Every morning on my bike ride in the park, I see what must be hundreds of earthworms on the road. Most didn’t survive, having ventured forth from the moist soil and wet grass, down the curb to the human-made road of no return, so close and yet so far from their safe haven.
Once on pavement, they are stranded in no man’s land, or no worm’s land. Should they make it across to the other side, they can’t get back up the curb. As minutes pass, those that don’t find a crack in the curb, those that don’t make it back to moist soil and grass before the sun warms the asphalt, are doomed.
Their bodies dehydrate and they lose their ability to stretch and move. When I come along, some are still alive and moving, but most have begun to dry up, their shriveled bodies dotting the road.
I am reminded of the story about the boy and the starfish. There was a young boy walking along the seashore where hundreds of starfish had washed up onto the shore. They were stranded as the tide receded.
As the boy worked his way along the beach, he picked them up one at a time and threw as many as he could back into the water.
A man walking along the beach stopped and asked the boy, “What are you doing?”
“Throwing them back in the water,” the boy answered.
“But, there are so many of them. You can\u2019t save them all. Do you really think you are making a difference?”, the man asked.
After a brief pause the young boy responded, barely altering his rhythm as he tossed another starfish into the water, “It made a difference to this one.”
After hearing what the boy said, the man joined him in throwing the starfish back in the water.
Some mornings when I ride my bike I stop here and there to pick up some of the struggling earthworms that have not yet dried out. I pick them up as they frantically writhe and wriggle in response to my touch. I struggle to grasp them, slimy and slippery, to toss them back onto the grass without harming them.
As I look at the many dried-up ones on the road I ask myself, Am I really making a difference? And then I think of the boy and the starfish, and say, it made a difference to this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every morning on my bike ride in the park, I see what must be hundreds of earthworms on the road. Most didn’t survive, having ventured forth from the moist soil and wet grass, down the curb to the human-made road of no return, so close and yet so far from …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1296,"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295\/revisions\/1296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boqueteauthors.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}