Burning Basket News Today

While 2023 saw the closest thing to a “return to normalcy” since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, actual COVID numbers and hospitalizations were reported to be rising for the first few months of the year before dropping to unprecedented lows. With a drastic decrease in demand for on-site tests and vaccines, the South Peninsula COVID-19 testing and vaccine site closed its doors, giving way to at-home testing and treatment at the regular hospital facilities.

Former Homer News editor Michael Armstrong pursues his creative life

Former Homer News editor Michael Armstrong pursues his creative life

As the lead volunteer for the Burning Basket project, a volunteer-dependent, weather-affected labor love, I have been witnessing this ongoing project as temporary art that leaves a lasting impression as it builds community and empowers individuals.

After participating in an interactive and impermanent art event in California in 2004, Homer artist Mavis Muller was inspired to bring the idea home. Since that time, she has been leading the creation of Homer’s annual Burning Basket, a community-wide collaboration that brings to life a Basket of Remembrance &Unburdening.

The pandemic didn’t end in 2022, but where it loomed large in January, by the end of the year COVID-19 had taken a back seat in many ways to the tumultuous events of 2022. Still, components of the pandemic: rises and falls in cases, reports of fatalities, transitions in public policy were newsworthy in most weeks of publication.

Annual Homer Burning Basket lights up the Spit on Sunday night

On a dreary, drizzly late-summer evening, Homer’s annual Burning Basket lit up the Spit on Sunday.

Fire burning off the remnants of a summer eclipsed by the storming rain clouds. Will this burning break through the placid facade of our drifting-asleep fall?