This woman made her living telling stories to children in Sikkim, in northern India, where there are parti-colored rhododendron forests.

She told me this story almost as soon as she met me, as if I had some life-threatening illness she could see, that she could treat with words.

IF SHE ONCE HAD THE GHOST OF A CHANCE AT UNDERSTANDING

It is said that to live well, our understanding must engage the world as we do the work of life; yet to do our work, it has been observed that now and again, we must make ourselves distinct from the world. For the understanding that is immersed always in the passing hours, linked with interminable chains of detail and emotion, joined uncontrollably with the current of everyday concerns, will in the long run lose its life, its clarity, its original powers.

Now, all this once was taught to a woman who, like most of us, had not used her understanding for much of anything in a good long while. She was taught these things, and saved from a terrible fate, by a grocer, a woodworker, and a spider.

To the grocer the woman said: “What is it that makes possible the consumption of so many varied products of the earth?”

The grocer said: “It is because knives and forks are not made of food.”

To the woodworker our friend said: “How is it that you are able to shape woods into so many implements useful to humankind?”

The woodworker said: “It is because the tools of a woodworker never have a cutting edge made of wood.”

To the spider she said, as though instinctively trying to revive herself: “What rules do you follow in stringing your cobwebs, the center of your life and work?”

The spider said: “I attach my cobwebs to stones, rocks, mountainsides, leaves, telephone poles, anything—but not to other cobwebs.”