#Write31Days: 12 • sky

Tuesday 11 October: sky

Carl Sandburg says, "I tell you there is nothing in the world. Only an ocean of tomorrows, a sky of tomorrows." Williams Faulkner reminds us how the past keeps overtaking us minute by minute, so it's as here and now as it ever was there and then. In case, in every case, the sky above us is vast and limitless and endless. God made a firmament and declared it good. The commentator asks, "what's a firmament?" Beyond the heavenly canopy above us as a sort of unit of measurement – boundless, endless, etc. – more than anything the sky is a wonder. Tucson is an astronomical dark sky area. Look up in the sky! Lie on the city roof bak on Clark Street. Not nearly as many stars to see as out in the country, but the stars, the night, the moon, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus planets all proclaim a Creator. Who is not us, to echo Tucson poet Richard Shelton in his Totem,

while it is still night
with morning around the edges
I will take the face of dawn
in my hands and say it

surely if I can tell anyone
I can tell her
that I have found
the gods and discovered
I am not one of them

The Sky. Blue serenity, thunderclouds. Funnel clouds. North Atlantic skies brewing up a storm over earth, on land.

#Write31Days: 11 • thanks

Tuesday 11 October: thanks

A Song of Thanksgiving for Today

Thank You! for giving us the mornings
Thank you! for the rising of the sun
Thank You! for food on the table
for companions who help make it tastier
thank you for church on Sundays
cities that are more than fun
thank you! for work that pays us
thanks for beauty, tasty veggies
fruits and berry bounty all resound
Thank You! for Harvest Feast and celebrations
Thank You! for county fairs all year round

#Write31Days: 10 • unknown

Intro: all year long I looked forward to the month of October and an opportunity to write for five minutes every day and be amazed at what I did. Just as for 2015, I planned to use the series prompts rather than invent a topic of my own. Fairly early in Sept, the wifi at the place where I'm staying started having strange problems, and I could access only a limited number of sites. But then, after I'd posted only three days, it went out completely. I'd told the landlord I thought the trouble was the not very good router the ISP provided, and in the end it looks as if that's what happened. So I'm writing offline, saving posts to publish on the correct days, and I've been designing buttons for some of the days.

Monday 10 October: unknown

never stop dreaming / be amazing!

I've been enjoying designing topical buttons for some of the word prompts for this write 31 days 2016 series. The bottom layer of this design for unknown features one of the near countless versions I've done of what originally was only three illustrations of a house in Truro, on the vacation peninsula of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, aka The Bay State. Every week I look forward to collecting most of the six free design assets from Creative Market; a couple weeks ago I got a large and generous supply of sayings in script to use wherever I'd like on any projects I create for myself or someone else. Some of them were way far too sweet and sappy for my current taste, but I latched onto never stop dreaming and be amazing,. After all the future is a real unknown, but if we all keep on dreaming, if everyone keeps dreaming and doing everything possible to be amazing, that'll help edge the future over into wonderful, marvelous, stupendous, not disappointing in the least column.

#Write31Days: 09 • post-it

Sunday 09 October: post-it

I have a sneaking suspicion Post-It® is a registered TM^TM but it may have become generic enough that we can remove all the legalese whenever we mention hand me a sticky note, I need one of those classic yellow post-its. Interesting that 3M (I believe it was) introduced the now indispensably ubiquitous sticky notes long before the digital age. Yet the post-it prompt meant I needed to do something with a classic snail mail stamp and postmark. I actually have several fonts that replicate real postmarks for places like Buzzards Bay and Wellfleet, MA, Detroit, MI and Bronx and New YOrk, NY, San Bernardino and Santa Clarita, CA. Bronx, NY, but in the interest of artistic my illustration is a coral postage stamp with a high value rather than a USA forever stamp. Five minutes are up, but I'll include my intended post-script remaining my readers we need to start sending more non-electronic mail. PPS: notice hoe electronic mail became ellipsed to e-mail that more often than not is email these days?

#Write31Days: 08 • muddle

Illustration created using an Old Film Look photograph (scans of analog) by Penelope Newman – Retroshutter – on Creative Market. The pack I got has "clean" versions as well as photos with light leaks, motion streaks, and other distortions we don't get with digital cameras unless we create them ourselves. I knew an image that's not pristine aptly could express muddle.

