In this election season, I'm been succumbing to partisan fever despite my best intentions. An antidote is the following quotation from a wise Indian sage.

When you know beyond all doubting
that the same life flows through all that is
and that you are that life,
you will love all naturally and spontaneously.
But when you look at anything as separate from you
you cannot love it for you are afraid of it--
alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation.
It is a vicious circle.
Only self-realization can break it.
Go for it, resolutely.

Nisargadatta

Early this morning, reaching to turn on the kitchen faucet to draw water for tea, I discovered a little spider scrabbling around in the bottom of the sink. She was trapped by its steep metal sides, with no possibility of escape other than the dicey proposition of the garbage disposal.

Ironically, she must have worked hard to get herself into this unfortunate position: first climbing the three flights of stairs to my little top-floor condo--an Everest for someone her size--and then finding her way indoors and into my kitchen sink. It would have been so much easier to have gone anywhere else!

Now, from her vantage point, circumstances must have seemed truly bleak. Perhaps she was regretting the diligent effort she had expended to get herself into this awful spot. Fortunately, I was more or less equipped to help. I rummaged in the recycle bin until I found a jar and a piece of cardboard. I set the jar over her, slid the cardboard under her, and then put her, jar and all, up on the counter.

She still wasn't home free, quite yet, because I was still in my pajamas, unready to go out in public, even if just for a moment on my balcony. So she had to wait a few minutes until I showered and dressed--in that time, surely, thinking that her world had gone from very bad to even worse. Finally--perhaps at the moment she had truly given herself up for lost--I took her to the edge of the balcony, and shook the jar until she floated out and down into the shrubbery below. How wonderful those familiar bushes must have seemed to her in that moment! Perhaps she vowed never to leave them again.

A little later, bicycling off to work, I thought about how our present situation might feel much like hers. It's easy to feel that though we've worked and worked all our lives, things only seem to have become more challenging. Problems and dangers seem to be crowding us on all sides. The prices of everything we need are rising; so much of the world is caught up in war or calamity; the country's finances are in miserable shape; less and less help is available for the most vulnerable among us; and worst of all is the specter of climate change, looming above all else.

It strikes me, though, that very likely we are no more able than the spider to see or even imagine the big picture. Perhaps we are, metaphorically, still in the sink, or maybe we're in the jar. Though it may seem that we're coming to the end of the line with no hope of escape, it's worth remembering that it must have seemed so to the spider this morning, only moments before she found herself back in the rhododendron patch, safe and sound.

I said in a previous post that it's a world of wonders, and here's a small example.

Over Memorial Day weekend, family and friends gathered for an evening barbecue in the Port Angeles backyard of my brother E and wife L. We sat at a long picnic table under the spreading branches of their lilac tree, which was headily in bloom. Ah!--I love the scent of lilacs on a spring evening. But midway through our dinner, family friend L was reminded that she's strongly allergic to lilacs. Her face had begun to swell, her eyes to water, and her nose to run.

As of last fall, I've been taking classes in reflexology. If you know about this alternative health practice at all, you probably think of it as a sort of foot rub. But I've learned that it's way of applying pressure systematically to specific points on the feet, hands, and/or ears--much as an acupuncturist applies needles to acupuncture points--in order to treat ailments.

In a recent class, I'd learned some of the major reflexology points on the ears. I explained to L that one of those points, Allergy Point, is at the top of the rim of each ear, and that applying pressure to it is a way to address allergic reactions. I volunteered to do that, and she accepted. So I stood behind her, and used my thumbs and index fingers to firmly but gently compress Allergy Point on both ears. After about eight to 10 minutes, T, across the table from L, exclaimed, "It's working!" She could see that L's eyes had cleared and her color had changed. Others looked and agreed. After perhaps 15 minutes, I released L's ears--by then, her symptoms were gone and she was feeling fine again.

