We begin a New Year in the Big Room.
We begin with a goodbye send off to our middle schoolers who are moving up to the Turning Tides.We'll play our old game, Big Room Questions 123.
We'll do some weaving,
And get out our journals
And sing.
We'll set our intentions for the year.

We'll make some final butterflies for the Houston Holocaust Museum Butterfly Project and read some poems.

Our objectives for the Big Room program are, as always, these:

Explore Ethics and Philosophy

Compare and Survey World Religions, great and small

Create building blocks for a Personal Theology

Develop a Unitarian Universalist Identity

It's official...first day of summer,
And last Sunday was our final Big Room class for the year.
But no worries, Sylvia, David, and others will have activities on the playground for summer Sundays. "Box City," circus skills, and ice cream making come to mind.

Our So Cal seasons may not resemble the New England pattern but we do have them.

(I remember as a kid doing a quiz on seasons, and getting my Social Studies workbook answers all marked wrong. Here's what I knew:
Rain comes in winter, obviously,
followed by spring with tons of flowers, because by summer all the flowers except tough old zinnias had fried up.
We flew our kites in the summer at the beach where you could count on a steady sea breeze.
Snow...that was funny...we knew of snow falling in winter in cold places.
Snow was an ornamental conceit at our school, though. A design to be cut from a six layer folded triangle of construction paper. Later sprinkled with glitter and hung as a Christmas decoration.
My teacher had come from Wisconsin, and had not taken notice of our true seasons.)

In So Cal we have Rain, followed by Mud. then comes Spring with poppies and blue eyes blooming and everything smells green and sage-y. And then it gets hot and Dry and it's best to get to the beach. Followed by Fire season, which we hope will be brief. And we hope that Rain will come in good time, not too much...not too little. This is a perfectly understandable rhythm of seasons.

Here is my fav poem to prepare for the Beach Season:


maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

—e.e. cummings

May you all lose yourselves and find yourselves,
and your own adventure at the sea this summer...(Hopefully not the "horrible thing" adventure like molly's!)