My sister asked me once what life with Maria was like. I said I didn’t have words. It was and is fantastic, a journey like no other. Maria is alive and relates to living things, from donkeys to birds to spiders; my whole idea of nature is evolving.

She rehomes spiders rather than stomp them, talks to owls, listens to ravens, and exchanges emotions with donkeys. I’m rehoming spiders myself now, it’s easy, and they don’t deserve to die just for doing their work.

None of these things I ever imagined doing, but the newest step on this ladder has caught my attention: gnat rescue.

Gnats are all over the farm in warm weather; just ask a donkey or sheep. They are not supposed to be bites, but they are always happy to bite me. I consider them pests who fly into my eyes and ears. I’m sure they serve some vital role in the food chain, but I can’t imagine what it might be.

I’ve been reading about them, and they are a significant part of the food chain; many things eat them, from birds to chickens.

Every morning in the warm weather, one or more gnats fly into the animal’s water bucket to drink, and every morning some of them can’t get out and drown. The donkeys and the sheep just consume them.

Maria looks for them in the morning and pulls them out on a forefinger. She brings them to a leaf where they dry off and lets them climb on it as they awaken. She puts the leaf on the ground, and almost all the time, they return to life and fly off.

It’s easy to laugh at this, which seemed strange to me. But Maria is an instinctive Buddhist at heart, she is gentle and kind and respects life (except mice in the house), and I have caught this infection to a different degree.

There is something funny about it; there is also something very thoughtful about it and empathic.

The highest calling of human beings for me is empathy, the putting of ourselves in the shoes of other living things. That’s what Maria has done; she can’t watch a living thing drown in front of her, no matter how small. I would never have noticed, and in 15 years of changing and refilling water tanks, I never did.

Truthfully, I can laugh at anything, but when I think about it, I can’t really laugh about that.

It does something for me to save a life or watch a life be saved, even if it is just a gnat. It is a powerful antidote to the anger and rage swirling around us.

Something I would have ridiculed just a few years ago is beginning to make sense to me.

Because if you can’t care for a small life, you probably won’t care for more significant or even human life. And if I start caring for more life, I’ll just be more caring and more at peace with myself. Who would have thought that about gnats?

Maria did.

Compassion and empathy are infectious.

Once I started doing it, I got hooked on it. It makes sense to me.

I’m not rescuing gnats myself yet, but I got a good picture of the last one Maria saved. In my Dog Support work, I deal with purebred and rescue dogs and those who love and rescue them.

We are connecting in a new way, even as I sometimes think the rescue movement can be too extreme. It’s heart-to-heart. I relate to people with big hearts. I can’t I love much about gnats, but there is a message there.

You could say that about almost anything in America is extreme right now, including Democrats and Republicans. Maria has saved a whole bunch of gnats, and I can’t imagine this will save our world.

But the impulse to respect life on any scale just might. Life is life, and I either appreciate it, or I don’t