Saturday 08 October: muddle

I don't recall ever saying "muddle, " but it's not among those words I detest and won't use that include eschew, perhaps, redux, woot, woohoo, pesky, and boho. I like that muddle begins with elemental earthy dirt and water mud. I like that you get middle when you change out the u for an i. That you pronounce it the way you spell it. But how would I use the word muddle? Related to an unclear situation, a jumbled up collection of anything. Those would be muddle the noun. Muddle as a verb, an action word could be about getting through a task or an action when I didn't really know what I was supposed to do next, the instructions weren't there or were unclear, the markers were a jumbled up collection of whatever they were. Maybe you've heard the midwestern states of the central USA referred to as the mud-west? Very apt, since a lot of those states specialize in agriculture, and dirt from the earth mixed with water turns into mud of one color or another.

#Write31Days: 07 • test

I enjoy spinning different word meanings—a test could happen in lots of situations. For a person, a vehicle (test drive, emissions test), test run for a project. Today I'll go back in time to school. By the time I started enjoying school for the most part (thanks, Mrs. Hartley!) I also wanted to do well in everything I attempted, and was enough of a perfectionist – because I loved the appearance of anything well-done – that I started taking classroom tests, exams, and papers very seriously. I'm calling shorter examinations of students progress "tests" longer ones (such as a midterm and semester's end) exams, but it's all the same.

Nationwide, school district wide, standardized tests hardly ever bothered me at all. No more than a minor hint of anxiety. I'm talking about tests from the teacher related to the subject we'd been learning about. On a paper I predictably could get an A or A-, very occasionally a B+, now and then that crack between B+/A-. I had my techniques for preparing to write papers and then writing them, and although my writing still needs improvement and still is getting better blog post by blog post, I enjoyed writing and wrote with relative clarity. Tests were the anxious part of school. Compared to some students I've observed, my test anxiety was actually very mild, but just enough that my test scores almost always were a half grade lower than the grades on my papers.

#Write31Days: 06 • you

Thursday 06 October: you

"what I know"

At least in Western languages, the pronoun you has singular and plural forms. Everyday spoken English has pretty much abandoned "thou" as intimate and singular in favor of you that in every case operates identically to the plural you. Other Western languages have different conventions regarding you: some truly reserve the singular you for the intimate, friendly, lover(ly), familiar, and also for addressing the Divine. Other ways of speaking address one person or pet with a singular you, more than one with plural.

Christianity acknowledges God as immanent – "closer to us than we are to ourselves; Ground of Being" – and also as wholly other than where and who we are – "transcendent." Yet some scripture translations along with many private and public Christian prayers still address Deity as Thou, with parallel pronouns thy and thine.

"that's what I know"

#Write31Days: 05 • silence

Wednesday 05 October: silence

Two millennia of Christianity have brought and often emphasized a way of being centered:

• not on social and political activism
• not on regular celebrations of sacraments and ordinances
• not on excellent exegesis and exposition of scripture

but without intentional speech, movement of bodies or objects from here to there, reflection on, perception of...

I've heard "prayer is talking to God – meditation is listening to God"

but the silence I'm contemplating is a bit different from
where has that silence found me?

• afternoon in the Sonoran desert
• first light over the beach
• driving up the central coast
• the moment before the concertmaster gives the orchestra an A to tune with

---

PS The song sings "silence is golden" because humans often find high value in absence of chatter,noise, commotion,, bustling activity... total lack of audible sounds? Sometimes. Sometimes not.

#Write31Days: 04 • brew

My series button perfectly fits the prompt for today!

Tuesday 04 October: brew

storms brew
coffee brews
beans. choices of roasts
Katie Luther brewed beer
hops and barley
look to the east
storm clouds announce
what's brewing today is
a big bombastic storm.

it blows across the valley
deep into the dry brush
tears up trees
sweeps clean the valley floor

sky over there announces
still air's starting to brew and serve
a sunshiny day

#Write31Days: 03 • wardrobe

Monday 03 October: wardrobe

Wardrobe. desert spirit's fire! mostly is a theology blog, so I could relate the wardrobe word and concept to clothes we wear on our body and/or the closet or armoire for storing clothes, and to make it formally theological, I could mention "clothed in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne" from My Hope is Based on Nothing Less and we can sing it to the tune Solid Rock. But I won't. Though I just did.

