wildflower.

And it's pretty clear to me that communities knew their wildflowers, and each kind of valley almost, you know, had its own name for that particular species. And now

Christine Perrin: Oh, yeah.

Jesse Hake: We don't really, you know, generally recognize wildflowers, and most people wouldn't know their names, let alone each region have their own particular name, you know, for that wildflower. So now now when you identify a wildflower, you end up getting about 16 different regional names that are all that are all the common names.

Christine Perrin: Okay. That helps me because I always thought there was one common name and one

Jesse Hake: You have the name. Yeah. You have the Latin name or the scientific name, and then and then you you typically, will have five or six. But sometimes, it's, you know, it's a dozen. Those are almost all regional.

But that and then bodies are streams and rivers. So, I've become convinced that and this goes both of these things are wonderful with walking. So, just taking taking walks. But I've become convinced that you that it's a great blessing to learn where all the watersheds are surrounding you. So I would talk to my students about this.

If a raindrop falls here on the sidewalk, where will it go? And then point just 15 feet away, and I know I'm standing over a watershed. If it falls over there, where will it go? And in one case, it goes into the Codorus. In the other case, it goes directly into the Susquehanna.

But to know the land you live on in terms of its local streams and creeks, and what the watersheds are between those local streams and creeks is a great blessing. So I love doing that with my children. My daughter, Tubby, and I have found many little treasures as we've been creek stomping and identifying the little watersheds, you know, right around our immediate neighborhood. And it's often quite a high adventure too because the world is built on top of these watersheds. So now, I've gone underground for close to a mile in a few cases, trying to follow water courses, you know, through

Christine Perrin: How interesting. Yeah. So there again, do you you just recommend maybe carrying a a small book that identifies the vegetation, the flowers, and then maybe some maps for the waterways?

Jesse Hake: Yeah. I think I think look for a slightly rash vow that you might that you might be able to take. Like, what would be what would be a reasonable sort of standard to hold yourself to? Such as, you know, I'm going this summer, maybe I'll try to take, you know, a walk once a week, and throughout the summer on this weekly walk, I won't let a single wildflower go unidentified. You know, so I do think it's beautiful to carry a book, but there's so many apps and things now.

Those are great too. But just kind of committing to getting to know where you live terms of the plants that grow there and what creeks, the names of the creeks that surround you, those are actually really hard to find. The creeks that are closest to your home, in many cases, are small enough that the names aren't common knowledge. I find very, very many cases where it's hard for people to tell me the name of a creek. When we moved to the neighborhood we're in now, it took me a long time.

Actually found it on a government document for all the arguments over when they would reroute Highway 83. Oh my goodness. And it named the creek that is near our home, but none of my neighbors could name it. And and but I finally found it. And so I treasured the name of that creek because it was a a legal battle over a a highway being built that actually documented it.

But just a few generations ago, everyone living by that creek would have had Would have known it. Would have had a name for it. But it was hard to find.

Christine Perrin: I I think that I wanna tell a little story about you, and I wanna ask you a question before we say goodbye. I'll give you the question while before I tell the story so you can be thinking about it. If there were one more pattern that you could build into your life right now, what do you wish it would be? But before you answer that, I'll just tell the story that when Jesse was how old when you would go into the caves in Taiwan?

Jesse Hake: I was, in high school, 17 years old.

Christine Perrin: Okay. So Jesse went into he worked with a team, a husband and wife scientists who were collecting bat data, studying bats. And in order to study the bats, they would send Jesse into the caves in Taiwan to catch the poisonous snakes before they could go study the bats. So, even though Jesse seems like a mild mannered man, you you really don't understand him and everything he's saying to you until you know that he's a a viper catcher and has been from the age of 17. So tell us what pattern you would adopt if you could in the next ninety days.

Jesse Hake: Oh, you know, a regular phone call with my father would be would be a very good pattern to develop. He comes and visits and spends a weekend with us from time to time. He's only about two hours away. But I think his goodness about staying connected to me, we went and canoed the Susquehanna River from here down to Harvard De Grasse, Maryland, where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay together. So we but I think that's given me kind of an excuse not to have the regular, you know, communications.

Yeah. Because I feel a kind of closeness, and he's not that far away, we've enjoyed good things, I think I let far too much time, you know, go by without simply saying hello on the phone. So some kind of a pattern of conversational regularity with my father with my father would be a great blessing.

Christine Perrin: Thank you. I just want to remind listeners that they can find your work at at the classical podcast show on True North FM at Copious Flowers. And, you know, the hand your hand, behind classical you, which has got hundreds and hundreds of, courses for parents and educators and parent educators, on on learning, not just pedagogy itself, but real content, across many subjects. Thank you so much for sharing, opening up the window into, these really beautiful living patterns in your life. Jesse, it was wonderful to spend time with you.

Jesse Hake: Thank you so much, Christine. Such a blessing to be able to answer your questions and talk about such things that have been such a blessing to me. Thank you.

Christine Perrin: You've been listening to Composed with Christine Perrin, podcast of the Humanitas Institute about composing well lived lives of virtue, craft, community, and delight.