My birthday is coming up—29 again!--and my garden guru Tony has given me a white rose bush. It's a real beauty. I have yet to plant it. I didn't want to do it during our little heat wave, and I didn't get to the garden early enough to do it yesterday, but then the unearthing of a bumble bee nest in my compost ran me out before I could get to it anyway. I'll get it in the ground soon, though—in the next couple of days here, probably early Monday, before classes.

The hydrangea are in full bloom. My neighbor, Ed, has a white one that's gorgeous. This'll get you up to speed:


And the roses just keep coming:


Some sweet pea vines are starting to pop, too:


Here's some Trumpet Creeper on Orchard Street:


And the lilies are in bloom everywhere you look:


Though it's been pretty dry in these parts as of late, seems what I've been doing a lot of this week is weeding. When you've got a garden, you do, though, don't you? If you asked Tony he would probably say I don't do near as much as I should, and it's true, it sort of comes in waves.

It goes without saying, I do all of my weeding by hand. I'm not a big fan of lawn mowers, weed-whackers, or leaf-blowers. They are mainly time-saving devices, but gardening for me is not mainly about saving time. I'll admit that a freshly weeded bed is a beauty to behold, but how much more gratifying after you've put a little blood, sweat and tears into it.

That reborn flower bed is the result you're looking for when, like me, you tend to let things go a little wild before tending to them (ah, methinks there might be lessons for my love-life here as well), but the process itself is therapeutic, too.

I spent some autumns of my youth in an orchard in New Hampshire, earning money picking apples. There is definitely an art to it, and when you're picking ten hours a day and being paid a piece rate, and having to please the quality control guy who wants those apples at the peak of ripeness unbruised and with stems intact, you have to learn to turn tedium to your advantage pretty quicklike.

Mastering the process is the secret. It's all meditation. Like they say over at The Daily Om:

We have a tendency to view many of the repetitive tasks that fill our daily lives as something to be gotten through so we can get to the experiences we consider desirable, or transcendental. But the chores on our "to do" list, in and of themselves, are gateways to the enlightened state of mind. Every moment is an opportunity to awaken.

It's the Zen of garden-weeding. You have to let it get weedy enough—you can't be too efficient—and then set to work on it rhythmically. After about half an hour your brain will go from this:

To this:
That is, from Beta (14-30 Hz), associated with anxiety, disease, feelings of separation, and fight or flight, to Alpha state (8-13.9 Hz), associated with relaxed focus, superlearning, light trance, and increased serotonin production.

Long and short of it: weeding is better than Xanax.

So at the end of the day you leave the garden not only a more beautiful place, but feeling relaxed, enlightened and unburdened of your ego, too. You've got all your bases covered. Now, go treat yourself to a margarita.

There's a guy across the way who comes by every so often to weed-whack his manicured and mega-mulched plot. He's not too interested in getting down and dirty, it's pretty obvious, and whenever he has to I hear him cursing up a storm. If he could get away with plastic flowers and astroturf I have a feeling he'd be good with that. As it is, the plot seems strangely Stepfordish (in a down-market way), set up and laid out for quick maintenance. And whenever I've seen him there, he's always in a hurry. Blows in, weed-whacks, blows out.

Frankly, I find it disturbing. Every time he blows in for a blitz, he's messing with my Alpha state. I don't mean to sound selfish. In fact, my Alpha state is the only thing that stands between me and an international incident.

It just seems like with a lot of things all the time-saving measures end up defeating the purpose of the thing. It's the extreme, absurd end to which emphasis on the bottom-line, on the "result" leads. Don't get me wrong, results are important—it's just that sometimes the journey really is the destination.

I mean, people act like everything that takes the least volition is utter tedium. Once we have that self-weeding garden, the self-cleaning house, the self-watching TV (Tivo anyone?), the self-raising kids, we'll be able to enjoy whatever it is we do when we're not doing anything, like griping about how there's nothing to do, cruising the internet for porn, and deciding, feck it, let's go shopping.

At the mall we'll buy clothes manufactured to look like somebody wore them through three world wars. Pre-stressed, they call it. We don't even have time to wear holes in our own clothes, we need someone else to do it for us!

Slow down, bitches. Slow. Down.

Speaking of. Did you read about road-rage on The Minuteman Trail in The Globe this morning? I swear I didn't mean to kick that Jack Russell terrier. I have RLS, see, and totally forgot to take my meds, and my leg just, er, slipped! I shoulda worn my brace!

For real, though. When I checked out the trail a couple weekends ago I did notice that the spandex-clad cyclist crowd was especially hard-core. The thing of it is, if you're going to ride The Minuteman Trail you should know what you're getting into. It is not a velodrome. You're not gonna break any speed records.

I think it's a bit of a Dawn Wiener syndrome. Cyclists on the road are constantly bullied by cars. So they get on the trail where there aren't any cars, and it's their turn to be the bullies. When there are no cyclists around, you can be sure the joggers will use the opportunity to bully those who are just out for a stroll.

It's true that pedestrians don't keep to the right, that they often walk three and four abreast, blocking the path. And the path's not wide enough for the kind of traffic it's getting these days. But that's what you're dealing with. And knowing that, you should mentally prepare yourself. If you lose it on The Minuteman Trail, you must just want to lose it and are looking for an excuse.

And if that's the case, maybe you should stay home, weed your garden, and generate some Alpha waves instead.