The speed of L's response surprised even me, though I've already seen many instances of reflexology's effectiveness. I trained for many years in Western biological science, and nothing I learned then can explain what happened in E and L's backyard. While there are various theories about how reflexology works, the mechanism just isn't known at this point. Its efficacy seems clear to me, though, and I'm enjoying the mystery of it.

I saw an old friend a few days ago at a conference in Georgia. He reminded me of a story I had forgotten I had told him, about the former president of Nigeria.

In the late 1960s, when I was a teenager, my best friend J and I determined that we should participate in the Walk for Biafra. Our purpose was to raise money for the people of the new state of Biafra, which had seceded from Nigeria and was under seige by the Nigerian Army. As the conflict had continued, the people of Biafra had begun to starve. J and I were deeply concerned by the photos of rail-thin, hungry children that began to appear on television and in the local newspaper. We couldn't imagine how someone could be so evil as to inflict this harm on helpless people. For weeks, she and I collected pledges from friends and family members for our upcoming Walk.

The Walk proved to be very long, and our feet were sore and blistered by the time we finished it, but we felt proud to have helped a suffering people to stand up against their oppressors. At least, in the face of the immensity of this horror, we had helped them a little.

Many years passed, and I became a Peace Corps trainee, studying fish culture extension at a Peace Corps training center at the University of Oklahoma. One day, a delegation of Nigerians arrived, led by their former president, Olusegun Obasanjo. They stayed with us for a few days. President Obasanjo had recently retired from office and moved back to his farm in Abeokuta. If I remember right, he was the first military ruler of an African state to voluntarily cede power to a civilian government. Now he was traveling in the US to learn as much as he could about US farming practices, hoping to bring the best modern techniques back to Nigeria.

Because the Nigerians took their meals with us, we had a chance to talk with them, and along with a few other trainees, I breakfasted with President Obasanjo on most days of his visit. Our conversations ranged widely, from current affairs and culture in West Africa (I was soon to be posted to Senegal), to aquaculture and farming, to philosophy.

One morning, I was startled to find out that he had been a Nigerian Army officer leading the siege of Biafra. I described the troubling news coverage of that conflict that I had seen, and asked about his point of view.

He explained what I hadn't known: that Biafra had seceded from Nigeria very soon after vast oil reserves had been discovered in that region. Naturally enough, from President Obasanjo's point of view, the rest of the people of Nigeria could not allow a small group to take the country's one substantial source of wealth and its best hope for the future. To his mind, the humanitarian tragedy in Biafra was deeply regrettable, but the Biafran cause was unjust and the fight against them unavoidable.

In the years since I was a teenager, I have come to appreciate the immense complexity and messiness of the human condition. I don't know enough about the Nigerian civil war, or President Obasanjo's actions in it, to say whether he was right or wrong. All I can reasonably believe is that he was sincere in his own point of view, and how, then, could I think him evil as I once did?

I grew up in Anchorage, in a family that loved the wild country that surrounded us there. From an early age, I had the habit of solo walks--at first, just in the woods and lowlands near our house, but as I grew older, more ambitious day-long hikes up into the Chugach Mountains above town. I still had that habit a few years later when I temporarily dropped out of college and took a job as a waitress/cook/housekeeper at Iliamna Lake Lodge in the tiny Bush settlement of Iliamna, in southwestern Alaska. (That lodge, the original roadhouse, burned down not long after I lived there.)

One day I got an unexpected afternoon off on a partly sunny day in late summer, and I felt the urge for a walk. I set off from the lodge, along the gravel shore of the lagoon full of float planes, then past the tiny wood hut that was the residence that summer of L, the handsome, amusing State fisheries biologist. I could see that L wasn't home, but just as well--I was more interested in a good, long, solitary, leg-stretching walk. I followed the lakeshore eastward for a couple of miles, and then began to strike northward, up onto the tundra slopes between the lake and Roadhouse Mountain.

Suddenly, I heard the loud crashing of branches in a draw just ahead of me. I had startled a large animal that must have been resting in the alders. I couldn't see it, but thought it was most likely a moose. In this mostly treeless landscape, the local bush pilots would have noticed if a grizzly had wandered this near the village.

