Hungry For: Matthew Long

Introducing a new conversation series

Introducing Hungry For! This new conversation series features people living beautiful lives in all kinds of ways. I’m so excited to share it with you.

Dearest Reader,

One of my favorite things, one of the things that brings me joy and fills me with hope, is to get a glimpse into the worlds and hearts of people living beautifully in all kinds of ways.

I also love hearing where they find beauty and hope and a more perfect hunger. A hunger for what nourishes body, mind, spirit. A hunger that leads towards Love and towards wholeness.

That’s the spirit of this new series, and one of the first people who came to mind was Matthew Long: a retired sailor, reading, writing, and living in rural western Tennessee.

I’ve long been drawn to Matthew’s beautiful writing in his newsletter, Beyond the Bookshelf. I’m equally drawn to his devotion to reading, and to his way of paying attention.

Even more than that—or perhaps I should say, intertwined in that—I’m drawn to the beauty of Matthew’s integrity. It shines through every word he writes on the page.

Lastly, perhaps more than ever before, I find myself interested in people who are practicing faith in myriad ways, guided by myriad teachings. Spirituality has been a vital thread through my life for more than twenty-five years, and this season has led me into a deeper, more serious and structured study and practice.

I’m eager to hear how others are exploring faith—not just in hallowed texts, but in life, in ethics, in relationship. I’m buoyed to find places of commonality, of shared humanness, of a Love that goes by so many names.

Matthew speaks of his own journey with faith below, and if these conversations captivate you, you might also check out his new series: “Taking Root in Tended Ground.” In his words: “I think the ordinary things, done faithfully, in the same soil, over time — that is where roots happen.”

Matthew with his wife, Jannett, and their children on vacation in Italy.

What does health feel like to you?

For twenty-four years, the Navy did me the favor of defining health on my behalf: a tape measure twice a year, a timed run, a checked box on a fitness report. It was clean and quantifiable, and I miss it the way you miss anything that used to make decisions for you so you didn’t have to. The military’s fitness standards are fairly rigid, though, and they don’t account much for aging. As I got older and my body changed, those “health standards” started to feel more constricting than enabling — less a measure of health and more a measure of how closely I still resembled a twenty-five-year-old.

These days I think health is less a number and more a totality — body, mind, and spirit, braided together so tightly that you can’t really pull on one strand without the other two tightening or fraying somewhere down the line. We talk about health like it’s mostly physical: the right foods, enough sleep, a body that does what you ask of it. That’s part of it, certainly. But I’ve watched plenty of physically fit men — myself included, on certain weeks — walk around with their mental health on fire and their spiritual life running on fumes, and still call themselves healthy because the scale agreed with them.

So now I try to feed all three on purpose. I read because my mind needs the exercise as much as my legs do. I’ve gotten serious again about my spiritual life after a long stretch of not being serious about much of anything except getting through the day. And on the body side, I gave up alcohol several years ago, which remains one of the better decisions I’ve made as an adult — up there with marrying my wife, and considerably ahead of most decisions I made in my twenties.

My retirement ceremony after twenty-four years in the U.S. Navy.

Before the Navy ever measured me, my dad and our farm did. I grew up in rural Missouri, where health meant you could still work after the chores nobody else wanted got handed to you. That’s a different definition than a tape measure, but it’s a related one — both are really asking the same question: can your body do what your life is asking of it? These days my life is asking different things of me than it did at twenty, or even at thirty-five in a uniform, so the answer keeps shifting. I’d be suspicious of a definition of health that hadn’t changed at all in thirty years.

Health, to me, finally feels like alignment. Not perfection — I’m not training for anything except maybe a long walk in the woods in a couple of years — but the sense that the different parts of me are pulling in the same direction instead of fighting each other for the wheel. When that alignment is there, even briefly, I notice it the way you notice a room go quiet. You don’t always know what was making the noise until it stops.

What’s nourishing your body, mind, and spirit these days?

Reading, mostly without apology. I go through stretches of nonfiction when I want to learn something, and stretches of fiction — big sprawling epic fantasy with a map in the front, or a thriller wound tight enough to keep me up later than I’d planned — when I just want to disappear for a few hours. A small sample of this year alone: fascinating history on the Civil War, several excellent books on Christian spirituality, Brandon Sanderson’s sprawling Stormlight Archive fantasy series, and finishing out Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers. It’s an eclectic mix, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t believe escapism and education are opposites. I think they’re two different rooms in the same house, and a healthy mind visits both.

