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

March 2021

• All of March 2021 has been within the soberly somber reflective season of Lent that helps prepare for the surprise of Easter.

• The COVID-19 pandemic continues; despite worldwide vaccine rollouts, too many people in this country have been acting with almost no consideration of anyone else, so I don't have a lot of hope for economic and social revitalization.

• My March header features three pictures from Carla's Tucson place and a ceramic cross with a descending dove from church. I have no idea when I'll feel safe enough to fly again, but early March I started back at real life church and it's been wonderful to reconnect with the handful who attend.

• Four weeks of Sunday School notes from my lectionary blog.

• For almost a dozen years I've designed for UN-sponsored World Water Day—an easy to remember one month before Earth Day. Due to COVID I didn't get to a live event, but created a flyer for the Green Team's virtual one and adapted some of it into a blog about #Water2me and Celebrating Your Watershed because everyone lives in a watershed!

• I've long loved how reflections and sunlight bounce off the glass curtain wall of this office building along Route 66. Assembling the triptych was tough because I got many excellent shots.

• Also for more than a short while… I've had this thing about red doors – red chairs, too – and get obsessively drawn to take their pictures. Left panel of this triptych features Red, White, and Blue; next is a slice of the DTLA skyline; finally verdant succulents along the way to the other image captures.

March 28 • Day

Lenten Snapshots 2021

A Palm-Passion Sunday Snapshot to April's prompt.

Sunday 28 March • Day

Bill Wither's Urban Psalm

When the day that lies ahead of me
Seems impossible to face
When someone else instead of me
Always seems to know the way

Then I look at you
And the world's alright with me
Just one look at you
And I know it's gonna be
A lovely day …

March 27 • Together

Lenten Snapshots 2021

A Saturday Snapshot to April's prompt.

Saturday 27 March • Together

Together because I love front, back, side, and wraparound porches. Urban ones. Farmhouse styled. Southern, midwestern, adobe, and undefined. Back stoops and every other way we can get together, be together, belong together.

Five Minute Friday • Savor

• Five Minute Friday – Savor Linkup

I always associate the words savor and savory with food, though logically they can apply to anything that impacts our senses. I haven't researched it, but I assume savor in English parallels sabor in Spanish. When anyone asks about my culinary preferences, Mediterranean tops my list, with Mexican (Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, New Mexico-Mex) – Peruvian, Salvadoran – and fabulous memories of Caribbean fare that approaches the ultimate fusion cuisine next. If anyone then inquires about degree of heat, I tell them "around 7 or 8 by north of the [International USA-Mexico] border measurements; about a 2 by south of the border reckoning." Then I explain I appreciate a fair degree of spicy heat, but flavor comes first; I describe an ideal dish as loaded with veggies plus very "savory and succulent."

More than one person has assumed I don't care for sweets as I always (as politely as possible, though I know I can sound impatient) turn down all offers of generic pastries, candies, and desserts. But not liking sweets is far away from my reality. As with savories, my sugaries need to be high-end, rich, and decadent.

What do you savor?…
# # #

March 24 • Forward

Lenten Snapshots 2021

On schedule today with another Lenten Snapshot to April's prompt.

Wednesday 24 March :: Forward

In this part of the world, last Saturday into Sunday clocks sprung forward. Most digital devices did that on their own; for clocks and timepieces that didn't, humans got to be aware of lost time. Did you ever notice days and months and seasons of many types – not only meteorological ones – seem to change and cycle on their own? Without apparent human prompts? Yet some haven't been acting as they used to, mostly because of too much human intervention of the wrong kind.

March 23 • Impact

Lenten Snapshots 2021

Another Lenten Snapshot to another of April's prompts. On schedule today, though I've almost convinced myself this is supposed to be a diversion rather than a discipline.

Tuesday 23 March :: Impact

Background this time also comes from the "12-abstract-seamless-patterns" I got from Pine Art via Creative Market. For Friday's Intersection I mentioned how the retro late-twentieth century feel of the colours appealed to me, and no surprise I've illustrated today's Impact with Impact the Font. According to my Fontbook font management app, the design hails from 1965, the unique name "Impact" from 1992 when computing was making Word Processing a buzz phrase and Open Type with its 65,000+ glyphs and other refinments allowed anyone with the proper software to finesse their typography in ways no one ever had imagined.