we had an awesome time

We were mostly slackers today, so glad that school was over. Slackers are good for the environment - they conserve energy. How many slackers do you know who own a car?
You could say that we dedicated our day to studying the environmental impacts of goofing off.
Work is highly overrated. The world would be a better place if most people quit their jobs, cut back or at least took a vacation at home. Maybe we could finally get around to doing all of the things that really need to be done, like taking care of ourselves and each other.
Most of the working people I know are total stress monkeys, afraid that if they slow down the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

Three kinds of clover are flowering in the garden: Dutch White in the remnants of un-mowed lawn, the Crimson clover that we sowed last Fall as a cover crop, and a single Red Clover by the garden gate. Later we can pick some Red Clover for tea,
The lawn grasses are flowering inside of Beanhenge, along with the dandelion-look-alike Hawkweed. The corn is up and half of the beans. The Squash have flower buds forming and we have one marble-sized tomato.
The blue/green leeks have gotten smaller, or so it seems. Already they are dwarfed by the beans which stand a head taller.
Neighbor pass by riding their bicycles or walking their dogs. Some stop to chat. We listen to the buzz in the power lines across the street.
Rebbecca who lives next door stops by to bring us gifts for the garden. She says she loves to watch the garden and the kids from her window - she spends a lot of time at home struggling with cancer.

The kids organize a bucket brigade to water the corn. Hopefully next week we will install the irrigation. We planted the corn in rows that gradually took on a greater curve with each new row. The corn is so tiny, it took us some time to find where the rows were when we weeded and mulched.
Farmers like long, straight, evenly spaced rows - so they will never get lost.
I heard somewhere that astronauts are trained and trained until everything becomes familiar, everything becomes routine. When they are in space, they are always kept busy , so they won't look out their window and see God, or freak out.
One astronaut did look out the window and he saw the whole world in a new way. I heard him speak years later, at some New Age-y conference out at Fort Worden.
The straight lines, the repetition, the routine - all of the order in our lives, keeps us from getting lost in the magic.
As someone who gets lost all too easily in the everyday magic of people, plants and places - I've learned the hard way that I cannot endure too much wonder, too much joy, too much of the everyday magic of life.
Awe is a great word for this feeling. My handy-dandy on line dictionary defines awe as: a mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might.
I was introduced to the word at /Our Lady of Good Counsel High School/ in 1967. The religious context of the word was that man could not look at the face of God because the experience would be too overwhelming for him.
My friend Jeff is deeply perturbed that such a powerful word (awesome) has been misappropriated by popular culture.
“There are simply no synonyms for the word in the entire English language.” He laments.
He refuses to believe that a young person could have the same awesome intensity of feeling for a pair of tennis shoes that past generations had for God or great works of art. I would disagree - young folks have a much larger capacity for wonder than we give them credit for. Who are we to say that it's not OK for them to squander it on a pair of tennis shoes or the person who's feet inhabit those tennis shoes?