After participating in Sabina Wyss's and my Sahara Desert Vision Quest a few years ago, my husband, Andy Gardner, came home with a mission: he would make a list of people who had been important in his life and send each one a tea bowl he had made, along with a note of appreciation. For several years he focused on this act of recognition and gratitude.

The practice took a different turn as we prepared to go to Ukraine for the fifth International Wilderness Guides Council Gathering. This time Andy selected one of his tea bowls without knowing whom it would give it to. Throughout our six days at the Gathering, he paid attention, wondering who the recipient might be. Perhaps it would be this woman because she'd had a disappointment at the Gathering. Maybe that man because he'd said something moving in the group circle. Andy knew that the identity of the recipient would have to come from the heart, not the intellect. In the end, the answer was revealed in the very last workshop of the event.

Whom he gave the tea bowl to and why is his story and that of the receiver, and for this article it's really not relevant. I'm mentioning it because I'm intrigued with this idea of bearing a gift before you know who the recipient will be. For six days Andy accompanied the gift as he sought the person who was right for it. The ongoing theme of this newsletter is paying attention to the invitations of the world and saying "yes" whenever we can. But even that approach leans toward an expectation of receiving a gift. Andy's new practice opens us not to receiving something from life and other people, but to being ever on the lookout for how to give.

After the gathering in Ukraine, Andy & I spent four days in Budapest, a city of gorgeous architecture and tumultuous history, dubbed by one Chicago Tribune journalist in 1918 as "a city built over an active volcano." One afternoon we visited the House of Terror, a museum created in the former headquarters of the secret police during both the Nazi and Communist regimes.

Even as you approach this stately building, standing amid mansions on a tree-lined street, you realize this won't be any ordinary museum. The word TERROR cut into a roof overhang casts a symbolic shadow on the street below. Inside the language is Hungarian, but you don't need a translator to feel the impact of the videos of victims, replicas of the offices of the men who determined the fates of thousands, and a labyrinth of rubbery white bricks evoking the grim fare of lard and bread that so many poor people were forced to live on. The most sobering exhibit of all confronts you in the elevator near the end of the self-guided tour. As the glass-sided box sinks with extreme slowness down a dark shaft, a black and white film features a man whose job was to clean up after the executions as he coldly, meticulously describes the process. You can't escape until the elevator stops in the basement, where tiny, barren cells and the torture and execution rooms are located. 

It is sobering and humbling to grasp so vividly what humans can do to one another. I wished only that there had been some opportunity for visitor participation in this powerful exhibit. For example, one wall bore the names of victims, one those of victimizers. A cloudy mirror in each would allow us to see our reflections and force us to question both our own culpability and our own vulnerability to cruelty.

Lawrence Anthony, the South African conservationist widely known for his determination to save the animals in the Baghdad zoo after the American invasion began, died in March of this year. Among the mourners who came to pay tribute were two herds of elephants.

In 1999 Anthony was asked to accept into his 5,000-acre game reserve nine unruly elephants that had been causing trouble in local villages. Anthony agreed, but the elephants refused to stay in their fenced enclosure and kept escaping. Finally authorities told Anthony that if the elephants got out again, they would be forced to shoot them.

That night, Anthony set up a mattress outside the gates to the reserve, determined to make things clear to the elephants. He assured them that they were safe there in the reserve, that if they left they would be killed.

The elephants did not leave the reserve again. They dispersed around the wilderness area and settled in. When one of the female elephants had a calf, she walked it over the to main entrance, presumably to show it to Anthony.

According to Anthony's wife, at the time of his death, they hadn't seen the elephants for a year or so. But two days after he died, they arrived from two separate directions, milling around near the house for two days before leaving again.

In an interview with Anthony's brother-in-law, Graham Spence, NPR's Melissa Block asked about this apparently deliberate pilgrimage. "How do you explain that?" she wondered. 

"I think they came to say goodbye," said Spence. "Sometimes, there's things that you can't explain and maybe shouldn't even try and explain. They just are out there and I think this is one of them."

 I am exceptionally honored to have been interviewed by Parabola magazine about my work with Radical Joy for Hard Times. The interview appears in the current issue. You can read it by clicking here (the RadJoy website) and downloading the PDF.  The interview was conducted by Richard Whittaker, one of the best interviewers I know of. 

Parabola has been my favorite magazine ever since I discovered it in 1984. There have been interviews with the likes of the Dalai Lama, Elaine Pagels, Joseph Campbell, Elie Wiesel, and spiritual leaders from traditions around the world. I am humbled and excited beyond words that the editors have recognized Radical Joy for Hard Times as a path worth exploring.