Wednesday night I got up around 2 AM and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.  When I turned on the light, a mouse jumped and ran across the counter.  I jumped and shrieked, then went into the bedroom and shut the door from an invader that seemed huge.  

Last night, having ignored the situation, I debated what to do.  I cleansed everything and put all the food away.  I emptied the bin and left it without even a bag.    

This morning when I  looked in the bin, I saw what I thought was either a sleeping or a dead mouse.  Then it moved.  I had time to observe it wasn’t gigantic and wasn’t a threat.  I realized it had been able to climb out when there was a bag there but without it, it was stuck in the bottom of a slippery-sided bin.  I covered the top and carried the bin up to the road and into plants and weeds, where bending the bin down, the mouse scurried out with room to hide and feed.  

Last night a friend recommended a book her seventh grade granddaughter is reading.  The book by Lois Lowry is from the series The Giver.  At first it seems to describe a perfect world, but then you learn what’s sacrificed to create such peace.  

I think of the mouse released from what might have seemed a perfect environment with warmth, safety, and food into an outside world into which there’s freedom and also hawks and cats.   

No judgment on either realm, though another opportunity to examine what freedom and safety mean to each of us.

As I spray  peppermint oil around the house to deter other mice, I listen to chainsaws as a neighbor cuts down even more trees.   People worry about fires so they cut down trees, and then they deal with flooding.  We live interdependently and in a world of complexity as we navigate the challenges and opportunities each day offers and provides.

I recently re-read the book High Conflict by Amanda Ripley.  I highly recommend it.  I’m with how the novel Lord of the Flies which most of us read in high school took a real-life incident where some boys were stranded together and worked peacefully to survive, and turned it into a book showing the opposite.  I wonder why.  May this world move toward and evolve in peace.