Sharing a home

Living in the mountains, one has to learn how to occasionally ...share home...with the myriad creatures which may venture in for a visit. One time it was a chipmunk who came running in through the open front door and soon found itself lost and trapped in the maze of insideness and furniture...the first (and so far the last) of his kind to come into this uncharted territory. When we finally found him, hours later, and liberated him from the trauma he had just gone thru...which I'll spare you the details of here...I'm sure he went straight home and told his relatives all about his strange adventure and warned them...loudly and sternly...to stay far far away from that crazy place from which he almost never returned. Another time a packrat inhabited the attic for a stay. We didn't know what was happening at the time, except that small things around the house would mysteriously and inexplicably disappear...a spoon from here...a spool of thread from there...One day the poor creature made the unfortunate mistake of coming down from its hiding place...right in front of the dog........needless to say....it wasn't pretty......Having never seen such an animal before, its identity remained unknown until, searching around, we found its "nest"...with all of our missing items and more...aahhh we thought...a packrat...how true to their name! There was also the bat that my son...just a youngster at the time... almost put his hand on while turning on the bathroom light. That one was quite the challenge to remove. Until then, I didn't even know that bats lived in the area...
Summer brings the crickets and the ants...not to mention the spiders - among the more famous the black widow and the brown recluse - and the occasional field mouse which, I'm convinced, has a 'cat radar' alerting it to stay away or else... I try to respect the life of these creatures as much as possible - especially since... so far...none have harmed any of my family - by putting them outside or relocating them to a plant or just ignoring them if they're not in groups...realizing that this was their home first...and that we are the intruders upon these mountains. Must admit that it's not a totally unselfish gesture..when, for example, I scoop the spider from the bathtub to prevent it from being flooded by the shower I always think that maybe one day my kind gesture will be remembered by that which has the power and inclination to scoop me or my loved ones out of the way of impending disaster... Also can't help but make a mental analogy to the disasters we humans are victims of every time I "move dirt" or move a log and see scores of ants or beetles, etc. scrambling around to deal with the human disaster which has been inflicted on their "communities". Watching their frantic movements gives one a microscopic view of our life...and its connection to all life...and what we must look like to the creator or other higher powers as we scramble around to rebuild our lives after experiencing catastrophic disruptions of our "normal" day to day life. It's also a solid reminder that usually the disasters we're subjected to...just happen...without rightness or wrongness or purposeful intent to harm...and that we humans have an infinite capacity to overcome challenges and hardships and recover...just like our fellow creature inhabitants of this amazing Earth...