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Steve West
I'm a writer, walker, and nature lover
Interests: walking, nature, and writing, reading (both good fiction and non-fiction), listening to music (particularly power-pop and alt-country), travel (particularly in the west)
Recent Activity
Only A Few Seats Left: Reserve Now for Alathea, Thursday, July 28, 8:00 PM
Posted Jul 23, 2022 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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Time to Reserve: Alathea, In Concert, July 28, 8:00 PM
Posted Jul 17, 2022 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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Reserve Your Seat Now: Alathea, In Concert, Thursday, July 28, 8:00 PM
Posted Jul 10, 2022 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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Tickets Going Fast: Reserve Seats for Alathea, Thursday, July 28, 8:00 PM
Posted Jul 1, 2022 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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Reserve Your Seat: Alathea, In Concert, Thursday, July 28th, 8:00
Posted Jun 25, 2022 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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Alathea: In Concert, Thursday, July 28, 2022, 8:00 PM
Posted Jun 14, 2022 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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It’s Coming to Take You Away (Corrected)
Posted Jun 5, 2021 at Out Walking
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A White Line Out of Here
Posted Apr 4, 2021 at Out Walking
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Don, that’s kind of you to say...and a relief. When you appropriate someone else’s words, there is always the danger of making them say something they didn’t. I actually had not read far enough in your book to come to the Christmas essay, but as I was considering Christmas, I thought, I wonder if Don has written on this? I was glad to find that you had, and so well—and then it gave me and opportunity to go back to our conversation last year, which was rich. May God give you many more words in the coming year, and may others come to love the place where they are as well.
Where We Are, Who We Are
“If we make a mistake about where we are, we can make a mistake about who we are” (D.J.Waldie) Sometimes when I want to remember who I am, I think about where I am, and to think about where I am, I sometimes think about a place where I am not, a place foreign to me. Historian and memoirist Don ...
Where We Are, Who We Are
Posted Dec 24, 2020 at Out Walking
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Jackie, indeed it has been a hard year, and we have been waiting for something to happen, right? I’m glad these words were helpful to you. Let’s use this interstice for more prayer. God be with you.
Interstitial Prayer: What To Do While You're Waiting For Something To Happen
One of the most difficult commands of Scripture to implement is that to "pray continually" (1 Thess. 5:17). It obviously doesn't mean every single moment of every single day, because then when would we do everything else? Or does it some sense mean just that? I can tell you that I have never met...
Slowing down is a difficult thing! Thanks Tanya.
Connecting October to April
At the perimeter of the yard, huddled by the fence, lies our grill, veiled, like it is ashamed of its diminutive stature. Arcing above it is a maple that once near died but many years since has bent toward the sun and thrust upward, and the bashful grill there teeters, like a child with its new...
Connecting October to April
Posted Oct 5, 2020 at Out Walking
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Home Calling
Posted Aug 23, 2020 at Out Walking
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Take Out
Posted Jul 5, 2020 at Out Walking
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Today’s News
Posted Jun 8, 2020 at Out Walking
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Dave, thanks for your comment. D.J. Waldie is coined house as “hero,” of course. I recommend his book, Holyland, which is a memoir of suburbia not as critique but love story. All the best to you. . .and your home in which you are making memories.
Allies
“The world is hard to live in, it seems to me, and we need allies. Your house can be a hero, too. And how else could it ever be home, if you did not fall in love with it?” (D.J. Waldie, in California Romantica) Like many of you, I have been under near house arrest for weeks. When you are in one ...
That’s a poetic reply, Amanda. Thank you! Jane Kenyon is on my very small list of poets that I enjoy reading.
Allies
“The world is hard to live in, it seems to me, and we need allies. Your house can be a hero, too. And how else could it ever be home, if you did not fall in love with it?” (D.J. Waldie, in California Romantica) Like many of you, I have been under near house arrest for weeks. When you are in one ...
Allies
Posted Apr 29, 2020 at Out Walking
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The Kinship of Things
Posted Mar 24, 2020 at Out Walking
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Eating the Past
Posted Feb 26, 2020 at Out Walking
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It’s good to hear from you, Michael, and thanks for sharing your heartfelt story. I will have to listen to Lennie Gallant, as I have not heard him, though I have visited your beautiful island many years ago. May God be with you and keep you and your son well. Blessings, Steve.
His Father’s Son: Singer-Songwriter Pierce Pettis on Life and Legacy
Pierce Pettis is taking stock of life. His first solo release in ten years, Father’s Son (Compass, Jan. 19) offers a retrospective on the past and a prayer for the future. As Pettis sums it up: “The overall theme, at least for me, is ‘Father’s Son’—and all that can imply. I’m thinking of my own...
