As children we come into a world filled with the cycles of nature. We watch with wonder as the first crocuses of spring poke tiny, green heads through muddy soil, then burst forth into bright purple and white blooms. We enjoy the warm breezes of long summer days. As days begin to grow short, we marvel as the leaves turn from green to bright reds and oranges before falling to the ground. We dress in our warm winter clothes and play outside as the first flurries drift in on a cold wind. The change of seasons is one of the most obvious cycles of nature, its rhythm carried deep in our bones.

Yet, for most of us, we live our daily lives thinking linearly with the habit of the western mind. As the days and weeks turn to months and years we think of time passing, moving toward us in a straight line from future to present to past as if we were driving a car through the moments of our lives. But in the last twenty-five years or so, science has offered us many new views of nature from a cyclical perspective. The nature all around us flows from one phenomenon to the next, affecting everything.

And there is another way we can occasionally witness the salmon cycle indirectly. For many centuries the Southern Resident Orcas — pods J, K and L — have staked their lives on these annual migrations. They followed the daily rise and fall of the tides along the west side of San Juan Island from June through September to chase runs of King salmon swimming from the Pacific to the mouth of the Fraser River in British Columbia. Now those runs have dwindled to less than life-sustaining and the Southern Residents must travel elsewhere for food, now visiting our inland sea infrequently.

Visit the Orca Network web site for recent sightings information. For more detailed information about the resident orcas of the Salish Sea, read The Breath of a Whale by Leigh Calvez.

Yet others, like the bald eagles and California and Steller sea lions, depend on the annual return of the salmon, just as the lacy cedars and the towering firs do.

As we stand along the streams watching these salmon returning to spawn, we may notice gills fluttering in the cyclic intake of oxygen that even fish experience. We may notice leaves falling from the trees around us.

What we may not notice is the nutrients from those trees, in the form of rotting leaves—the simultaneous end and beginning of a cycle—washing into small rivulets that run into streams, that run into the Salish Sea. These are providing essential nutrients for plankton that feed small fish like herring that feed the small salmon that will one day feed the orcas, bears and wolves that will in turn feed the trees. We rely on these very same trees, which may not exist at all without essential nutrients brought by salmon, to produce the oxygen we all need to breathe in the grand dance between carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules.

Life is never static. It is ever-changing.

Our life-sustaining, blue jewel of an earth travels through space, carrying us through the years, as a mother possum carries her babies clinging to her back.

Our earth spins once a day on her axis, as we breathe the sweet oxygen given to us by trees. We watch our children play beside streams that support the lives of salmon that nourish orcas and bears and trees. We live our lives each day surrounded by mysteries yet unimaginable. 

What are the larger cycles we have yet to understand? What will we learn about how these cycles impact planet Earth and our corner of the world in the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea?

We are sustained by the natural cycles within cycles of planet Earth, many of them still mostly unknown or unnoticed. What cycles will you notice today?

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Thanks so much for your interest and your support.