The cooking smoke settles over the little adobe stove in the kitchen of Dr. Plaza's gardener.

Dappled light filters in through unpained windows of the small room and a roostered

clucks outside. We have harvested coffee beans and are roasting them, filling the

kitchen with a bitter, twiggy smell. The old gardener speaks only catchwa and

Inca dialect, but somehow we're learning to understand each other. At first he

thinks I'll be the farm cook. No, I have no idea how to cook Peruvian food, but I

would love to learn I manage to convey. As I regain my strength, the old man

also teaches me to pick cocoa beans up on the gentle hillsides above the Urbamba

river. This region is called the Altaselva or Hai jungle. It's about a thousand

meters up in elevation, a mixture of forest and agriculture. In addition to

coffee, the villagers grow many kinds of citrus and bananas and avocados, mangoes

and the yucca root they eat as a staple. The place is magical and like nowhere I've

ever been. The whole valley is basically a garden of trees. It smells like fruit

and cooking fires. It's my idea of heaven. Beehives, fruit trees, mountains, and a

big river. If the world manages to keep spinning a while longer, a chunk of

our gratitude will surely be due to Dr. Marla Spivak. Dr. Spivak is an acclaimed

entomologist at the University of Minnesota, a MacArthur genius and a leading

light in the movement to save the planet's spiraling honey bee population, which

in turn just might help us human survive as a species too. In today's

meditative story, Dr. Spivak shares the securities and at times terrifying

path that led to where she is today. How are lives pollinated at various points

with the insight and experience we need? How do we take those and somehow

...