A postscript to the observations about Amazon.  I am a Amazon customer.  I buy books on a regular basis and Amazon is convenient, affordable, etc.  Often a book is available that perhaps I’d find otherwise with a great deal of effort.  I have a good friend who works for Amazon.  His account of the work has been positive without exception.  The work at Amazon is indispensable to meet his mortgage and to buy groceries.  All that is to say that I, along with you, participate in the structures of our society because we must.  We criticize institutions and philosophies and approaches to business so that they will serve us better, if possible.  If not feasible — we live with them until they can be replaced.

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Another day of yard work.  Physical labor in the out-of-doors can be immediately satisfying.  One can see the results of one’s labor for weeks or even months.  Unlike work done in the office, or in a warehouse for a wage, the results are apparent, a cause-effect relation to the earth.  Such labor connects us with our ancestors as well.  Until the last one hundred years, and certainly prior to the industrial revolution a majority of humankind worked directly on the earth.  Certainly this was hard, not glamorous.  On the plus side humans knew exactly their place in the order of Nature, and of the earth. 

I walked about the yard to mindfully observe the riot of life in late spring.  These are what the camera lens allowed me to see.  Blinded by color, astounded by form…

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.  — Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Tractatus 6.44