As the maples and Virginia creeper pick up glorious reds, Lowell and I are full of garden projects. Some are indoors.

He's picked the grapes and I'm making delicious grape juice. Apple boxes are piled in the kitchen. The apples aren't great this year, too many bites and brown spots, but some fine apple pies are hiding in those boxes.

Outdoors we're preparing our garden for spring, hoping to make next summer more manageable. This time we're not being caught with our clippers and weeders down.

Yesterday, toiling in the sunshine, Lowell built a 3-foot-wide path diagonally through the big flower bed that my study window overlooks. When we dug that bed in 2003 it was dirt and weeds and seemed enormous. We over-planted. The new path bisects the bed, making its parts far more accessible. It's helping to tame our tangle.

The path is made of round red stepping stones set into gravel, edged with large river rocks. I was supposed to be working on this column, and instead I was distracted by watching Lowell's emerging work of art.

Finally I couldn't contain myself. I ran outside and walked back and forth on the path crowing, "It's beautiful. It's beautiful." I wanted to plonk a lawn chair in the middle and sit there. Instead I clipped overgrown shrubs and chased weeds.

On one side of the path are pink and fuchsia peonies, old-fashioned orange day lilies, my ever-favorite euphorbia and Jacob's ladder. On the other are three large buffalo junipers, two rows of yellow Asiatic lilies that multiplied from one original bulb, echinacea, Shasta daisies and a queue of Siberian iris.

All summer you could hardly see any of this. In last spring's cold and rain, flowers and weeds burgeoned. Over summer they grew into a waist-high weed patch that made my puny clean-up efforts laughable.

Hence the path and our intense weeding and cultivation. The bed, now starting its fall colors, has become lovely. It's also tranquil, the way an overrun garden can never be.

In the most beautiful of seasons, it's remarkable how spiritual malaise can creep in ... and how little I'm aware of it when it happens. I eventually catch on and then I look around wondering what's off. Life starts seeming pointless and I'm distracted and unable to concentrate.

There's a word for this state of being: acedia. St. Thomas Aquinas considered it one of the seven deadly sins.

Acedia makes one less able to experience the true pleasures of God's world, prompting us toward depression or self-hatred. Acedia prevents us, Aquinas says, from "getting down to anything good."

Today we're told to escape such feelings. Shopping, drinking, watching TV, almost anything. Such escapes, though, usually lead to more discomfort.

Because the problem is spiritual, the solution lies in the traditional spiritual disciplines. Prayer, Scripture, engaging in daily activities with prayerful hands.

Eventually I reconnect with God and my spirit soars. God is there and everywhere. So out again to the weeders and clippers.

Joan Uda is a retired United Methodist minister who lives in Lewis and Clark County joanuda@yahoo.com