Of salamanders and strange conversations

I love that on this date in history the former Pope Francis (nicknamed Pope Frank because he seemed more down-to-earth) was elected. And. Going much farther back, Uranus was discovered by an astronomer-composer (how eclectic!) with a garden telescope.

Spirit and science are always intersecting that way.

I don't love that there was also a shooting that took 16 children and a teacher at the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland or that 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was wrongfully killed by police in Kentucky.

Life and loss also perpetually intersect.

How do we hold on to optimism?

How do we balance the magnitude of being here, right now—after all, we're all we have—with the minuteness of our time in a universe and eternity that's utterly incomprehensible?

I don't have any easy answer for you or for me. There's simply paying attention and leaning into curiosity. Also, realizing that you get to choose what you focus on and what you believe, which can make the journey happier or harder.

In this issue of The Wild Now, you'll find two recent Field Notes, brief excursions (no, not the war kind) into moments and memory that hold clues.

🌱 Field Note | March 4, 2026

"Hello, Little Salamander."

Heading out the garden room door, surprise, a dark-coppery sliver of movement, as my foot swings over the threshold onto the deck.

“It’s not safe for you there, Little One.”

I’ve seen this California slender salamander before. Not quite the length of my pinky, she (or he) finds her way through the tiniest gap at the corner of the door sill, curling in a space between the door’s edge and the doorjam.

Afraid I might crush her closing the door, I crouch to coax her out of her previously safe harbor into the pre-dawn drizzle, while I also keep an eye out for my indoor tabby who might think a bolt into the wet darkness a great adventure.

Little Salamander uncoils, places her two front feet on the decking, hesitant to step back out into the larger world.

“Me, too,” I tell her.

Feeling out of the stream of life beyond this house, this deck, this patch of land with it’s second- and third-growth redwoods lush with sword ferns and purple-backed sorrel, I've been sidelined the last several years by the necessary and sacred, yes, it feels sacred, tending to a person who is dying slowly. I don’t even try to imagine what it will be like to slip freely into some new life where you have the privilege of going whenever and wherever you please.

I rip a flap from a small, cardboard box nearby that holds sand dollars, which I keep meaning to rinse and re-home on a table.

Damp and porous, the flap is an off-ramp I offer to Little Salamander. She scuttles over it onto the deck, pauses, then scuttles back into the threshold.

I so want to hold her.

If you’ve never met a salamander like her, a bronze and earthy-speckled wonder, know that she’s shimmery and snakey, her stubby legs and feet, an after-thought. She sports just four toes, fist-like, that grip leaf litter the way the tread of a hiking boot grips a trail, a bit of tacky mucous for added traction.

Would she hold my finger and spiral into my palm? Would she feel wet or warm, slick or sticky? Would I sense her tiny, three-chambered heart beating? Would that heart beat calm or fast with fear?

“Let’s try this again, Little One.”

I place the flap before her. She grabs on and stays put, as if riding a magic carpet, as I move her through air and soft shower to a planter thick with moss and a half-shell for shelter.

Turning back, then closing the door, I lift the tall cup I’d set on the railing, drinking what’s now tepid peach tea mixed with rain.

Wet hair, wet face, wet hands, wet robe. Within the skull is a wet walnut. The mind a kind of energetic ghost, roaming through it all.

Tetrapods.

Where did that word come from? Little Salamander and I are both tetrapods, four-limbed vertebrates with some common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago.

Stepping back under an eave, the way she slithered under the shell, I think, There is only one life here. There has only ever been one life.

🌱 Field Note | March 7, 2026

So many years ago, a man we didn’t know well asked my husband, “Do you believe in God?”

The question seemed as bizarre and out of place, as if frogs had suddenly rained down on our plates.

We’d barely sat down in a frumpy, family-owned Italian restaurant in a small Pennsylvania town, glasses of bitter chianti between us, the old-rounded humps of the Appalachian range outside the window, waiting, listening for the answer.

I felt my husband, a wildlife biologist, his taxonomic mind sorting out the moment, his body tense as a buck with a heavy rack of antlers, exposed and wanting to bold.

In the awkward silence that I made no attempt to fill, knowing yet not knowing how he might answer, I stared through the lovely, plumy color of the chanti at my husband’s hands, warped and purple, twisting and twisting the stem of his glass.

He didn’t say, no.

“The forests and the rivers,” he offered calmly, “the birds, the mammals, the fish, the mountains and the oceans, those are my god.”

Another awkward pause, waiting for further probing, a possible debate, some persuasive effort. Conversion, a communion of chianti and ciabatta.

“Oh,” the man said.

And that was it.

The waiter came with menus. The conversation turned to golf scores and travel. The sounds of forks tapping plates filled in any other quiet gaps, as we made our way through bland pasta to the sweet tiramisu, and out to the parking lot where we said good-bye.

Why this memory emerges now, who knows?

After more than 25 years, curious, I ask Google to search the man’s name, as he’d been something of a community leader and likely still in local news stories. Up pops his obituary from nearly 4 years ago.

Apparently he loved flying small planes and once invested in lobsters. Like all in death, he was loved by everyone. Among the mentions of career and family, a reference to mental health and that he was an Episcopalian.

“I guess you believed in God,” I whisper, looking at his smiling face above a crooked bow-tie on the screen.

“Where are you now? Any clues you can share with the rest of us?”

Outside this windowed room, wind walks through the tips of redwoods, saying, Hush, hush, hush.

Thank you for being a part of my world.

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