Seeking Higher Ground (or, "It's for your own good.")

I save earth worms.  I gather them along the gravel roads after rainstorms, pulling them out of puddles, sometimes carrying home handfuls in the hem of my shirt. It's not purely for altruistic reasons; I put them in my compost pile, where they live in perpetual bliss munching fruit, coffee grounds and vegetable scraps, and churning them up with grass clippings to make glorious black soil.   Yes, I have a worm farm of sorts.  When my husband goes fishing, I ask that he bring back the ones he doesn't use so they don't die, as when I saved them, I invested care for their well-being.

Our rivers are getting high.  We live near the convergence of the Tongue and Little Tongue Rivers, and snow pack on our mountain is much higher than normal.  Worms are struggling out from under the pavers on our patio, as the ground water is ankle deep in some places on our property.  I saw two night crawlers seeking asylum from the sodden ground this morning.  I grabbed at each and their strength never fails to astound me: though they don't have hands, each had found something to hold on to beneath the paver, hanging on so tightly that I would have ripped them in half had I kept pulling.  I only wanted to save them, to carry them to the higher ground of the compost heap.  They didn't know my intentions; I could have been a bird pulling them out.  Rather than chance the possibility of being rescued by something bent on devouring them, these worms held on to their surroundings, even though staying there will surely kill them.

People are like that.  We get used to our environment -our habits and our lifestyles, and our fear of change makes us loath to let go for something that might be better.  Something big and scary may come along and tug on us, and instead of rolling with it, we resist, sentencing ourselves to remain where we are.  I don't want to be like the worm.  The next time something uncomfortable yanks on me, I'll investigate it to see what it has to offer.  Either way, it will have taught me something. 

I'm going to go yank on those worms again; when they first get out from under the pavers, it's going to look like a vast desert from their point of view.  If they let go of their drowned dwelling places, I'll show them my cornucopia of kitchen scraps on higher ground.