Gardening as a meditation.

I often think of my late mother Maura Austin Lyons (1923 - 1994) when I am knee high in weeds in a garden digging them out.  She would wander in from the garden and announce as she walked through the kitchen door "I was thinking in the garden..." and proceed to tell us something that she remembered, an idea she had, a solution to a problem or simply something she had neglected to say in an earlier conversation.  I now find myself doing the same thing and realize that we do our best thinking and creative problem solving while in a meditative state in our garden plots.