In 1977, I lived and worked for two months in Israel, on Kibbutz Dafna, a small settlement in the Hula Valley in the northern Galilee. This is a lovely and lush area. Dafna is surrounded by orchards, fishponds, fields, and woodlands, and a stream called the Banyas, one of the sources of the Jordan River, runs nearby. The kibbutzniks are proud of how they turned the area, once a malarial swamp, into a fertile farmland. Mt Hermon and the Golan Heights tower above the valley.

Dafna is a border kibbutz. I could easily walk from there to the border with Lebanon, just a few kilometers away. Although I was there at a relatively peaceful time, sights and sounds of war were always present. The sound of machinegun fire was almost always present. It came from the Lebanese hills just to the north, where Druze Arabs and Christian Lebanese militia were skirmishing. Now and then, when the unrest came too close to Israel’s border, Israel responded. Mortars fired and fighter jets screamed low overhead. These are frightening sights, even when you know the firepower isn’t meant for you.

At that time, though, there also were heartening signs. I sometimes walked the three or four kilometers to the border town of Metulla, where, in those days, there was a gate in the security fence between the countries. Under an agreement between the two countries, it was then possible for Lebanese workers to come into northern Israel on daytrips to work at jobs in nearby towns. One could sit on a shady café patio across from the gate, watching the Lebanese workers pass in and out of Israel through the gate.

Watching the traffic through the gate, it was easy to see that relations were friendly between the Israeli gate guards and the Lebanese visitors. Mostly, people seemed to know each other and to greet each other by name.

It seemed to me then that ordinary Israelis were trying hard to establish peaceful relations with their neighbors. I worked at Dafna at a time when the English economy was hard-hit, and many lower-class British young people were also living as temporary workers on Israeli kibbutzim such as Dafna. They routinely used harshly racist expressions to refer to the Arab residents of Israel. But though most of the Israeli residents of Dafna had endured many years of shelling from Syrian gunposts on the Golan Heights above them, and wars with neighboring countries, I never once heard any of them use such expressions.

I imagine that it would be hard to find such signs of hope in that border region today, where fighting between Hezbollah and Israel still shows no signs of abating. Today, it would be easy to conclude that peace won’t be possible there, at least not in our lifetimes. But then, nothing ever happens quite according to our expectations. An unexpected factor emerges, something gains ground or something else loses ground, and events begin to turn in a new direction. We can all hope--for both the Israelis and the Lebanese--that the turning will be in the direction of peace, and that it will begin soon.

Mom made a wonderful discovery last week. Cleaning out her files, she found a fat packet of carbon copies of letters she'd written to family in the "Lower 48" during the 60s and 70s, the first two decades of our family's life in Alaska. Yesterday afternoon, I spent a happy couple of hours on her back patio, reading many of the letters. They brought back many of my own memories: my cheerful rivalry with R during the cross-country ski racing seasons when we competed on opposing high school teams; Dad's annual fall moose hunts; various backpacking and winter ski trips; our semi-annual trips Outside to visit family; the Matanuska Valley cabin where we often weekended; the loss of our beloved family dog, and so on.

The letters also offer glimpses into Mom's own life, concerns, and interests at that time. She worked at various editing jobs, ferried children to countless before- and after-school activities, kept us all clean, fed, and clothed, and ran the household single-handed during the long stretches while Dad was away doing fieldwork. During the same period, she also earned a teaching certificate and pursued graduate-level study in English literature. She especially enjoyed a course in math. How did she fit it all in? And she recorded some of her own memories: worrying about Dad, off hunting moose with the weather turning bad; wondering how the heck she was ever going to master the new technology of computerized document publication; watching E manning the goalpost during a hockey game as his attention drifted away from the game, bewitched by a beautiful, rising winter moon.

The constraints on Mom's time were so tight and her leisure time so infrequent that a letter typically took her a few days to complete. Most often, she snatched a few minutes in the late afternoon to write a few paragraphs, before we needed to be fed yet again and she needed to make yet another supper. How many hundreds of gallons of her trademark moose stew must she have cooked during those two decades, I wonder?

Returning home from her house later that afternoon, I stopped for a walk in the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is busy this time of year, with great blue herons stalking the marshes, frogs croaking from the ponds, cedar waxwings and warblers flitting through the trees, swallows swooping and soaring everywhere, and troops of young ducks and geese following their mothers around the ponds.

One sight might look more than a bit familiar to Mom. The refuge office building is plastered with many cliff swallow nests, all close enough to the walkways below them that it's easy to see the four or five nestlings inside each one. Those nestlings are constantly, ravenously hungry, and they vociferously let their parents know it. Each time the adult bird returns to the nest, the nestlings beg and cry to be fed, with mouths open wider than one might believe possible. For the parent swallows, life right now must seem like endless rounds of hunting, feeding, then hunting for more. But of course, those nestlings will fledge before so very long, just as my brothers and I did long ago.

