Happy Non-traditional Easter!

It’s Easter. Unlike other holidays, I don’t have a set thing I do every Easter, although chocolate is the one constant theme.

I have good memories of Easters past: the sunrise service on North Carolina’s Outer Banks on a camping trip when I was 10, my dad dragging me out onto some sand dunes; another sunrise service at the Stanford University “dish” in graduate school: we followed Pastor Herb up and down some hills on a hiking trail while he was carrying a rather large cross, and when we got there, we sang “My Lord What a Morning.” There was the year of the $2 bill in a chocolate egg and the lavender-colored dress with lace that my mother made for me to wear to church. There was the year when I was 11 that I won a big chocolate bunny in an Easter Egg hunt on the golf course of our new housing development, and was so taken with the fact that I had won something that I could never bring myself to eat it.

There was the Easter I celebrated while on tour with the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra over spring break, and a couple of Easters as an adult spent getting on or off cruise ships, hurriedly stuffing the chocolate bunnies into luggage. My husband and I have made a small Easter tradition for our own kids: we hide plastic eggs with chocolate in them, but the clues are in German. It’s a little like a multicache and a puzzle cache, all in one. And my husband and I actually got a couple of real FTFs this morning.

Today’s Easter Egg hunt clues

Easter on board

Sunrise at the Stanford Dish

The Outer Banks: North Carolina

Ready for church

When I was younger, several times I gave up chocolate for Lent. I was not raised Catholic, and as an adult UU I’m no longer as taken with the idea of giving something up to demonstrate willpower or character. This year for Lent, I did participate in the #UULent photo challenge, although not every day. Some days I didn’t want to do a whole blog about that day’s word, so I just Instagrammed it instead. These are the days I posted.

Happy Easter!

Day 3: Quiet. The quiet hillside beside the Lipman School where I teach in Brisbane.

Day 4: Humility. Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten toward their end.

Day 5: Love. The teddy bear my husband and I won at Seattle Center a few months before we were married.

Day 6: Difference. The weather in Portland OR looks a lot different than the weather in Mountain View CA.

Days 8 and 9: Curiosity and Fear. Will curiosity kill the cat?

Day 10: Suffering. How people feel on the inside doesn’t always match how they look on the outside.

Day 13: Gratitude (at a Starbucks). Grateful for a free drink, the gift cup for coaching soccer, the weather, and the time to enjoy them next to a fountain.

Day 14: Creativity. The messy creativity of geocaching and laundry, side by side in downtown Campbell.

Day 15: Friendship. Maintaining a geocache that needed a new container, for all my geocaching friends.

Day 19: Hospitality. Most of the persimmon cookies I made were eaten and enjoyed.

Day 20: Possibility. You never know what the next geocache holds.

Day 21: Abundance. A mindset of abundance is freeing. Also, lamp post caches are easy and relatively abundant!

Day 24: Memory. A cache in a park with a playground. Memories of when my kids were little.

Day 32: Vulnerability. The vulnerable beauty of a tulip bulb growing in hard soil.

Day 35: Home. Our new cat Sadie makes herself at home.

Day 37: Worship. The Rock of Cashel in Ireland, a worshipful place.

Day 44: Hope. The thing with feathers.

Day 47 (today): Rejoice. My husband took this picture in the desert, on the “Highway to Hell.” (And no, the irony of putting this in an Easter post isn’t lost on me.) It was a geocaching trip for the ages, and they found more than 2000 caches in one weekend. I’m rejoicing that I didn’t have to go!