What a Joy a Worm Used to Be

Small awe as resistance

Today I want to talk about worms.

I’ve been working on some longer form essays. One about friendships and the various complications and gifts that come with them - one an “introduction” to myself, since I realized I’d never really done that here.

I’ll finish those essays soon, but today I want to talk about worms.

Everything is complicated right now. Not only here in the US, but globally. There is so much pain being thrown around. It’s tempting, and oh so easy to disagree, and to feel hurt, and wound one another. Violence is in leadership, and it will only create destruction, because that’s what violence always does.

But really, I just want to talk about worms today.

A client asked me recently how I stay “okay” when it feels the world is burning down. She’s a sensitive soul like me, and I know what she was asking is “are we going to be okay, and how do we be okay - us tender ones?”

And I told her, the only way I know how to be okay is to love. To love and to zoom in on the tiniest little love pockets, and then to live in them. This is the microscopic rescue within pain. Zoom in, further still, further and further, and further, until you find yourself in a moment so small, nothing can exist there except wonder.

So let me tell you about worms.

A couple of weeks ago, while it was still raining daily here in Colorado Springs, Michael got up early, as he does, to head to the gym. He recently lubricated the hinges on our connected bathroom door, and now it gently and slowly swings open unless you close it all the way. He had the light on in the bathroom, and didn’t notice that the door was slowly opening, the beam of light landing right on my sleepy face at 4:00 am. I thought it was the sun, and so did my body.

So despite my best efforts to go back to sleep, my mind kept me awake, listening to the rain fall persistently on the skylights and I thought about all the worms that would emerge, and how happy the hungry robins would be.

I wrote this down, and it feels like a simple and easy thing to love right now:

What a joy a worm used to be

Plump, wriggly, banded bodies

Their lives held in our pudgy little fingers

I’d save them from the sun baked sidewalks after the summer rain

Bathe them in hose water, not knowing the dirt was their work

May you have a week of deep rest, small moments of awe, and a deep understanding that something bigger than all the love you could ever imagine is holding you. In awe of you. Rinsing you in its praise.