This is the time of year that we wait for all winter. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge was a world of wonders this evening when I stopped there on my way home from a weekend visit with Mom. I saw so many species of birds that I've lost track. Among the highlights were a cinnamon teal--the first one I've seen, if I remember right (I don't keep lists)--a ringneck duck, many wood ducks and shovelers, a couple of greater yellowlegs, yellow-rumped warblers, and a dozen or so pintails, probably resting before the next leg of their flight up to the arctic. Best of all were fluffy mallard ducklings just learning to dabble, and a single gosling, carefully attended by its parents.

As I walked the usual 5.5 mile loop on the old dike road around the refuge, it struck me that I've been taking that trail routinely for 20 years now, usually alone, sometimes with various members of my family, sometimes with other birders I meet along the way. Each time, so many familiar sights and old memories appear: the bench along MacAllister Creek where I sat watching young eagles fledge...the hedges of wild roses out by the tide flats...the old duck blind where Dad, Mom, and I had a picnic of cheese sandwiches and tea on a long-ago November day...the bend of the Nisqually River where I often watch seals...the gnarled old big-leaf maple with its scarred and broken trunk...the slough where I saw a fox late one summer evening...the swampy spot where skunk cabbage comes up every year...the spot where R and I, still smelling of hospital, saw three owlets perched in a tree on the afternoon of the day Dad died...

On this particular evening, a breeze at my back blew me down the last leg of the trail, winding below high-arched maples and cedars. New green leaves fluttered and flashed in the late sun, swallows swooped, and warblers and sparrows darted and dashed through the trees. The constant motion of greenery and birds set up a sort of dizzying optical illusion, so that it began to seem as though not just leaves and birds but everything--the world itself--was gorgeously in motion, rolling down the path along with me, all of us come completely loose from our moorings, even time itself. And for a few minutes, it seemed almost as though all those long ago times I'd passed this way all rolled together into one single Now--the eagles, the owlets, Dad, Mom, R, the birders who've come and gone over the years, the trees that put forth their leaves and then drop them down again, year after year, the birds that come and go, and hatch and fledge, and then bear their own young in their own time--all of us were heading down the path back towards my car together.

On Tuesday evenings after work, I drive to the hillside home of C, my yoga/dharma buddy. From there, we carpool to the weekly sitting of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society on Capitol Hill. Last Tuesday, the view from C's yard was so beautiful that it stopped my progress to her front door. I took in the fresh green leaves of her trees, the flowers spilling across her her flowerbeds, the singing birds, and the sunlit lake in the distance below me. She came out of her door, laughed at me, and we were off to our sitting.

By the time we returned, thick clouds had replaced blue sky and darkness had fallen. She parked, and we chatted for a while in the carport behind her house. Our conversation turned to her new project: a short story. C is a successful novelist with a series of books to her credit, but she hadn't written a story for years, and was struggling to come up with a plot. She was drawn to begin her story by describing a dream she'd recently had: she and others were trapped in a building and stalked by a nameless and dreadful entity. The question was how the plot should proceed from there.

Talk of her dream drew us on to the topic of how other writers had depicted dread, then on to scenes from Stephen King books we'd read. Soon, the trees that had looked so gay in the sunlight hunched ominously over the long driveway I would have to descend back to my car. The birds had fallen silent. The heavy clouds blotted out the stars and added to the gloom, and the flowers, of course, were now invisible in the shadows. I felt a touch of dread building in my own heart as I bid C goodnight and scuttled to my car.

There is just one landscape in C's hillside, but there were two wildly different landscapes in my mind. And so I, and you, and everyone else sees reality: never clearly as it is, but filtered through the mind's preconceptions and expectations like something seen through a glass darkly.

In 1999, a freighter ran aground on the Oregon coast, then broke apart, spilling its fuel oil. The response to the accident was difficult and controversial, and very much in the public spotlight. At that time, I managed a government website that provided frequent news updates about the response. Our site was inundated with visitors, and I got all the emails sent to the webmaster.

Many of those emails were so filled with hatred and vitriol that they astonished me. It was my first encounter with the phenomenon of flaming. Generally, I wrote back with a polite answer to the writer's question or concern, thanking them for their concern for our coastal environment, and signing my responses with my own name.

More often than not, I received a reply. It's not that the writers apologized--as I remember it, none did--but the replies all had a contrite tone, and the writers thanked me for my work. I could tell that they had imagined they were addressing a faceless government drudge, not a real woman with a name and personality.

