Earth Day 2026 :: Our Power • Our Planet

Earth Day 2026 • Our Power • Our Planet

• suntreeriver design

Five Minute Friday :: Invest

• Five Minute Friday :: Invest Linkup

Because invest has an overwhelming variety of nuances, I'll mainly run with Kate's agricultural picture as today's prompt.

The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land,
a land with flowers streams and springs, valleys and hills,
a land of wheat and barley, vines and fig trees and pomegranates,
a land of olive trees and honey.
Deuteronomy 8:7-8

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,
for the land is mine;
you are but aliens and sojourners with me.
You shall grant redemption of all the land
of your possession.
Leviticus 25:23-24

It's all about the land. The dirt, sod, earth beneath our feet forms a heaven for us to live on. It's about investment and stewardship. You may remember the first humans received land as a gift and then as a task or a charge:

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden
to tend and guard and care for it.
Genesis 2:15

Invest conveys a sense of a long time, something not fleeting or ephemeral. You know about investing in stocks or commodities, in an education, in a dream. Some of those involve a long stretch of time; some entail money; some are about human effort and initiative. Some investments are about all of the above. Creation care in general and farming in particular require legal tender, human grunt work and intellectual insight, and dream worthy results don't happen yesterday. Sometimes not even in a year or two. Have you heard, "We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors—we borrow it from our children?" I illustrated it as one of my designs for Earth Day 2010.

Those "children" or descendants are as long-range as Abraham's were. Way beyond grandkids and great nieces. We're talking a few centuries down the line, so they can look back and retrospectively love our investments, maybe be inspired and invest a bit or a lot themselves.

For sure God majorly invested in planet earth by creating land to last, and it's been around near-countless millennia. In Romans 8:19 the apostle Paul reminds us all creation waits for us humans to claim our divine image and start (or continue) to steward creation as lovingly as God would: "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." As our Leviticus text insists, the land belongs to God. It's only on loan to us.

• Read the entire passage: Romans 8:18-23

It's about the land so we'll have food. So we'll have shelter and bigger buildings, too. So we'll have transportation, tools, and everything that's made from wood and minerals the land provides us. It's about the land because all creation – not solely human creatures – depends on land and human caretaking of the land in order to live, thrive, and flourish.

How have you invested? What have you invested? What will you invest next? Who do you have in mind as you look into the future?

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April 2025 Highlights

• Urban Wilderness City Paradise Lectionary Project for April

• Wednesday 02 April • Another Trip to Torrance. I collaged the Stained Glass Windows I thought to capture this time. Have I mentioned google AI makes some really good collages, and has different options for us to make our own?

• Monday 07 April • Ground cover daisies. I don't know how many pics I've taken of ground cover at commercial sites. It's always fun and lively and even encouraging.

• Thursday 17 April • Florist Shop Easter Flowers in a collage by google AI.

• Saturday 19 April • My first time back in town in four years. Here are snacks from the annual Holy Saturday Easter workday; with covid and other disruptions I'm not sure when my last one was.

• Sunday 20 April • Easter Day, the Festival of Resurrection, Queen of Feasts. Lunch on the lawn included Persian Food for the end of Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

• Tuesday 22 April • doubles for Earth Day! I designed a poster for 2025 and my blog linked to six faves from previous years.

• Serendipitously, Earth Day also was the Fourth Tuesday Santa Monica Lunch Brunch I enjoyed for a second time. I collaged the lunch venue and some outside foliage.

Earth Day 2025

Our Power, Our Planet

From previous Earth Days:

• 2023 Invest In Our Planet

• 2020 50 Years :: #ClimateAction

• 2019 #ProtectOurSpecies

• 2018 #EndPlasticPollution

• 2015 #GreenCities

• 2008 Urban Oasis

April 2024

• Urban Wilderness / City Paradise for April

• Since mid-December I've been doing a Gap Half Year that may – or may not – keep on keepin' on a little longer; thus I'm blogging my April rundown during June, plan to assemble a May chronology soon, and eventually catch up on my lectionary blog. I didn't go on any real outings for April, so here's some creation beauty.

• Earth Day: Planet vs Plastics
Please stay tuned for this year's design!

• Google AI made a 15 picture April collage!

April 2023

• Peach Blossoms
• Golden Poppies
• Succulents
• Roxy in Easter Egg Bandana she won from a twitter friend

• Triduum Act 1: Maundy Thursday in North Hollywood 06 April

• Triduum Act 2: Good Friday in North Hollywood. What a Night! 07 April

• Crucifixion by He Qi is a separate line item. He Qi Art website

• Triduum Act 3: Resurrection – font and flowers 09 April

• Statice and Golden Poppies. The world in spring bloom!

• Too funny! I was so intent on publishing this April rundown before midnight, and I knew I'd carefully included all the highlights… but I ended up spacing Earth Day! Here's a Monday morning edit and addition. I trust you'll always #InvestInOurPlanet.

• Very early April peach blossoms turned into very late April peaches

Earth Day 2023

Earth Day 2023: Invest In Our Planet

Flowery clip art with legal reuse rights is from Creative Market several years ago. When or if I find the artist name, I'll add it here and link to their CM or other online presence.

• Earth Day Official Website

April 2022

• Liturgy and Lunch on Tuesday in Holy Week in Glendale. First time there since February 2020—more than two years! These stained glass windows on the front of the building always wow me.

• Maundy Thursday and Good Friday marked the first two acts of the three day Triduum. A Pink Full Moon on Saturday was the first full moon after the vernal equinox; let's also call it Easter Moon. I've never had a camera that can photograph the sky, so again this time I illustrated the moon. No Easter Vigil or Sunrise this year, but the concluding act three of the Triduum on Sunday morning was splendid.

• Earth Day 2022 – #InvestInOurPlanet – happened on Friday in Bright Week!

• On the second Sunday of Easter, April 24th, a neighbor's garden was part of the Native Plant Garden Tour sponsored by Theodore Payne nurseries. At least twice I've blogged pictures from visits to Theodore Payne and will try to find and tag them.

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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