Little concerned, but wanting to avoid a confrontation, I adjusted course to follow the cobbled lakeshore a bit further. Meanwhile, a skiff had been travelling well offshore. Appearing to seeing me, it changed its course to curve straight towards me. Soon I could see that its driver was my friend A, a local Athabascan fisherman.

He pulled up near me, his face stern. "Hey! You shouldn't be walking alone out here! Get in--I'll take you back to the lodge." I protested: No need to give me a ride back--I was enjoying my walk and would come back on my own soon. But A insisted that I get in the skiff. I was astonished by his intentness. I knew him as a lighthearted flirt, and normally, we had a cheerfully bantering relationship. But there was no point in arguing. I climbed into the skiff, and soon we were back at the lodge.

At that hour, the main room was full of coffee-drinking locals. When A announced that he had found me walking alone far from the village, I faced a unanimous chorus of criticism and concerned advice: I must never, ever go walking alone outside the village. Again, the strength of the insistence surprised me--these were easy-going people, and I could see no reason to fear the country around the village.

I did take more walks, but was more surreptitious about it. A few months later, winter set in, I returned to Anchorage, then went off to finish college at the university in Fairbanks, traveled abroad, and eventually returned to Anchorage to begin my career.

I had long forgotten the incident on the Iliamna lakeshore when, one day while waiting in the Anchorage airport for a flight to Seattle, I picked up a copy of the Anchorage Daily News. I was astonished to find that the top story was a report that an Iliamna resident--J, the local FAA administrator--had seen a giant, hairy, humanoid several miles from the village. When J shot at it, it ran into the nearby woods, leaving tracks in the snow. Reporters from the Daily News had flown out to Iliamna, and their photos of the tracks appeared on the front page of the paper next to J's account of the incident. The incident had been near the Newhalem River, not so far from one of my favorite walking areas.

What to make of this? I had come to know J when I lived in Iliamna, and he struck me as a serious, responsible family man and a professional--one of the last people I'd expect to conjure up a crazy story on a lark. I'm left wondering: What--or who--might have seen me on my walks, or might have been in the alder thicket on that long-ago summer day?

It's a world of wonders, and how I do love a mystery!

Last weekend, I attended a wonderful retreat led by dharma teacher Greg Kramer. Rather than meditating silently, as in a typical retreat, we learned and practiced Greg's interpersonal meditation practice, Insight Dialogue. The experience was intense, profound, and surprisingly exhausting--I slept solidly for more than 9 hours on both Saturday and Sunday nights, presumably because some sort of deep, internal reprogramming was going on within me. By midday Sunday, the second day of the retreat, I found myself dropping repeatedly into an expansive, deeply calm state in which my sense of "I" nearly disappeared (of course, it makes no sense to use first person singular pronouns to write about this, but what can you do?). This state of mind has continued to return briefly from time to time, each time bringing a few moments of great peacefulness.

On Monday, still in a state of heightened mindfulness, I went for a long walk in the Issaquah Alps. As I walked along the trail, the trees and ferns, the small forest birds and squirrels, the ice and snow, and each new turn of the trail all seemed vivid and distinct.

I found myself hyperaware of my internal reactions as I passed others on the trail, and was struck by something I'd never noticed before. Each time a dog appeared, I felt my heart instantly open and fill with a surge of friendliness towards the animal. In contrast, my internal reactions to other people were much more restrained (though outwardly, I offered everyone a friendly greeting). Why the difference?, I continue to wonder.

My guess is that over the years, our difficult experiences with other people--the small and large hurts and pains we experience--cause us to take on a defensive stance when we encounter other humans, until we feel safe enough to relax those defenses. For most of us, our experiences with dogs have caused us little pain and great pleasure, so we haven't learned to feel defensive around them. Of course, someone who has been menaced by dogs in the past may react very differently from me.

My hope is that my meditation practice is allowing me to grow more and more open-hearted towards other people, not just their pets.