Where we live, school won't end until late June, but the end is beginning to be in sight. My kid is starting to talk about becoming a "rising third grader," which boggles my mind. I'm finalizing plans for his day camp adventures this summer,: there will be scavenger hunts and arts & crafts and swimming in ponds surrounded by rolling green hills. The first distribution week at our beloved CSA is coming up soon, and I'm eager to return to the profoundly holy spaces of its fields and gardens and barn.

All of these are sweet -- and none of them is particularly noteworthy. But they are part of spiritual life even so. Ordinary days are part of spiritual life too: not just the highs and the lows, but the stretches in between. These days offer the challenge of sanctifying the ordinary: walks on the dirt roads behind my condo, making supper for my child, unpacking groceries, watering the plants on my small mirpesset where last fall and the fall before I set up a sukkah festooned with tinsel and sparkling lights.  

From the morning's modah ani and m'chayei ha-meitim to the evening's ma'ariv aravim, every day offers countless opportunities to wake up and offer blessing -- and countless opportunities to get bogged down (in scheduling, laundry, the frequently grief-inducing daily news) and forget. It can be easy (or easier) to offer words of blessing at high times. And at low times, the heart may demand to cry out and be heard (mine often does). But much of life is in between those two extremes. 

And that in turn means that much of the work of spiritual life is in that in-between place. It's the work of staying mindful, cultivating gratitude, doing what I can to make the world a better place, reminding myself to rest. It's the work of the everyday, the ordinary, the weekly rhythm of Shabbat and chol. It's the work that happens in traffic (even though where I live "traffic" is likelier to mean a slow tractor on route 43 than a surfeit of cars on the road) and waiting to check out at the grocery store. 

It's not glamorous. It's not the stuff of soul-stirring sermons. But it is the stuff of daily life. It's like parenting: my kid's childhood is made up of mornings and bedtimes and school days and play dates. It's easy to focus on the big milestone moments: starting school, or going on a big vacation, or becoming b'nei mitzvah... but childhood is more than those, and the work of being a parent is more than those. Parenting is in the little everyday things that make up the backdrop against which the big milestones unfold. 

And spiritual practice is in the little everyday things that make up the backdrop against which the big milestones unfold. Now that we've made it through Shavuot, the celebration of covenant that is the culmination of the journey of freedom we began at Pesach, the Jewish calendar quiets down for a while. Just in time for northern-hemisphere summer, a season of long days and splashing in the pool and doing all of the quiet ordinary things that make up a life. Here's to sanctifying ordinary time.

Image: the beginnings of summer where I live.