About three years ago, my friend A and I attended the same academic conference in Orlando, Florida, and afterwards spent a few days touring the famous natural areas of that state in a rental car. By the time we'd finished our visits to the Everglades, Big Cypress Preserve, and a variety of wildlife refuges, we had encountered dozens of alligators, and had even been charged by a mother alligator when we inadvertently walked too close to her offspring. For a long time afterwards, back home in western Washington State, I continued to automatically scan shorelines, ponds, and marshlands for the telltale triangular heads of alligators. Such is the power of the survival instinct--you can't turn it off even when your rational mind knows it's no longer needed.

This week, I'm in the Bay Area co-teaching a course at Lawrence Livermore Lab with colleague and friend M. We just returned from a short evening hike in the hills above Lake Del Valle--a nice route I had found described on the Web. It was a beautiful evening: clear, warm but not hot, with just the lightest of gentle breezes. Low sunlight on the dried grass and trees lit up the landscape with a lovely reddish glow, birds called from the trees, and frogs croaked from the margins of the lake and nearby ponds. A new moon--just a crescent sliver--rose above the lake. We saw magpies, a mule deer, ground squirrels, frogs, flocks of swooping swallows--and two rattlesnakes. The first, sunning itself in the trail, was modest in size and slowly slid off into the grass by the trail as we debated what to do. After we safely passed it, we put much more attention into scanning the grass and trail ahead of us for anything snakelike. A mile further on, we turned a bend in the trail to find a big vulture just ahead of us. It lifted off, leaving behind a much bigger rattlesnake in the center of the trail, at the head of a long drag mark in the dust. Was it still alive, or was it dead? We couldn't readily tell. After it hadn't moved for two or three minutes, we gingerly edged past it and continued on our way, even more alert. After that encounter, dozens of sticks and fallen branches looked snakelike to us.

We're due to return to Seattle on Friday. After that, I expect, I'll be paying lots of attention to sticks and branches, even though my rational mind knows I won't encounter any reptiles more dangerous than garter snakes.

Today on my walk to work I encountered lots of sowbugs on the bike trail where I walk. Why so many, I wondered? One Extension Service website tells me that when their aquatic habitats dry out, they typically begin to move in search of another water body. We've had a dry May, so this explanation seems to fit. At these times, according to the website, they tend to find their way into houses, so we'll soon see whether some of them come to join me in my own basement apartment.

The sowbugs reminded me of a hike up Lummi Mountain a few years ago, when Dad and I encountered a thick stream of similar isopods traversing our path up the mountain. They looked like sowbugs, but were much smaller. Maybe they were on the move for the same reason as today's sowbugs. Because Dad liked to document such finds, he made a series of careful photographs of the creatures, placing his Swiss Army knife next to them for scale.

No doubt those slides are somewhere in his slide cabinet, carefully annotated and dated, as all his slides are. R and I have been working through that cabinet, trying to organize and cull the collection and ensure that the best photos are saved and scanned for the family. As I worked one recent weekend, I kept encountering evidence of Dad's enthusiasm for documenting the interesting natural history he encountered. For example, I found three slides of the same fungus at the base of the same tree next to a favorite walking trail, each taken in a successive year and looking very similar to the one from the past year. One can read from those slides that Dad was delighted again each year when he encountered that beautiful fungus again. Perhaps it looked familiar, perhaps not, but clearly, each year it seeemed worthy of recapture on film.

R and I chose to cull those slides. But doing so, I felt a touch of sadness because they seemed to illustrate an essential element of who Dad was: someone who was highly aware of the natural world around him, someone to whom that world appeared vividly and delightfully. Other slides seemed to tell the same story from different angles. For example, looking through Dad's photos from a trip to England that he, Mom, E and I took in 1989, I discovered that 9 out of 10 were of boats. Each had been carefully annotated as to the exact type of boat it was. Boats were always a big passion of his, but how did he ever come to know so much about so many kinds of English boats? I wondered, amazed.

It would be easy to smile fondly at Dad's photographic habits and characterize them as an amusing eccentricity. But I just realized that those left-behind slides really point to something much more profound. To be as aware of the world around you as Dad often was--as fully present with it--is to exhibit what the Buddha called mindfulness and others have called being-here-now. Mindfulness is said to be the key to finding your way through the world's delusions to the true nature of things, or nirvana.

In contrast, most of us, most of the time, are unmindful, caught up in the constantly-flowing streams of thoughts, judgments, and "would-have-been" or "could-be" scenarios generated by our ever-churning minds. Our focus remains on ourselves--our needs, desires, aversions, concerns, and priorities.

