But why just cooking and gardening? Why not other creative stuff, like writing? Less sensual physically but not imaginatively.

Imaginatively it is alot like gardening. Creation and recreation; placement, rythem, design. And like in gardening, where the garden cultivates you as you presume you are cultivating it, writing can also change, refine, and redefine its originator.

Devotion as real luxury. Makes sense.

Engaged in the task at hand, I feel not as if I am working, but being played like an instrument by a divine virtuoso. My senses are engaged by color, scent and flavor. I am in the blissful junction of recreation and re-creation. This is what it means to reap the fruits of one’s labors. Devotion is the New New Luxury.”

I, like another commenter, also cook, paint, and play piano. Gardening and all of these activities entail a lot of WORK. When I sit on my piano bench and muddle through a Mozart concerto (or Gershwin, for that matter), that is work, too. But all these kinds of work feed my soul. When I am engaged in any one of them, I am “in the moment”, which is truly the only moment that matters. I have no conception of time as it passes, except in reference to where the sun happens to be.

My pet peeve is the perennial question: “When will dinner be ready?” Finally, after cooking dinner for 35 years, I found the self-awareness and self-respect to reply, “It will be ready when it’s ready.”

My art, my skill at the piano, and my garden will never be finished. They are not meant to be. They are about the journey, not the destination.

But it is especially when working in the garden, weeding, digging in the soil, caring for plants, planting new ones – whatever the task at hand – ALL my sense are engaged. In 1892, William James referred to this soul-soothing activity as involuntary attention. We breathe the scents of the turned soil, the grass clippings, the new blossoms, we hear the birds nearby; the squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks, furtively scampering up and down trees, across the garden beds or lawn; we feel the textures of the grasses, leaves, petals; we feel the warmth of the sun, the breezes, the rain beginning to fall.

I can go out of my house in the morning on a fine day and stay occupied until it’s too dark to see (and I’ve been known to continue trimming a hedge with a flashlight), and not be really aware that the day has passed. Only that I have felt interconnected with every natural thing in my tiny corner of the world. Even better, I feel interpermeated with my surroundings. As if I am one, small part of something greater than myself.

I have even noticed that I do not care if my clothes, shoes, hands – whatever , have smears of sweaty soil all over them. I do not have an image of myself at times like this, nor does it matter to me. If I see myself at all, it is through the reflection of my garden.

I am not a master gardener; I am a rank amateur who has learned by trial and error for the past 20 years. Watching my garden develop and mature over the course of those years has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Most importantly, my time in the garden is when I hear my “still, small voice”. Not the voice of my ego, and not the voice of the God of my Fathers. I believe it is the still, small voice of the divine spark that lies within each one of us and within every part — animal, vegetable, and mineral — of our world. When joined together, these still, small voices form a quietly divine chorus of gratitude and praise.

And I am at peace. And free to take a nice, long bath.