I am currently blessed with too much free time; this gives me the opportunity to garden at a slower pace.  I could have  cleaned/weeded the currant bed with a hoe; it would have been marginally faster.  I am sure I could buy some sort of obscenely loud and expensive equipment to do it even better…

Doing it by hand though…I observed the root systems of various weeds, sorted out some baby foxgloves and mulleins for transplant when it is raining, avoided a young dogwood seedling (also to be moved), considered the repulsive but compelling scent of some sort of morel type fungus growing in the bark mulch, watched the chickadee watching me, avoided harming the salamander that I disturbed (he thought my warm hand was rather nice when I picked him to move to an already worked spot), and so forth.

The currant bed isn’t a just a piece of work or a piece of landscaping to take pride in (or not as the weeding goes).  The image in my mind is far deeper, far wider than that.  It encompasses a summer’s growth and decay, dozens of plant and animal species, scents, sounds, textures.  What’s not to like about that?