THANKFUL FRIDAY

Something bigger than a bee zipped by me during one of my morning walks this week and it took me a moment to realize what I had seen or was seeing. It was a hummingbird moth and it stuck around, competing with the bumble bees for the nectar in these Lantana. But briefly. Hummingbird moths move quickly and do not hang out, savoring their meals. They’re nothing like the hummingbirds that frequent my feeder. I have one that sometimes just perches there for long minutes at a time. The hummingbird moth never perches and is extremely difficult to capture on camera.

I was lucky.

This particular hummingbird moth is also known as a hawk-moth or sometimes the Sphinx moth. Those large brown or green caterpillars with posterior horns that you you sometimes pull off your dill or tomato plants eventually turn into one of these moths. They’re great pollinators and according to my research, they are not rare. Yet, they seem a bit rare and elusive to me. This is the first one I’ve seen all summer and this is the very last week of summer.

This is the very last week of summer.

Early in the year, I struggled with finding a reason to do much of anything. All I could do was worry about my job and what would I do if I lost this job. The more hits and restrictions that this administration put out on the NIH and the CDC, the more I stressed. I knew that there would be a trickle down effect in their restrictions and worried about that impact. As a result, I threw myself into my work like never before, to the point of having dreams where I am troubleshooting microscope problems. Someone at work joked with me about this recently and said I was living the dream. While I am not as worried about losing this job as I was at the beginning of the year, I am still very busy.

The threats are different now. The disappointments are greater. I never realized the number of people I know who have been hiding their own homophobia and racism, while calling that hateful rhetoric “the Lord’s work.” I always think the best of people and then they go and show their true colors by posting some stupid meme of support for the latest Nazi in the spotlight. I wonder how it is I could have believed they were good people to begin with. And for some time now, that disappointment of knowing people who support racism and bigotry, has been a weight, an embarrassment really.

Now I think about that hummingbird moth, zipping around the Lantana and sharing space with bumbble bees. It stayed focused on it’s one task of gathering nectar. What task can I stay focused on? It’s certainly not changing people’s minds or removing the sludge and hate from their souls. I’m not a miracle worker, but I am pebble. I know what happens when a pebble is dropped into a body of water. I know about wave theory and objects in motion. Supporting and helping my community to help and support young people in the LGBTQ+ communities creates a wave. Supporting my local TV stations like PBS ensures that I have access to unbiased news sources and educational programs creates a wave of knowledge. Supporting and voting for candidates who serve their communities by promoting policies (health care, public transportation, appropriate taxes, school systems) that better our communities, leads to even bigger waves.

This year will be over in a blink. All of this is temporary. I truly believe that if we focus on caring for those people this administration is targeting (Brown people, Black people, LGTBQ+ people, our unhoused people, our people in poverty) we can make great waves of good change. But in order to do that, we’re going to have to filter out the noise coming at us through social media and that includes some people you thought you knew. We cannot control other’s action, but we can control our own actions and how we respond to those actions.

I am finding ways to make my heart feel as light as a hummingbird moth while being a pebble.