Oddities, Thankfully
Posted Jan 16, 2020 at Out Walking
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Claire Holley Concert Cancelled
Unfortunately, the Claire Holley concert scheduled for December 29th has been cancelled. We will try to reschedule in the Spring! Continue reading
Posted Dec 29, 2019 at Brookhaven House Concerts
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That Infant Disturber of the Peace
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matt. 10:34b) In a season when we say, “Peace on earth,” Jesus says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” He goes on to say that he will set families at odds, that if we love our families more than him, we are not worthy, says that if we lose our lives for his sake, we will gain our lives. Writing about these hard words, Oswald Chambers says, “Jesus Christ came to send a sword through every peace that is not based on a personal relationship to himself.” In short, every sense of well-being and security not based on a relationship with Jesus will be wrecked by a God who knows that our own glory is only in knowing him. Dying to self—to what I want, desire, and need—and living unto God is the door to life, to abundant life. Be of good cheer, Jesus says. Then, take up your cross. Die. His burden is easy. But that was this morning when the house was quiet and you could think, when your thoughts had room to drift out of your head and down quiet hallways, settle onto stairway landings, rest in vacant spaces, sit on the sills of windows. You’re at the mall trying to squeeze your SUV into an available space marked C, for confident or perhaps conceivable, and you had to inhale to slip through the slender opening between your door and the car and were thankful that you were still trim enough to squirm through. And you thought you were done shopping, but there was that one item you needed. And then you remembered another thing you needed while sitting at the stoplight, and you wrote it on the back of a gas receipt stuffed in the cupholder. But you lost the paper in the crevice made for tiny people hands between the seat and the console. You thought a bad word, but at least you didn’t say it, today. You bought a Cinabon, just to soak up frustration, though you know you shouldn’t have, and besides, it’s Christmas, almost, you remind yourself. Sitting there eating it, slowly, you remembered the squirrel you saw at lunch yesterday deftly navigating the thin edge of the black fence behind your home carrying an oversize pine cone, like a tight-rope walker with a balance beam, stopping to strip away the husk to get at seeds and how, once down, he stopped and looked at you, dead on. Like he said, “What? What? This is what I do.” Nothing bothered the squirrel. Not the screeching circular saw at the home being constructed behind me. Not the hammers arresting silence. Not the blond real estate agent pacing back and forth on the unfinished patio, cell phone in hand, barking at someone, gesticulating, while the cement churned and workers looked on. Not the whine of a motorcycle on the avenue. Not the 747 passing overhead. You just remembered the second item you needed, pushed back from the table, joined the throng of shoppers humming along to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” It’s said that the common ground squirrel can bury up to 1000 nuts and, remembering where each one is, dig them up later for a meal. That doesn’t sound common but extraordinary. Yet I suspect they lose a few. I have seen them scurrying about in the pine straw, all a titter about their lost nut. “I know I put it out here,” I can almost hear them say, “and yet, it’s not here.” They move on but then circle back. “I may have missed something,” they say. I may have missed something, I think. I forgot to buy something. Someone will be forgotten. Someone in my extended family. A child. No one will say anything, but they’ll remember me as the uncle who forgot. You put your hand to your head, and not softly, as if the percussive effect may jar loose a memory. My wife told me that a woodpecker has an area in its head behind its beak that acts as a shock absorber to his intermittent head-banging. I don’t know. There may be a reason why he (not to be sexist, but it seems like a man thing) is banging his head on an aluminum gutter. But I’m glad of it. The other morning a woodpecker was working out on my neighbor’s metal gutter, like a rivet gun, as if it might yield an insect, but won’t. Perhaps he was frustrated: it was one of those days when nothing seems to work, to come to fruition, when there’s nothing to point to as achievement. He may have forgotten something. I may have forgotten something. And then there are a lot of “what ifs.” What if, when I finish here, another Suburban has parked next to me and I cannot get in the door? What if the parking garage collapses? What if my kids are smarter than me? (Wait a minute. . .) I worry about things, but I needn’t have. When I return to my car there is a Fiat parked next to me in the shadow of my side mirror, leaving ample room for me to slip in, settle into the seat, close the door, recline my seat, and close my eyes. Just rest a minute before I get going, I think. Only I just remembered another item I forgot. I thought that word again. I was going to wrap this little journey up nicely, circle back to Oswald Chambers, mention the squirrel and woodpecker again. But I forgot where I was going with this. Only thinking back about those hard things I read this morning, about what Jesus said, I see a little more of who the baby Jesus really was, that Infant Disturber, that One who brings peace yet disrupts every false peace. It was like a sword in the stone of my heart. Continue reading
Posted Dec 25, 2019 at Out Walking
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