The Little Things that Happen

 

When we aren’t looking! Our lives are so clear to us: we eat, we sleep, we get dressed, we work, we have friends, we have families, we mow our lawn, we take out the garbage … yet all around us, the rest of Earth is living lives too.

Flowering Elymus hystrix

I noticed this week that the Eastern bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix) is blooming. It has already formed spikelets that make it look like it has already made seeds but the tiny flowers are just appearing now. Each spikelet has 2 to 4 florets with pale yellow stamens. This cool-season grass is shade tolerant and has proven to be pretty happy in my yard: it is starting to seed around a bit and I’ve been donating and pulling some of the extras.

Seeing these blooms reminded me of so many things we don’t see as the rest of the world goes about its lives around us: tiny bees and flower flies pollinating flowers that are so small themselves we don’t always see them; frogs hiding in the foliage while they wait for an insect to pass through; the caterpillar hiding under the leaves while it eats to live; bird parents gathering thousands of insects to raise and support their small nest of chicks.

I’m sure this post reminds some of you of the #momentinnature posts that I copied from a friend several years ago. The message is similar in that we should notice things, but whether we notice them or not, they are happening. We share our living space with thousands and millions of other organisms. How we treat our outside (gently or harshly, with or without chemicals, what we add and what we remove) affects them too.

Bee going about her business whether we see her or not