I consider colour, pattern, line, and other aspects of design almost 25/7. I've long loved clothes made of well-done neon fabric, but I don't mean hurriedly yarn- or garment-dyed with an off the printable gamut, screamingly vulgar spring green, coral, pink, green yellow, etc. My ideal is at least the appearance of sun-struck and semi-bleached, more softly subtle than in your face. Having said that, over the past two or three years, clothing retailers have been doing neon better. My flat lay features neon wear from the GAP and I actually bought a couple of pieces (not pictured here) at the nearby GAP factory: neon coral t-shirt dress and a softer coral long sleeved t-shirt. Having said all that about neon fabric, real neon colors are closer to "the benediction of the neon light" in Jackson Browne's Tender is the Night. The band Simple MInds also sang about neon lights. I insist I want my neon wardrobe stonewashed gentle and understated, but real neon colors are bright, vivid, casino and glaring.

#Write31Days: 02 • paint

Sunday 02 October: paint

October Paint

Santa Ana winds brush in a pageant of pasts
Winsor & Newton watercolor paint Christmases
painting summer thing fences
paint parties for classmate apartments
scriptures painted on suburban (church) classroom walls
getting face painted at the suburban (church) carnival
paint on my face at the (urban) church carnival

#write31days 01 • walk

Write31 Days, October 2016 edition. Very similar to Five Minute Friday free writes, participants write unedited for five minutes each day to a one-word prompt the host page provides or to their own topic; I'm following the prompts.

Saturday 01 October: walk

Last year I happily wrote all 31 days of 5 minute unedited free writes, but haven't been convinced accomplishing it this year would be worth the extra effort.

Christians talk about walking the talk. The gospel talk that's the story of death and resurrection. Death and resurrection like Jesus of Nazareth's. Do we walk the talk a lot? Risk all that much real dying to self so other humans and all creation might really live? Dire Straits had Johnny busking in the subway and doing the walk of life. Turning night time into the day. Baseball season's still here. Sometimes the pitcher walks a batter. In that scenario, actual walking is bad form.

First prompt of 31 is walk, so why not consider the entire month a one foot in front of the other, evenly paced walk through aspects of my days the prompts suggest—through sections of the city the ideas evoke. We're getting some good ones that include paint, brew, sky, neighbor – we've been talking neighborology a lot in the adult SS class I lead, so that one's already done – weekend, global, sign, bouquet. For Write 31 Days a slow stroll, lopping canter, jaunty jog or normal paced walk all are permissible. Not one is bad form! We can help turn the world's nighttime into day? Yeah, wholly holy! Let's go for it!

Autumn 2016 Currents

Clockwise:
• Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at Wilshire/ Vermont
• Milkweed window boxes on Santa Monica Blvd, West LA
• Grand Park DTLA
• NoHo Metro Red Line station art
music
What's more fun than making playlists and maybe even blogging them? Very slightly expanded, here's my Rev Gal Blog Pals Friday 5 for today:

1. group 1 because I love Bruce Hornsby's piano playing and for other reasons: Mandolin Rain; End of the Innocence; Down the Road Tonight; Look Out Any Window, Look Out Any Open Door; The River Runs Low; Every Little Kiss – "When the day goes down on Water Town." I lived in Watertown.

2. because I can't not pick up on the Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, S&G bandwagon: April, Come She Will; For All I Know; Bridge Over Troubled Water; Mother & Child Reunion; the Graceland title track of the Graceland soundtrack; Born at the Right Time from Rhythm of the Saints

3. Huey Lewis' Best for me: Power of Love; I Want a New Drug; If This Is It

4. Mary Chapin Carpenter because she's about the middle america of my mother's side of my family of origin; because we're exact contemporaries; because I love the wistfulness and realness of her music and her style. First songs that come to mind: Almost Home; Come On, Come On; Stones in the Road; I Am A Town; Something of a Dreamer; Quittin' Time; Only a Dream

5. Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 4, and 7. What? No Fifth of Beethoven? No Ninth? I'll leave it where I left it.

work
Still mostly appreciating the variety, feeling of competence, and sense of self that comes with freelance designing.

bebidas
Before moving to this section of town I'd enjoyed a large with whole milk Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Hazelnut Ice Blended most Saturday afternoons while I worked through final notes for my Sunday morning class. No nearby Coffee Bean or Starbucks, so I've been rotating mocha, caramel, and chocolate chip McDonald's frappes. Or a latte on a chilly day. Both options are very very good!

what is there to wear?
Preppy shorts and shirts, dresses, huaraches, and flip flops. Two brand new pairs of combat boots – brown and black – all ready to wear with jeans or dresses in the cooler months. A surprise find of black canvas high tops in my size when I wanted them. Good price, too!