I thought of that experience last week when I saw something similar happen to my good friend Tim Harris. Tim runs Real Change, Seattle's street paper. The Seattle Weekly, for reasons that aren't clear to me, chose to write an investigative piece about Real Change's policies for employing vendors. I suppose that they had expected to find shoddy practices, but the eventual article revealed none. An altercation arose after Tim wrote a criticism of the upcoming article on his own blog shortly before the article appeared in print, and the Weekly took offense (actually, when Tim wrote that post, I doubt that he expected that more than 8 - 10 people would read it, counting his wife).

I know Tim to be a kind, dedicated man who has worked courageously and smartly to keep his paper alive, thereby building opportunities for homeless and at-risk people to earn a little money and build connections with the community around them. But in the comment threads on the Weekly website and elsewhere, I saw Tim described as the deranged author of a bizarre diatribe, and suspected of sneakily making money off the impoverished. It all seemed so familiar!

During the early years of the World Wide Web, I expected that the Internet would help to develop understanding among different people, by giving people a chance to communicate freely together. Sadly, something about being able to speak anonymously brings out the worst in many people, and so often poisons online conversations. Still, there's hope. As the New York Times reports, thoughtful bloggers are searching for ways to build civility online. The trick is to build civility without unduly constraining writers, as Monica Guzman notes.

The Buddha offered us Four Noble Truths. For a long time, I wondered what made them noble, until I heard a dharma teacher's explanation: think of them as ennobling truths which, if you reflect on them, will enoble you.

The First Noble Truth is often misinterpreted as "Life is suffering." Among teachers in my Insight Meditation tradition, it's usually translated from the original Pali text as "There is suffering." Of course, we know that life isn't only suffering--for most of us, it's full of all kinds of happiness as well, ranging from quiet contentment to experiences of great joyfulness. What the Buddha was pointing to, for one thing, is the fact that nobody's life is without suffering, despite all the joy it might also contain. The Buddha also was pointing to the ubiquity of unsatisfactoriness. For example, say, you've been really looking forward to a special occasion, but then when the occasion arises, things just don't quite live up to your expectations and you end up feeling at least a bit let down. And he also was pointing out that happiness is always transient, like everything else--for example, you eat a wonderful piece of cake, and then it's eaten, or you go on a vacation, and then it's over.

The Second Noble Truth is that desire and aversion are the causes of suffering. If you can train yourself to feel neither desire nor aversion, your suffering will cease. This point was beautifully explained long ago by the Third Chinese Patriarch:

"The Great Way is not difficult for those who are unattached to preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind..."

The Third Noble Truth is that there is a way out of suffering, and the Fourth Noble Truth presents the Eightfold Path, a way of living that can lead you out of suffering.

I think a lot about the Second Noble Truth because I so often observe desire and aversion arising in my own mind. For example, I've noticed that at any given time, there's a sort of mental shopping list in my head. It contains the things that I'd like to get next, once I have saved enough money. No sooner have I purchased one thing on the list than another takes its place. This list is all about desire. My list has become smaller in the last few years as my practices of yoga and meditation have developed, but it's never quite zeroed out.

The one time my mental shopping list was shortest was when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa in the 80s. I lived in a remote rural village at the edge of the Sahara in northern Senegal. There was very little to buy in that region, other than the small essentials of rural African life, and no advertising. I wore essentially the same small collection of clothes during the 2 years I spent there. Once in a while I traveled to a larger city, where I had a restaurant meal or two, and perhaps an ice cream cone, and bought a few sundries and small gifts to bring back to the village. There was so very little on my mental list at that time!

A few weeks ago I remembered that experience when I watched David Brancaccio interview Dr. Muhammed Yunus on the PBS show, Now. When David made a side comment to the effect that Bangladesh was a disadvantaged country, Dr. Yunus replied that Bangladesh is near the top of the gross national happiness list, while the U.S. is near the bottom. He pointed out that Bangladeshis don't feel themselves to be disadvantaged, and that he'd seen more unhappiness among Americans. (I'm not sure which list he was referring to, but he might have meant the Happy Planet Index.)

I can imagine that Bangladeshis may be happier than Americans because material wealth is less prevalent and valued in their culture, and because they aren't so targeted by advertising campaigns designed to make them desire more material things. So much of the U.S. economy is about generating desire!

The idea that great material wealth is not a cause of happiness--and may even make it more difficult to be happy--resonates with me when I think back to the mental ease and freedom I felt during those 2 years at the edge of the Sahara, when I had little and my material desires were fewest. Nowdays, it seems to me that I can be happier and more relaxed whenever I am able to counter my own material desires. I do that by trying to observe and reflect on those desires when they arise, by challenging myself to be generous, and by minimizing my exposure to advertising (giving away my television, for example, and subscribing to no commercial magazines).

Of course, life is not so simple that living without a TV will bring you to enlightenment, but it may be a good way to make a step on the Great Way.