• It's the end of another meteorological season! Time to link to Emily Freeman – What I learned this spring. It's my third monthly roundup blog in the current global season of COVID-19. And? Today, the Fiftieth Day of Easter that's the Day of Pentecost is the third day of the #LARiots2020, second day so far of a stay at home curfew for all but essential workers. National Guard has been deployed: 500 troops to the city; 500 to the county. Heartbreaking.
• March 2020 Highlights
• By mid-March #SaferAtHome and #StaySafeStayHome were in place, so Green Team transformed the long-planned actual World Water Day into a virtual event. "When life gives you lemons make lemonade." See you next year by the river?!
• April 2020 :: Lockdown
• I didn't picture either Easter Sunday or Earth Day 50 in my April summary blog! However, I gave both events a solid paragraph and I'd already blogged both days. If I'd been able to get out in the world to celebrate, both festivals would have included many many pictures.
• Easter 4 Sunday School notes – "Teaching and Fellowship Breaking of Bread and Awe" Acts 2:42-43
• Preparing detailed lessons to email to my mostly-lectionary [mostly] adult Sunday School class has become major since the world started #ShelterInPlace; partly for lack of outings and other activities around town, partly because they've been coming out really well, I'm linking to all 5 reflections for May and adding illustrations. Have I said this before? The notes I used to blog (and will again) after interactive Sunday morning discussions were more interesting and dynamic, but for people who weren't there that Sunday, these newfangled lessons may be easier to follow.
• Every year includes a Cinco de Mayo; no other has happened during a year like this. Here's one of my all-time favorite designs from a previous year in Previous City.
• Easter 5 Sunday School notes – "Chosen Royal Holy God's Own People" 1 Peter 2:9
• When physical distancing got serious, my nearby Subway franchise stopped offering trays and baskets to customers, then became takeaway only, then closed down completely for a few weeks. A couple weeks ago it opened again for takeaway. With restaurants now permitted limited indoor dining, I wonder if they'll reopen to eat-in, sit-down?
• Easter 6 Sunday School notes – "You will get your quilt" John 14:16
• Ascension / Easter 7A Sunday School notes – no illustration for this one.
• Day of Pentecost Sunday School notes
• In January I declared 2020 my year of living local. So far it has meant no amazon purchases, more fruits and veggies grown nearby, community owned restaurants and other retail outlets. #SaferAtHome has helped make life extremely local… families are doing better at being together; board game sales have increased a lot!
COVID-19 Quarantine
• When I started linking my monthly summaries to Emily's quarterly blog roundups, I started using her "what I learned in..." tag, though my approach was lists of activities rather than learnings. But after close to two months of required quarantine and home lockdown for non-essential personnel, learning just might describe my own and many other's recent experiences.
#SaferAtHome
• Observing #SaferAtHome #StaySafeStayHome, I've tried to keep current with design work that's plummeted because orders for restaurant and café menus aren't coming in or being updated. I've continued to blog for the adult Sunday School class I facilitate, but instead of typing up the one or two hand-written pages I refer to when we gather, I've been assembling a more detailed reflection or lesson to post late Saturdays. Here's some of what I wrote for last Sunday:
The Church has Left the Building
• In mid-April church and world celebrated an Easter unlike any Easter we've known. In early March, the church left the building, but not in our usual way of returning to home and work after gathering around word and sacrament, enjoying a tasty brunch, and then venturing out into the world. The church left the building because the authorities told us to, placing countless restrictions on where and how any non-essential personnel could go. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox came and went. But it never felt like Easter. We didn't gather on Saturday to polish the silver, to hang white bunting from the ceiling, to arrange flowers. It didn't feel like Easter. It still doesn't feel like Easter. We keep getting updates of county-wide and worldwide COVID-19 cases and deaths. It feels more like the empty devastation of Friday evening, of all day Saturday, as if death reigns, as if the Day of Resurrection never broke into history with the reality of new life, the death of death.
• Most people know the drill: you don't get spring's verdant bloomin' newness unless you've been through winter.
Social... Physical Distancing – at least 6 feet / 2 meters apart
• It's generally being called physical – rather than social – distancing because rules of disengagement have helped socially unite many people with activities like home schooling, board games, meal prep, etc. Carla in Tucson sent me pictures from her National Wildlife Federation Certified Habitat® backyard in the heart of the city. Jane, a friend I'd typically be lunching or hiking with, stopped by with some Farmer's Market bounty and a mask made of cute print fabric she couldn't resist when she visited a Fair Trade shop (alone, of course). A note about Carla's yard: she never applied for certification—someone else did, and she'll never know who. When the NWF peeps stopped by, they observed many birds, bees, and butterflies in the carefully stewarded habitat.
Lemonade out of Lemons
• When life gives you lemons make lemonade isn't a phrase and concept exclusive to grandparents, nor is the practice limited to folks with enough years to have acquired a bit of wisdom. As #StaySafeStayHome rolled out across the globe, many people frantically dug into home improvement endeavors, writing the Great American – or Expatriate – Novel, reorganizing from cellar to loft, everything they'd always wanted to do because, even if you had to do your usual work from your home, even when you had to teach your kids so they'd keep up with their class, you still had lots of minutes, hours, and days to fill.
• I've been on break from Facebook since Roxy kitteh's mid-October birthday, but easily can aggregate trends I see on twitter. People are learning to slow down, to do less rather than more, to make that future best seller and renewed dwelling space still happen, though in small, slow increments. Staying #SaferAtHome is having at least triple benefits of protecting vulnerable populations, getting some parts of some of those projects done, being able to tell everyone "What I learned... during the great COVID-19 pandemic lockdown."
Typography Credits
• Shoutout to font designers Des Gomez for SunnyDaysInLA I used for this month's header and to Illustration Ink for ZPFrozenLemonade-Regular on the footer image.
Deuteronomy 8
7For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, 8a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. 10You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.
11Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. 12When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, 13and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, 14then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery...
