Piping Plover

Learning Mercy

This beautiful scene is on Plum Island, a ten minute drive from where we recently moved.

The sign you see warns that no one may walk on the beach beyond that point. The Piping Plover, an endangered bird, breeds during this season on this beach.

I remember summers on Fire Island, NY, our complaining, joking sarcastically about some bird we’d never heard of keeping us from the walk we’d always done. How silly to value that bird over the summer pleasures of thousands of people seeking respite from urban life.

Something uncomfortably familiar to what we’ve been hearing recently from the highest places.

Over the years our thinking has dramatically shifted. We’ve learned that our future as a species is directly tied to the well-being of all the other species who depend on the health of the planet, as we do.

Our son, Oakley, works with the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Oregon, a foundation dedicated to the health of salmon habitat all over the planet. Their premise is that the health of salmon habitat is a good a measure of the health of the planet.

With the shifting of values from welcoming diversity and practicing mutual well-being on every level, to acquisitiveness and transactionalism – what can you do for me? – we’ve lost understanding that mutual well-being, and welcoming the stranger, are hardly the “woke” behavior some vilify.

When too few have too much, and too many have too little, the stage is set for the decline of us all.

The Piping Plover is a tiny, poignant an example of the urgency of understanding our place in the order of things.

No species is expendable.

With the possible exception of ours, if we continue to behave as if our ascendency is the best measure of how life is faring on Mother Earth.

We have come to understand that we emerged from the primordial ooze with an assist from life forms that adapted to conditions that wouldn’t have supported a species like ours. When we demean or diminish other species because they don’t seem as sophisticated as we consider ourselves, we do violence to our own place among them.

Piping Plover mating season will end in late summer, and the signs will be taken down. Humans can walk the beach at will.

Ever wonder why we’re drawn to the salt water lapping at the edges of the continents where we live? A chemist friend once told me that, if you suffered a catastrophic loss of blood while at sea, human plasma is close enough to sea water, that an infusion of salt water could sustain you for a period until you could renew your own blood supply.

Consider how we spend the months from conception to birth.

WeStick our toes into the edge of the surf, longing for a taste of our origin. A taste of that salty water. A taste of kinship.