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.