SproutingWhale

The whale had never seen a tree.

This was not particularly surprising.

There aren’t many trees in the ocean.

He knew them only by what the water brought him — a branch after a storm, a seed travelling somewhere it had not intended to go, once even a yellow leaf that floated beside him for most of an afternoon.

He wondered where they came from.

Far away, a small sprout had never seen a whale.

This was not particularly surprising either.

It knew the world through rain and soil, through the warmth that arrived every morning and disappeared every evening.

Below were roots.

Above was an enormous blue sky.

It had no idea that beyond the land there was another blue world.

And in that world, something enormous was swimming.

They might have remained strangers.

The whale in his ocean.

The sprout in its patch of earth.

But the world has a habit of connecting things that appear to have nothing to do with one another.

Rain falls on forests and finds its way into rivers.

Rivers find the sea.

Water rises from oceans and becomes clouds.

Clouds travel over land.

Rain falls again.

Leaves fall.

Whales rise.

Seeds travel.

And somewhere in all of this, the whale and the sprout belong to the same story.

Not because they ever meet.

Not because they are alike.

But because neither exists alone.

Perhaps a habitat is not only the place where something lives.

Perhaps it is also everything that makes that life possible.

The rain.

The river.

The soil.

The sea.

The things that came before.

The things too far away to see.

And the things, still very small, that are only beginning.

A small reminder that when you look at one thing for long enough, you may eventually find another.

And another.

Until the thing you began with is no longer quite one thing at all.

It is a set of relationships.

A habitat.

And somewhere inside it, something is always beginning.