08.08.2025 Our Animal Teachers, Great and Small   The meditation room was perfectly quiet. The thirty-plus meditators, including my husband Adán and I, were all taking our practice very seriously — breathing in and out, a statue of the Buddha looking serenely down on us. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a spider lowering itself from the ceiling on a thread of silk. It was dangling exactly between me and the man to my left. But subtle, virtually imperceptible shifting air currents were enough to blow the spider into my space. Wanting no part of those tiny legs, I leaned to the right, toward Adán. He noticed and now neither of us were meditating. What were we supposed to do? We couldn’t disturb the sacrosanct silence. Suddenly the air current forced the spider sharply left so that it almost landed on the man’s arm, but he had his eyes closed and had no idea. When I saw Adán’s eyebrows raise in alarm, the situation struck me as terribly funny, and I had to struggle not to laugh. My laughter infected Adán, and until the bell rang we shook in silent, heaving hilarity as the spider swung like a pendulum. For the rest of the day, I didn’t take myself so seriously. The practice felt as light as a silk thread. I don’t believe that the spider’s purpose was to teach me anything. That spider, like every animal, has its own personal trajectory — its own concerns about food, shelter, and reproducing that have nothing to do with me. But sometimes on the path we meet an animal like the spider, and we learn from it. This Weekend Reader features Buddhist teachings and stories about our animal teachers. —Andrea Miller, editor, Lion’s Roar Deer to the Heart Even if you don’t think much about them, they’re always present. Andrea Miller reexamines something we all might have missed in the meaning of the quiet, watchful deer. Deer hold a place in mythological and spiritual traditions from around the world. But being a Buddhist I’m particularly fascinated by their role in Buddhism. First and foremost, in Buddhism, deer symbolize the Buddha’s most essential teachings and the act of receiving them. After all, it was in the Deer Park that the Buddha taught for the very first time. When we see a doe and buck flanking a dharma wheel, we are reminded that the Buddha taught in order to save all beings, not just humans. ADVERTISEMENT The Ten Hearts of an Earthworm They have five pairs of tiny beating hearts. But what really makes earthworms precious, says Lin Jensen, is simply that they exist. I once came upon a surprising and arresting statement by Charles Darwin about the common earthworm: “It may be doubted whether there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly creatures.” I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old when I read this, but I somehow knew that what Darwin said of earthworms might well be said of any creature on Earth. We cannot choose what life forms to share our planet with, selecting only those to our liking and dispensing with all the rest. My Dog, My Heart Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu discovers you don’t get over the death of a beloved pet. You just learn to love more. Over the years my wife had occasionally seen me hugging Duke and with a sympathetic expression had asked, “What are you going to do when he dies?” I’d always answered defiantly like a little child, “He’s not going to die!” I couldn’t deal with the extremely likely possibility that he’d one day leave me in this world without him. If you’ve ever loved a dog, you know how I was feeling. How would I live without him?