I thought desert landscaping would be less work, but it's MORE work, especially during the first year.  This is what I get for having no relatives.  Nobody hangs out and tells you these things. 

There is good stuff, too, though.  There are the flowers that emerge brilliantly, optimistically, and against all odds just days after being newly planted.

And then the doggone weird stuff.  Before, I could just barely keep my lawn alive.  NOW, because I'm watering the landscape plants, SUDDENLY--and I mean in just, like, TWO days, there's all this damn grass! 

And I'm like, "Where were YOU when I needed you???"

And they're like, "We don't know, we're just the damn grass.  Aren't we pretty?"



And I'm like, "No!  You're NOT pretty.  You grow like little green monkeys all over the place and you're rotten little guys and I just want you to GO AWAY!"

And so I go to Home Depot, and I get RoundUp, and I poison them.  My mantra is "Kill, kill, kill!"  I am a heartless, ruthless killing machine that sprays DEATH!  I'm serious.  Those feckless, amoral, stinking weeds have GOT to go!

But they stay.  I find out that I haven't purchased a grass and weed killer toxic enough to do the job.  Geeeeeeeeeez. 




Some of the parts of the yard are like they're "supposed" to be, and some are coated with the stupid green grass that last year I would have done just about anything to foster. 

Now I have to decide whether I'm willing to be an even more toxic Death Goddess.  How do other people get such nice, functional landscaping?  They pay someone to come and Kill Kill Kill. 

The magic of nature is perverse. 

I was dancing/working out at Jazzercise the other day,


when I thought about how almost everyone yearns to experience natural grace and flow.  We want to move beautifully.  We know that when we do, there's a quality that goes with that, and others can see it.  Viscerally, a person feels it.  And we--at least I --want that to be the quality of my movements. 

Excellence of movement happens on so many levels.  There's the oratory of Barack Obama, the cooking of Julia Child, the dancing of Michael Jackson.  They are all very cool.  There is an excellence that comes into its own.  It's when we are very clearly who we are, and we are operating totally in sync with the excellence of what we do.

I do think all of us want to be cool.  And as we know from our adventures in middle school (ok, well MY adventures there, anyway) one can't be cool by trying to "be cool."  Or not for very long, anyway.  Cool is an unconscious byproduct of authenticity and excellence, and that's why it's so-  cool.

And then I was thinking that coolness is part of our evolution.  If we go to 'incarnation school' long enough to meet and become this thing we call "enlightenment," we also will somehow be very "cool."