The Paths that Connect Us
I have always been drawn to the small helpers of the natural world.
Bees in the flowers. Butterflies fluttering through the garden. Birds pausing in seed heads through winter. The hum and flutter and movement of life all around us. There is something about pollinators that fills me with wonder. They are busy, beautiful, often overlooked, and absolutely essential.
My love for nature did not begin in a family that spent much time outdoors. I was raised in a house that did not really live that way. But something wild in me kept reaching for it anyway. When I was seven, I taught myself to garden. I planted and tended and watched things grow, and the more I learned, the more I loved it. Year after year, that love stayed with me.
Later, I fell in love with butterflies too. Growing up near the prairie, I looked for them everywhere. Their color, their paper like wings, their determination to keep moving from place to place felt almost magical. I even spent a summer volunteering at a butterfly pavilion just to learn more. The more closely I paid attention, the more I realized how much these tiny creatures do for the world around us.
Pollinators are not just bees, though I do adore them.
They are butterflies and moths, hummingbirds and beetles, bats and bees, each playing a part in carrying life forward. As they move from bloom to bloom, they help plants make fruit, seeds, and more flowers. They help gardens flourish, meadows thrive, and ecosystems continue in quiet, essential ways.
They are, in every sense, little helpers.
And maybe that is why they have come to mean even more to me over time.
During the pandemic, my family went through a tender and heartbreaking season. We lost both of our dogs within four months. We were living in a new place, cut off from people, and carrying grief while the world itself felt uncertain and strange. In the middle of that, my daughter and I turned to birding. We began paying attention to who was outside the window, who visited the trees, who gathered the dried seeds in winter. We learned their habits, their songs, their little personalities. We made lists. We added to our life list. We kept going.
Six years later, we are still birding.
What began as a way to survive a hard season became a thread of connection between us and the natural world, and between us and each other.
That is what I keep coming back to: connection.
Pollinators live by connection. Butterflies follow migration paths that depend on places of nourishment along the way. Bees move among blossoms, linking one living thing to another. Hummingbirds visit flower after flower. Life continues because there are pathways of support, nourishment, and exchange.
And perhaps people are not so different.
We need places to land.
We need nourishment along the way.
We need beauty, shelter, and community.
We need the steady, often unseen work of care that helps life bloom.
Mr. Rogers said to look for the helpers, and I think pollinators are among them. Not only because of the work they do in gardens and wild spaces, but because they remind us of something true: we belong to one another more than we think. We help carry life forward in ways we may never fully see.
A garden blooms because many small helpers visit it.
A life blooms that way too.
So I find myself asking:
What are the paths of connection in my own life?
Who has nourished me?
Where have I been invited to rest, grow, or begin again?
And how might I become a small helper too?
Maybe that is part of what it means to live well — to move through the world carrying a little life from one place to another, helping beauty continue, helping hope take root, helping something bloom where it might not have bloomed before.
We all need a path of connection.
And maybe, if we pay attention, we can become part of one.
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