Why I stop for worms

Small acts that ripple big.

“You know you can’t save them all right?”, my friend smiled at me incredulously, watching me place the limp body into the mud, her face barely masking the thought that I was entirely wasting my time with something ridiculous.

This is the most common response I get. Either in words, or in facial expressions, or in the 2 seconds pause people passing me on the street take to watch me bending over trying to tend to an earthworm on the road.

“It’s just an earthworm.”

“You can’t save them all.”

“Gross.”

“Everybody is looking. That’s enough. Let’s go.”

The last one is my own thoughts when my insecurity about people’s judgement catches up to me. Thankfully, that one has become softer and softer with age.

I’ve always saved earthworms. Every time it rains, my first response is to smile and think: The trees are getting a drink of water! And my second thought is: The earthworms!

On those wet, rainy mornings during the school year, I would put on my raincoat and my flip flops and grasp my son’s hand and we head out the door to walk him to kindergarten. We live on a hill, so as we walk up the incline we watch as the rainwater bubbles down the street, sometimes in soft flat streams and sometimes in thinly gushing rivers. My son’s warm, small hand, tightly gripped in mine, squeezes mine and I smile at him as he hoots and hollers when a car splashes by or the gushing water on the road hits a wall and splashes.

“Do you have your eagle eyes ready?” I always ask him.

This is our ritual. As we begin our 10-minute walk up the hill on rainy mornings, we diligently scour the sidewalk and road for earthworms in the rain. Healthy pink earthworms lolling about. Injured brown earthworms whose bodies are half damaged. Dead earthworms that carry the smallest remains of pinkish hue. They all get our attention.

“There’s one mommy!” He points to a wiggling worm on the road a few feet from the sidewalk.

This is one of my son’s favourite parts of our routine, because now is the time when he lectures me about how I always forget to keep a thin stick handy. I start searching the debris on the ground for a thin stick or wrangle a twig free from a nearby bush. We carefully select something sturdy with a thin tapered edge, and bend over in the rain and examine our first client.

“He’s pink mommy!” A good sign. Carefully, with big smiles and determination on our faces, we pick up the worm with our twig and place him upon some nearby wet dirt, safe from being stepped on or driven over. Success!

It’s a funny practice. I know people are right. I certainly can’t save them all. But somehow, I can’t help myself. I see their wriggling, perfectly pink bodies sprawled out on the dark concrete, slithering seamlessly across the slickened pavement, and it reminds me of being a child and feeling so alive feeling the rain on my face, letting the water seep into my pores and refresh my soul. Watching this lovely creature with its perfectly smooth accordion movements makes me think we can’t be so different in our pleasure in these delicious raindrops.

I’ve always loved animals. One of my early childhood memories is coming across a cat in the parking lot of our townhouse complex and thinking I was like Snow White, floating towards it with magical music floating in the air as I reached out to befriend it. The cat probably had a different vision, in that it proceeded to wildly scratch the fuck out of my face when I tried to pick it up and kiss it. As my mom dabbed peroxide on my 5-year-old battle-scarred face, I still thought about that cat with no anger, only curiosity about where it was going and what it was doing. I loved animals. My sister (probably very aptly) used to equate me to Elmira from Tiny Toons (those of you old enough to remember that Looney Toons spinoff will know). That was me, in action. Loving animals to the point of being borderline oblivious (or maybe not so borderline) to their need to escape me.

40 years later, I am still thinking about the animals, and what they are doing and feeling.

Working in animal welfare, I’ve learned a lot about animal sentience. Many debate about whether animals feel, think or know. I’ve always found the debate rather useless. Because anyone who has ever had the gift of sharing their life with an animal – ANY animal – for a significant period of time can tell you the answer is a resounding YES. They feel.

And as I watch the earthworms we rescue – those with half darkened bodies whose remaining pink halves wriggle to survive – begin to pinken a bit more or gain the tiniest iota of strength as we place them upon a safe place in the earth, there is no doubt in my mind that all life wants to live. Wants to survive, and thrive.

Every living being wants their life to matter.

Because it matters to them.

It matters to me.

Since I was a child, all I wanted to do was fight for justice for those in our world who have no voice, or whose voice is not being heard through suffering. I have been drawn to nature and animals and children all my life, finding solace in honesty with which they live, as well as their dignity and resilience and compassion.

A blade of grass fights through a slab of sidewalk.

A street dog trusts after being pelted with stones.

A child remains hopeful after watching his world fall apart around him.

The world often feels like an incredibly unjust place at this moment in time. There is so much to feel hopeless about. I marvel in heartache as I witness the unfolding of the unthinkable each day. Forests stripped away. Oceans ravaged and polluted. Animals tortured and slaughtered in factory farms and testing labs. Species extinction rising. Poverty and hunger worldwide and locally. Genocide being live streamed. Billionaires in mansions and populations in tents.

It can feel utterly hopeless.

But then … every once in a while, you watch an earthworm start to get pinker in the soil.

Maybe it’s not hopeless. Maybe hope grows when we start to recognize our interconnectedness. The connections between People. The Environment. The Animals. Maybe hope blossoms when we start to internalize that we are all brothers and sisters, and act with the same Compassion that nature and animals afford us.

Maybe, through our shared compassion, we can all be Empowered to embody kindness.

Because maybe it’s true. Maybe you can’t save them all.

But you can save some. You can save one.

Our small acts of kindness and compassion each day can make a difference to one life, in one moment, that can change the course.

And if we’re lucky, one day the life it will make a difference to … is our own.

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