Refuge Farms (www.refugefarms.org)

"That tree is as important as I am!" I shouted the words into the smoke and flames, from which a man emerged to tower over me. We each carried a shovel, and each had a 40-pound pack can of water on our backs. We were civilian fire fighters for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, tasked with putting out the blaze. We were engaged to be married.

Concerned with the fury with which I threw myself into the task, he cautioned me to back off, be careful, don't get hurt. Live to fight fires another day. I wanted no part of it; I was on a mission. I have no idea where those words, that idea that a three-foot jack pine was equal to a human, came from.

Probably it was my wish to say something shocking, to be different in a world whose sameness bored me, to buy some space from well-meaning men in a world of 1970s paternalism. It was perhaps a visitation of my childhood angst at the thought that anything else in the world, even a tree, would experience being unwanted, as I had been, which led me during my preschool years to hide garbage so it wouldn't be thrown out.

As a child I whispered "I love you" to anything my parents discounted, from furniture that "looked junky" to specimens at the Christmas tree lot that "looked scrawny," to spare them the pain I intellectually knew they were incapable of feeling, but which lodged so large an ache in my heart.

My words in the woods that day came not from a firm grounding in science or a well-developed spiritual belief, since in those days I had neither, but I was to learn years later that my idea was, indeed, connected to both.

"However innumerable all beings are, I vow to save them all." Two decades and 2,000 miles from the Wisconsin fire line, I found myself reciting those words at 6 a.m. every day for what would be many years in a Los Angeles Zen temple. Like other things Zen - the koans, the stories - this first of four Buddhist vows (the other three are equally vague and impossible to fulfill) are meant to skew our thinking to a non-linear place where we can perhaps, some day, gain enlightenment - an understanding such as that held by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, of our "true nature."

While I knew it was impossible to "save them all," my continued concern for reducing suffering and pain in the intervening years had lead to my not eating meat, not using chemicals, and only buying products that didn't involve animal testing. A trip to the store was, again, me on a mission, armed with lists of products to avoid, rather than things to buy. "Paper or plastic?" would elicit a lecture about the need to use cloth bags.

In my corporate togs, I bent one day to lift earthworms that would otherwise dry out and die on the sidewalk in front of the Fortune 500 firm where I was a manager. This was a typical walk in from the parking lot for me on a rainy morning. "What are you doing?" asked my boss, passing with someone from her ranks of ever more authority. "Rescuing earthworms," I smiled, my nearly 50-year old hands filled with squirmy sliminess. "How cute," her colleague mused.

Fast-forward another several years and, back in Wisconsin, I'm driving past Refuge Farms. "home of "Horses Helping. . ."," I read the blue and white sign that faces the state highway and, seeing people in the yard, I pull in. The warmth, laughter and friendship I found that day in the midst of hard-working women applying themselves to dozens of tasks has stayed with me as a joyous memory, and it is one I experience again and again when I go there. The unwanted child is gone. The horses? They're icing on the cake.

I tell the students in the classes I teach that life is a journey: getting the most out of college is more important than racing through in some belief that life is better "out there" in the "real world." In 30 years, whether you graduated at age 22 or 23 won't matter, but the ideas you've absorbed, and the friends you've made, will, I say. They smile and nod ruefully; at core they understand, but their eagerness to "get on with life" is palpable. I tell them, this is your life; you've already lived through a quarter of it.

Looking back on my own journey, much more than a quarter gone, I see a movement towards moderation that has its roots in the combined worlds of physics and spirituality. Science tells us our world is made up of spinning electrons and sub-atomic particles, forming what we see as "you" and "I" as well as what appears to be the empty space between us. However, the idea that each thing we see is a separate being is so ingrained in our psyches from childhood on that this alternate view of the universe as a continuum of undulating energy is beyond our comprehension.

This is what the Buddha saw, without benefit of scientific knowledge, two and a half millennia ago, and while far from enlightened, I have seen bits and pieces of this reality through a decade of meditation. It has informed my life, helping me "save them all" without losing myself in the process.

I see that I'm really helping myself when I rescue earthworms or care for rescued horses - it is who I am. They are a part of this same, vast energy mass as I, just as my fingers and teeth, which are so different from each other, are both part of what I call "me."

Science has determined that sometimes it is preferable to let a forest fire burn itself out - destruction leads to needed regeneration, and the plants and animals sacrificed, despite whatever pain and fear they experienced, become part of the new growth. This is a hard one for me to accept - allowing short-term loss for the greater good - so the image of this ever-changing mass of energy swirling in space of which we are all a part is easier for me to accept than a world of individuals in which so many meet untimely and tragic ends.

So I salute THE FARM's two missions - reducing pain and supporting healing in people and animals. It is at the root of everything I've believed and cared about for as long as I can recall. But I am also able, some days more than others, to realize that we can only do so much - saving the earthworms starves the robins. And when it is time to release a horse from suffering, I know that this swirling energy mass that we call by a name and love as a separate being is no more or less with us than before, since no energy is gained or lost. It is merely transformed.

Tracy