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diverse thirty acres. Others in Adams County were resisting the Flat World, trying to imagine and live somethingdifferent. This was one of the only counties in the United States adding small farms each year. Land in Adams was still inexpensive enough for the average person to buy, yet there was a large and growing urban market just up the road in Chapel Hill and Durham that increasingly demanded — and would pay a premium price for — organic and local foods. Nationally, their lives tied into the growing slow food, environmental, and antiwar movements, part of a more durable future.
    “You might say it all centers around a question,” she said as the sun was going down. “Where do you grab the dragon’s tail?”
    Two deer bolted through Zone 2, beyond the deer fence. I spotted them through the 12 × 12’s cedar-side window, slowly becoming aware of the natural activity around Jackie’s home. Meanwhile, she talked about her upcoming trip in the next weeks. She had an eighty-dollar Greyhound ticket out west. With a small group, she’d walk a pilgrimage across the desert to the Nevada Atomic Test Site to hold up a sign saying NOT IN OUR NAME. And then she’d be “Grey-dogging,” as she put it, further west to visit other activist friends. After thirty years of doctoring she’d taken a year’s sabbatical and was on a sort of pilgrimage to figure out if she would continue in medicine or strike out on a new path.
    It was time for me to go. But I wanted to absorb more. “Where do you grab the dragon’s tail?” I asked, feeling the Bolivian rainforest burning, the climate dangerously warming.
    She looked at me and said: “I think you should grab it where the suffering grabs you the most.”
    As I drove away, the sun was setting. I only made it fifty yards before slamming on the brakes. I looked over my shoulder. Most Americans seem to have a recessive melodrama gene, and I guess I’m among them; I couldn’t resist the urge to look back. Through a cloud of dust the 12 × 12 appeared hazy. Jackie’s brook, swaying winter wheat, “the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightestthing.” I’m not sure how long I stared back at the tiny house, the seed that becomes a redwood, the atom that turns into a bomb.
    I TOLD MY SISTER OVER THE PHONE about my 12 × 12 visit, and she said: “Where do you put that?”
    At first I put it in one of those categories we all have: that time when that amazing thing happened. A one-off wonder. Something pure and illuminating that becomes a kind of touchstone. Frankly, I had no idea where to put it. I only knew that I felt a stirring at the 12 × 12, partly because of the way Jackie looked at me. She didn’t see a baffled global nomad; she gazed through that and saw what I might become.
    In any case, I reluctantly put the 12 × 12 away and prepared to head back to New York. My dad was recovering, walking around, even planning to start jogging again. So my sonly duties were done. That’s when the letter arrived.
    I found it at midnight — I wasn’t sleeping so well at the time — partly hidden in the pile of mail by my parents’ phone, addressed to me. I took a sip of red wine and breathed in deeply. The letter was weighty, like a fat college acceptance letter. I opened it.
    A slip of paper fell out; on it was a poem by Mary Oliver called “Mindfulness.” The poem ran down the page like a long, neat ribbon, each line containing just a few words. As I read it I felt the expansiveness I often feel when reading Mary Oliver’s poetry. She talked about her teachers: the world’s “untrimmable light” and prayers “made out of grass.” But one particular phrase really made me pause. Oliver said her life’s purpose, essentially, is to become fully absorbed “inside this soft world.”
    My heart now beating a little faster, I pulled the meatier pages out of the envelope, several loose-leaf pages of handwriting folded to fit into the small envelope. I unfolded them.