A blessing to our land

Our labyrinth

My wife, Mary, was talking to a customer yesterday and she mentioned our labyrinth out behind our shop. Mary told the woman that we use it to meditate and we also got married in the middle of it.
"A labyrinth blesses the land it's on too," the woman said.
What a nice thought.
Speaking of blessings, I am in the middle of making a new batch of clay, hand dug by my son, Levi, and I this summer. It's just a small batch, maybe a couple of hundred pounds or so. It's been drying slowly for the past month, and I sliced it like brownies recently in order to expose more clay surface to help the water evaporate. Over the past several days, the slices opened up, and finally, enough water had evaporated to allow me to transfer small chunks of sticky clay to a table to allow them to dry out more. As I picked up each chunk and patted it into shape, my hand became coated with sticky clay, and I noticed its earthy smell, slightly musty from the decomposition that occurs naturally when wet clay sits for a long time. It was a good smell.

Following are some pictures of that process:

Clay Brownies

Lumps of clay (don't know what happened to the color)

Clay on my hand