To remain caught up in that way means that if you're walking through a beautiful spring woodland, you're not really experiencing the unfurling fern fronds and ripening berries, the soft sounds of birds and rustlings of squirrels, the light and shadow running across the tree trunks. In contrast, Dad had that habit of mindful presence--not always, of course, but often. He could walk through that wood, vividly seeing, hearing, and smelling it in a way that few of us can manage. That's the real story that his slide cabinet tells, and in that sense it can serve as a waymarker for the rest of us, if only we manage to notice.

Make Way for Goslings

On the lakeside campus where I work in North Seattle, everyone's job has to do with science and technology, one way or another--either the doing of it or the supporting of it. Most staff members have advanced degrees and important research responsibilities. Still, hearts soften here as everywhere, as became evident during the past 2 - 3 weeks. Here are the relevant observations, presented chronologically:

1. A female Canada goose selected an area next to our building as her nest site. She built herself a nest in the grass, laid six big eggs, and began to sit.

2. By the following morning, bright orange traffic cones had been placed around the nest at a comfortable distance of about 3 feet. Next to the cones, a hand-lettered sign read: "Nesting goose - Please do not mow."

3. A day or two later, a plastic wading pool appeared near the nest, situated close enough that the goose would need make just a short stroll to take a dip.

4. A few days later, a piece of plywood was laid against the side of the wading pool, to make it that little bit easier for the goose to waddle up to the rim of the pool.

5. Once a stretch of warm, sunny days began, a big plastic beach umbrella appeared to shield the nest from the direct sun.

6. Finally, one evening about a week ago, the eggs hatched! By morning, the goose had herded her offspring down the the lakeshore, and the nest is now empty. Fortunately, a colleague was present with a camera, so digital photos of the event quickly circulated along with excited email messages throughout the campus.

Following negotiations, it was I who made the chicken stew a few weeks ago, but Mom did part of the shopping. She recuperated so rapidly from her operation that she was able to do a short hike in the Hoh rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula last Monday. Back in action in time for spring! We're all really pleased that her recovery has gone so well.

--

Last week, during a business trip to Washington, DC, I was able to fit in 3 hours at the National Gallery before my flight home. I joined a docent tour on 19th-century French art.

During the tour, we stopped before a painting by Corot, completed a few years before the Impressionist period. It's a painting I've often enjoyed in the past, showing a young woman in a summer dress lying in a grassy glade in a forest, elbows propped, reading a book. To me, it seems the picture of a perfect Saturday afternoon.

But the docent explained that the picture was unacceptable to the art establishment of the time. To the Academy, only two kinds of subjects should be depicted in art: Biblical and classical Greek or Roman scenes. And only two kinds of people should be depicted in paintings: well-known Biblical or classical characters.

Corot's painting was unacceptable because it showed an ordinary person doing an ordinary activity. It was all the more unacceptable because the viewer would guess from the context that the book was a novel rather than scripture or classical literature. The Academy rejected it. But once it was shown in the Salon des Refusees--a special showing for rejected pieces--it gained public attention and praise, opening minds just enough to eventually make it possible for Impressionism to succeed as a movement.

I left the Gallery wondering what we consider unacceptable in our time that will seem utterly uncontroversial in the future.

A little character study:

Mom has an unusually high pain threshold, but finally even she decided it was time for a knee replacement operation. She loves to walk, and had gotten to the point that she could only travel a few yards. Her doctor concurred, she made the necessary preparations, in consultation with the hospital staff and my physical therapist sister-in-law, L.

Finally the day came, and E, L, and I accompanied Mom to the hospital. We chatted, and then an orderly came to lead her off to the operating room. All seemed in order, and so E, L, and I waited for the several hours it took for Mom to have her operation, recover, and be taken to her hospital room.

When it was time to join her in her hospital room, we gathered around her bed. Mom's eyes fluttered open weakly. "Hi, Mom!," we chorused. "How do you feel?" "What time is it?" she responded, and we told her. "Oh! It's so late--you had to wait for so long!...Did you have lunch?" (Yes, we had.)

Now she's recovering at home, progressing well, but still not quite back to her usual active self. And her appetite is not really back. This week, I tried out a new chicken stew recipe. Taste-testing it, it struck me that it might make a nice, easy-to-eat meal for Mom. I'm planning to spend Saturday evening with her, so I sent off a note suggesting that I plan to make a pot of the stew for our supper.

The next day, her reply email was in my inbox. She liked my plan. She could get things at least partly ready, she said: she could pick up the chicken and other ingredients, and have the salad greens washed and ready. In fact, she realized, she could make the stew on Saturday morning and have it ready for us. (Note that she's still using a walker to move around--I can't quite visualize how she'd navigate the grocery store without a sherpa to push the cart.)

I emailed back: Wait, wait, Mom! My plan is to help you, and besides, I like to cook (which is true).

Now let's see who makes that stew this Saturday...