Staying for many winters on a small and beautiful island of the Bahamas has taught me respect for water, energy and food supply lines. When the boats come in, we have groceries. When it rains, we have clean drinking water. When diesel oil arrives in ships, we generate electricity. When the sun rises, we see that it is our greatest source of energy, along with the tides and winds. Our agricultural lands are limited and our water for drinking is shallow. We view our great tradition of catching fish and crawfish to eat is a glorious luxury as our schools of fishes diminish.
We live in two places. In the spring, we return to our home where we are on another island of sorts, called North America. Although geographers would refer to it as a continent, I have come to see that we all live on islands. There are small ones, big ones, even some called continents. But they are still islands to me. They all defined by finite natural resources, limited water and food supplies. Our islands, all of them, confront the wild forces of nature, be they drought, storms, earthquakes, or pandemics.
We are students of islands.
On our little island in the Atlantic, when the wind blows, we feel our vulnerability as the waves roll wildly on to our beaches, sometimes ripping cliffs and taking them back into the ocean. When we step out at night and look up into the unlit sky, the stars and the moon literally hover over us. They are right there, smothering us with soft glow of light and opening up our world to the real possibility of imagining infinity.
Nature’s forces are abundant and everywhere, although often out of our reach.
On our huge island, or continent of North America, we do not necessarily sense this intimacy with the ocean the same way we do when we stand on a hill on our small island of the Abacos in the Bahamas and see the Atlantic Ocean in both directions, east and west. However, we feel the power and presence of the ocean as we wander along the beaches of the Pacific.
Yes, North America is in actuality, a well-defined body of shifting land surrounded by a shifting massive body of water, although its boundaries east and west cannot be seen simultaneously when standing on a hill, like we do in Abaco. If we were standing on the moon and look down on the planet Earth, however, we might see the east and waters of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans surrounding North America. We would also see that the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are one body of water, not two.
Our islands are on a single planet. Now, that is a different matter. The planet Earth is surrounded by other things than water, holding even more possibilities of massive immensity. This whole act of thinking about who we are and what island we are on is a humbling experience.
On all our islands, we are impacted by the immediate danger of pollution from other places, as well as our own, as the plastic and detritus roll in onto our beaches and creep into our water and air. We see that abrupt shortages limit what people eat, and determine the time they must spend searching for food. We may not see it so clearly, until something like a global pandemic comes along, or droughts, or other big shows of nature that bring it to our attention very clearly, that things might change in a minute and our life lines are fragile.
Knowing this makes me appreciate my life even more. I am surprised and awed by the fact that I even exist, midst all the other options available. These chemicals and cells comprising me could instead be part of an apple tree, or buried in sands, or drifting in a large body of water.
I could have died before I was a year old. I might survive as a person for twenty more years.
Right now, I am living on an island, as is everybody else.
marysgardens 
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