Monday, July 14, 2025

This is the sixty-eigth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Please take a moment to pray for the victims of the recent Texas floods, and for all those affected by natural disasters recently.

Hello again, everybody! Here we are again with a new week, and a new issue of West Wind. It’s been a little while since I posted last, as last week was taken up pretty much entirely with relocating to a new property, just down the road from our previous one. No need for another cross-country move, at least not right now. This was the sixteenth time my wife and I have moved since we were married 21 years ago, which comes out to a staggering average of 1.31 moves per year!

I noticed something interesting, though. In normal conversation, you can say that you “moved” recently, or can ask people for help “moving.” Move is a fairly common verb that fulfills a lot of different roles, but it’s pretty much universally understood what you mean when you say it in this kind of a context. Is that because we do it so often that we don’t need to provide any context or explanation for it?

It was also a complete coincidence that during this last week, EWTN aired a series hosted by Jason Craig, dairy farmer, homesteader, and otherwise awesome guy. It consisted of interviews with other homesteading families about why they do it and how important it is, along with discussions about artificial culture and economies. Or, as I liked to call it, Liturgy of the Land: The Movie.

You can watch all five episodes right now, but it was a lot of fun to watch them live with the family after a long day of packing and readying the house and property to move. Yes, it was a little ironic to be watching a show about homesteading and finding a place to call your own while moving away from what was meant to be that place for our family, but that’s just what God is calling us to right now.

To us, it seems contrary and a little frustrating to have spent all the time, effort, and energy to find a nice piece of land to cultivate and put down roots in, only to uproot and move on to somewhere else, but we can only see what’s in front of us now. We don’t know what effects that our being exactly where we were for exactly as long as we were will have in the future, not just for us but for anyone. The additions and changes we made may end up blessing another family who lives there in the future, and we just can’t know.

I have more to say about this, but it will have to wait until tomorrow, since this is supposed to be a short email. But I’m mostly just making this up as I go along, so who knows what will happen?

Since putting the trio up in last week’s email seemed to be relatively popular, I’ll be keeping it there at least once or twice a week. Enjoy the rest of the day!