April 2021 • Earth Month

• Blog header highlights spring along Route 66 in West Los Angeles.

• April virtual Sunday School essays/notes

• Nearby Sunflowers I captured on the actual 51^st Earth Day, Thursday 22 April.

• Earth Day 2021 blog featuring one of my several (closely related) designs for this year.

• Jane treated me with a belated birthday trip to the Los Angeles Arboretum. Perfect springing!

• Once again I tried to design this month's full moon, a Pink – happens when posies start to bloom – Supermoon. What I got was respectable but not very good, so I'll conclude with a bowl of mixed Blueberries and Blackberries. This particular lot of Blubes were giant ones. Yum!

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Earth Day 2021

Earth Day 2021—half a century plus 1. For almost two decades I've designed for Earth Day with quite different styles for very different years. Some of the results have been real "wows" and included a first place Blue Ribbon at the County Fair. Others? Somewhere between not so much and not at all. What could I do for this COVID-19 Earth Day II?

In January 2020 I declared 2020 my year of Living Local. Very early in January 2020 before COVID was even a whisper most places, when a pandemic was something in the history books. I began Living Local because all life really is local and can't be anywhere else. Late Boston Great Tip O'Neill who famously served many times as Speaker of the US House of Representatives constantly reminded us "All Politics Is local." As a voter or as an elected official your heart and your hopes may reside in the Mayor, City Council, or Town Meeting because you know government needs to be as physically close to the people as possible; but as you've likely observed, decisions at the State Capital and on Capitol Hill inevitably end up right here as they impact you and me.

During those innocent pre-COVID times, my main rant was how Amazon cardboard packaging had become more than I could bear, despite my no longer being a Vine reviewer and receiving almost none. I realize many small entrepreneurs and artisans sell on Amazon, but aside from how much "stuff" does anyone need, other factors had become beside the point.

"Living Local"? All these pictures are from West Los Angeles. More on Saturday about being local, earth day, stewardship, restoring our earth, and cities on my lectionary blog!

PS: We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors—we borrow it from our children was one of my themes for Earth Day 2010; it seemed exactly right for this year, too.

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Five Minute Friday • Permission

• Five Minute Friday • Permission linkup

Permission is another FMF I couldn't leave alone. The title of James Agee's Permit Me Voyage makes me wonder what those peregrinations and places could have been. Maybe not an actual cruise to somewhere, but excursions to unimagined destinations? In any case, I need many many MANY permissions! The catch is we live in society, in relationship to individuals in that society and cannot do life alone. Can't do life alone? It's not really life if it's not tethered together. Please let me, permit me, allow me to—

• acknowledge the present
• remember the past
• get angry about aspects of the past
• forget the past
• grieve for parts of the past
• rejoice in parts of the past
• trust a future
• welcome the future
• ask for what I need
• ask again for what I need
• take what I need when they give it to me
• live again?

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The Desert, the Cross, and Easter

Screen capture: Desert Sonoran Easter, ground zero
Pascal daybreak: Lepus sits tamed at Orion hunter's feet
evoking the kairos past when
Noah's God hung his weapon bow
high in the sky, surrendering disarmed
Divine capitulation to creation
for earth to claim covenant
Desert dawn's eastered hues quietly course throughout creation
equal desert's constant colors
Friday's cross seemed desolate
but from mortality's tree
on Sunday's morn bursts forth the Tree of Life:
earth all-living breathes again!

© Leah Chang 2007