Three essays that will make you feel whole

Exploring origins in the Monday Mind Meld

Welcome to Monday Mind Meld from The Brown Barge. I’m Spencer. Each week I spend hours sifting through Substack in search of writing that makes me feel whole. This sense of wholeness comes through connection to other people and the world, and so each Monday I share three pieces from the previous week to forge another link in the causal chain that connects us.

I didn’t spend the Fourth of July with my family, but I still spent a lot of time last week thinking about where I come from—and by extension where we all come from. The chain of causal connection linking us to the stars is a long and mind-warping sequence of events, one that feels more unreal to me the more that I learn about the world. Grounding this immensity in something tangible is a good way to let a bit of that awe seep into our minds. And so for this week’s mind meld I picked three essays that brought a bit of awe into my mind by focusing sharply on the elements that support our growth. 

First we have a video essay that made me tear up in appreciation for the people who gave me my name. Next is an essay about gardening that helped me feel more rooted in the world. And we finish with an essay that made me appreciate something I often overlook—that I am a human with a body, not just a brain in a vat. 

Names by

Taegan MacLean

Taegan publishes one of my favorite Substacks, called

One Word

. Each month he takes a deep dive into the waters of language and emerges with treasure. After starting with essays, Taegan started making video essays that remind me of one of my favorite TV shows of recent years, How To With John Wilson. The video essay that Taegan posted last week is another beautifully crafted tear-jerker. I think One Word is a masterpiece of the emerging Substack ecosystem, and if you aren’t already a subscriber you should go do that now.  

I felt triumphantly optimistic about the world while watching this video essay. You see, Taegan takes us to the heart of his life: interviewing his wife, talking about the name of their daughter, and riding around in a car with his best friend. But all of these tangible and moving parts of life are also underpinned by the things we struggle to understand—how the world shapes us, how we cope with the loss of loved ones, how we maintain the connections across generations when the only things we have are stories and images. 

There are so many thought-provoking and emotional moments of this video, plus some really cool cinematography. But the best thing I can do to recommend you watch this is to just quote Taegan:

The names of the people I love may seem weightless, a few brief, recognizable sounds, but they are the heaviest, most profound things I carry. Death is helpless against a well-loved name spoken aloud.

Give this video essay 18 minutes of your time and you’ll emerge back into the world more grateful for the gift of your name.

Everything I know about gardening by

Simon Sarris

I first came across Simon’s writing when I found an ongoing essay series he is writing called Designing a New Old Home, where he documents the process of turning a lovely patch of land in New Hampshire into a home. I often think about decamping from the city to build a life in a lovely patch of land amidst the pines of New England, and so this series was immediately alluring to me. Since finding that post I’ve explored the bounty that is Simon’s Substack,

The Map is Mostly Water

, and come to greatly appreciate his impulse to “write what you’re learning.”

The post that I am sharing is about gardening, about how we cultivate the land that we share, but also about how we cultivate ourselves. Simon shares a series of uncomplicated principles for gardening. As an apartment dweller without access to a garden, these principles initially seemed abstract to me. But when I started to look at them from a different angle I saw how they connected to my writing and more broadly to my life. What Simon ultimately wants in his garden is the same thing that I want in my writing—”to make something living.”

How wonderful it is to experience something living in just six minutes of time spent reading an essay about gardening. 

Remedies for Lyme disease of the soul by

Caroline Ross

Caroline’s Substack,

Uncivil Savant

, explores Tao and the embodied life. A couple of months ago I came across a poem by Caroline that made me get out of my head and go for a walk in the woods, and her post last week was another reminder that there is a wonderful world always there outside my own head.  

Remedies for Lyme disease of the soul explores the way that our thoughts can leave us feeling drained, isolated, and frightened. For quite some time, I thought that the world started with my own thoughts—these were after all the first thing that I could identify and the things that often seemed the most tangible to me. Caroline seems to come from a similar starting point—namely thinking immensely—but 25 years practicing and teaching T’ai Chi and making art have helped her shape a new way of being in the world. 

This essay made me think. I contemplated my own mental monocultures, the different sides of my brain, the way in which my mental grooves have calcified. But more importantly I felt. I felt that I have a body. I felt that there is a world. And finally thinking and feeling united as Caroline ends the essay with a potent sentence: “I live in hope.”

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These three essays spoke to something that I feel more powerfully each day—that we live in a profoundly interconnected world, that this world is more awe-inspiring than we often let on, and that I am grateful to be right here, right now, with you.