join a campaign to reinstate the word 'boss'

ps tonight i fell for that old trick where the child can't fall asleep so the adult says, okay, i'll lie down with you...next thing adult knows, she's wiping the drool of her face and wondering why kids don't get how awesome it is to sleep for 12 hours a night.  going to sleep when it's still light out? totally boss.

pps boss song.

ppps my face is sunburned and hurts real bad.  jane, don't be mad.  it actually looks pretty boss because i guess i was cracking up all day or i just kept my eyes really squinty so there was a tie-dye effect. (i have lots of eye wrinkles. ("from my mother's side of the family.") inside my eye wrinkles is like the white part of the tie-dyed tee-shirt--unwrinkle and whabam.) 

pppps sometimes serious can be boss too.  i saw a sign while driving home today that said: AIR QUALITY ALERT. LIMIT DRIVING.  this sign gave me major pause because i think/read a lot about how to treat earth, but i'm pretty pathetic when it comes to putting beliefs in action.  so here i am, having just driven my SUV (ok, even worse: SUBURBAN!) for three hours and planning on driving another hour today and two tomorrow to make things possible that are delightful but not necessary, and i pause.  i could actually change my plans.  i could give something up, be "inconvenienced," heed the warning, do my part to improve air quality despite knowing that many others won't (remember the tragedy of the commons, the categorical imperative?), adjust to fit natural constraints instead of manipulate nature to avoid adjusting, etc.

we're all friends here, so i'll tell you i caved.  i made the choice that resulted in more driving that beast of burden back and forth across my home valley.  i am gald, though, to have paused.  i hope i will be stronger in the future.  i hope you will support me when i am weak.

the struggle in that pause matters because air quality matters, but there's more to it, symptomatic of what wendell berry describes as the credo of limitlessness (read essay here).  i don't agree with everything he says (what do you think?), but i see myself in some of his critique. like here, when he describes our "dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible.  We will keep consuming, spending, wasting, and driving as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.... In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt.  The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable--a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer."

we live in spheres of connection and we cannot see the ties that bind us.  but we are bound, whether we see it or not. let me pause then, at least, to trace a few of the strings looped around my fingers to where they lead, let me work to understand my role in the problems and the solutions, let me confront my limits and respect them.

being a hippie, if hippie means acting responsibly/with accountability towards the earth, is totally boss. plus, i have a tie-dyed face.

last words from wendell berry:
"We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody else or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything.  It is hard to make the most of one life."