theology
Continuing my Sunday morning teaching gig at Church in West LA. Loving Green Faith Team meetings at the judicatory offices and excited about getting involved in future creation care activities.

comida rapida
Here in the #SFV I've been lunching on subway samwiches a lot; Special K cereal with bananas or other fruit for breakfast. I've discovered Japanese-American Yoshinoya with only about a dozen menu items, all of them in plain, simple, semi-industrial (autocorrect said "neutral" and that's not far wrong) style retail restaurant settings, not overly expensive, and a change from the usual mexican, burger, or other.

hangouts
Wilshire & Western near Koreatown; Panorama Mall; big open air shopping center The Plant mall that used to be an actual GM assembly plant; #DTLA around Grand Park and Hill

re-creation
Still more digital versions of more of my analog art. Stay tuned for more additions to this blog's art page!

worship
Every Sunday at Church in West LA with SS before, brunch after; as many weekday 12:10 masses as possible at #DTLA cathedral.

wishlist
I still hanker after relocating to Detroit, still imagine i couldn't cut the winters, but locations like Sepulveda and Roscoe are gritty enough, sufficiently grungy maybe I can have it all where I already am. Most major wish? Longer term housing.

Green Team Talk: Friday of Pentecost 18

January 2017: I've tried to reconstruct my talk from my scant notes that were all I needed at the time... and I'm publishing this on the actual Friday of Pentecost 18 date.

Isaiah 25:6-9

⁶On this mountain shall the Lord of hosts
make unto all peoples
a feast of fat things
a feast of vines on the lees
of fat things full of marrow
of vines on the lees well refined

⁷God will swallow up the covering that hovers over everyone
the veil stretched over all nations

⁸God will swallow up death forever
God will wipe away all tears
God will remove the remove the reproach of the people from the earth
For the Lord has spoken

⁹On that day we will say,

"This is our God we've waited for
so he could save us.
"This is the Lord we've waited for.
"Let's rejoice in God's salvation."

This passage the canon places in First Isaiah is the appointed text for Easter Evening RCL years A, B and C. We find it amidst writings mostly from Isaiah of Jerusalem, yet it's probably at least a century afterwards—with its sense of optimism, probably exilic or later. This is the Hebrew scripture reading for Easter evening, but six months have gone by since we celebrated the Day of Resurrection, over four months since the Great Fifty Days concluded.

Here in the northern hemisphere the wheel of the year has been in meteorological autumn for close to a month; in a couple days we'll be in astronomical fall. Ripening root crops, leaves falling from trees then decaying on the ground, shorter days, longer nights, all remind us of God's gift of the agricultural cycle, God's gift of land. These natural events in the browning time of autumn anticipate the arrival of the apparently quiet, still, and silent season of winter that in many respects is similar to the stillness and quiet near-silence of the surface of the desertscape.

These imaginative words we find in First Isaiah remind us the God of Israel is God of all people, God on the side of everyone. They promise God will swallow up death and the shroud of death – a veil that hides the light of life, anything that lessens our joy – into God's own being. God will obliterate tears of grief; God will prepare and serve an amazing spread of a covenant meal shared by God and people. That eschatological feast – as we called our extravagant potlucks in divinity school – will be God's sign that death and dying are no more!

But six months have gone by since we celebrated the Day of Resurrection 2016, over four months since the conclusion of the Great Fifty Days. We look around us and still see, still experience hatred, poverty and injustice. Illness, death, and dying. Grief. Tears. We know the agricultural seasons' periods of tilling, planting, growing, and harvest keep cycling continuously, yet our theology tells us how Easter, the event of Jesus Christ's resurrection, that eighth day that's also the first day of the new creation, marked the end of death and dying, concluded ongoing cycles of poverty, illness, injustice.

These promises we find in First Isaiah describe God's action of new birth from death, the start of the new creation. Despite the dawn of the new creation on the day of resurrection two thousand years ago, that renewed, restored natural creation and righteous society has only begun, still waits for us to help finish it as God's hands doing God's work. Theology of the cross emphasizes Saturday, the interstitial time of winter-like quiet when apparently nothing happens yet everything happens, yet God calls us to live as people of the cross who now are fully alive, resurrected, and redeemed. The third day aligns and unites nature and history; filled with the Spirit of the Day of Pentecost, the fiftieth day of Easter, we become God's hands, God's voices, agents of God's justice, inclusion and freedom for all! Let's all follow Jesus into the resurrection, into the next six months!

Can I get an "Amen"?!