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.

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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.