The deeper nourishment, lately, has been spiritual. I went through what I can only describe as a wasteland for a stretch of years — nothing dramatic, no single moment of falling away, just a slow drift, the kind where you don’t notice the distance until you turn around and it’s considerable. I’m finding my way back through my church, where my wife, Jannett, and I are both active in a life group and in the outreach work the congregation does — feeding people who are hungry, ministering to men and women in prison, running reading programs for kids who don’t otherwise have easy access to books. There’s a difference between reading the Christian scriptures and trying to live them, badly and imperfectly, alongside other people who are also trying. That second thing has done more for my spirit than any amount of solitary reading could.

Physically, I’ve kept it simple — walking most days, some bodyweight exercises at home, paying closer attention to what’s on my plate. I was never a gym person and still am not. But I’ve learned that “simple” and “sustainable” are nearly the same word, and “impressive” rarely is. Nobody hands out medals for the workout you actually finish three years running, but that’s the one that counts.

What strikes me, looking at all three of those at once, is how little they have to do with each other on the surface and how much they have to do with each other underneath. The walking clears my head enough to actually pray instead of just reciting. The reading gives me language for what I’m feeling in church on Sunday. The church work reminds me why any of the rest of it matters. Nourishment, it turns out, isn’t three separate meals. It’s one meal with three courses.

What are you hungry for?

Connection, mostly. We’ve spent the better part of two decades being told that more screens equal more connection, and I think most of us know by now that the math doesn’t work. I finally ended my relationship with social media when I realized I was falling for the performative trap myself — writing for the algorithm, counting likes, paying closer attention to subscriber numbers than to whether I actually knew the people on the other end of them. I wanted the real version — knowing people, being known by people, the kind of relationship that survives someone seeing you on a bad day and sticks around anyway.

I’m also hungry for whatever this next chapter turns out to be. I’m closing in on fifty. I spent the first half of my adult life in uniform, raising a family and building a career, and that chapter had a shape to it — orders, deployments, promotions, a fairly clear sense of what came next and when. This chapter doesn’t have that shape yet, and most days I find that more exciting than unsettling. I’m planning to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail when I turn fifty, which is either a midlife crisis or the most honest thing I’ve ever planned for myself, and is probably both. Either way, I’m hungry to find out who I am when nobody’s handing me orders anymore — when the only person deciding what comes next is me.

I notice the two hungers are related. A trail doesn’t hand you connection through an algorithm. It hands you a person walking the same stretch of dirt, a shelter you’re both glad to reach before dark, a conversation that has nowhere else to go because there’s no signal to escape into. I suspect that’s part of why I’m drawn to it — not the miles, exactly, but the kind of company the miles tend to produce.

What does it mean to live beautifully?

Be kind. That’s the whole foundation, and it costs nothing, which makes it a little suspicious how often we skip it anyway.

Beyond that, I think living beautifully means getting off the machines on purpose. Go outside. Listen to birds instead of notifications. I walk our rescue dog, Lola, most mornings, and she has taught me more about paying attention than most books have — she stops for things I would have walked straight past, and after enough mornings of that, you start stopping too. Plant something. Ride a bike. Read something that isn’t on a screen. Go sit with a friend instead of texting one.

It means building relationships that take time you’ll never get back, on purpose, because you’ve decided they’re worth the cost. It means taking care of the body you’ve got — moving it, feeding it well — without turning that into another performance for an audience that isn’t watching as closely as you think. And underneath all of it, for me, it means believing in something bigger than yourself, because a life lived entirely inside your own head is a small life, no matter how nice the head is.

I don’t think beauty is something you arrive at and then get to keep. I think it’s something you keep choosing, in fairly ordinary moments, until — slowly, almost without your noticing — it becomes the shape of your days. No one measures that with a tape, and that might be the whole point.

Matthew, thank you so much for sharing your beautiful writing and wisdom with us. I’m grateful for your way of being in the world, and for the chance to introduce your work to the PERFECT HUNGER community.

If this resonated, a heart ❤️ helps these letters find their way.

Thank you, with love,
Dana

If you’re new here, welcome! PERFECT HUNGER is about living a more beautiful, nourishing life. I’d love to have you here.

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