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.