By Will Rand
April 15, 2025
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There are a few days in my life that I look back on as truly perfect days. One of these perfect days happened about six years ago. I was in Key Largo, Florida, with a new friend. We had spent the last two weeks taking an orchestral conducting course at a music festival in Miami. It was July and nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit with high humidity. July in southern Florida is not usually my idea of paradise.
My new friend from this festival graciously invited me and a few others to visit his family’s home. We had a lovely time meeting his family and seeing his neighborhood. Afterward, my friend took us to John Pennekamp State Park. Apart from some beautiful palm trees and thick, leafy canopies, John Pennekamp is not a place to explore on land. Rather, it is a place that is mostly underwater. My group was outfitted with flippers, a snorkel, and a mask, and then escorted with a large group of visitors onto a pontoon boat skippered by a rather gregarious captain.
He regaled us with tales of diving with sharks, how he had once had a jellyfish wrapped around his neck, and how not to get stung by a stingray. After we had left the sanctuary of the mangroves, we rocketed out onto open water toward the reef. The wind on the water was a sweet relief from the thick tropical summer air. Finally, we reached a spot of particularly bright blue water when the boat slowed to a halt. We were promptly informed that while we were there to look and see beautiful marine life, we were strictly forbidden from touching any coral or the bottom of the reef. Any contact from the oils on our skin had the potential to kill the coral. On a final ominous note, our guide shared, “You will soon understand why we can’t afford to lose any more coral”.
“There are a few days in my life that I look back on as truly perfect days.”
With what our guide said at the forefront of my mind, we were told how to don our gear and jump into the water. Upon immediate splashing impact, I was caught by salty blue bathtub water and beheld a sight I had never before imagined. I saw hundreds of colorful fish swimming in schools and darting between colorful stacks of coral. It felt like seeing a forest or a mountain for the very first time. It was a whole new world of color, light, and life revealed to my astounded eyes. I spent the next hour in heaven, drifting between choppy waves and gazing down at the beautiful coral, careful not to touch it. I tried and failed to keep up with fish, looked for sharks, longed to see a turtle, and tested my new equipment by diving down from my buoyant perch 15 or so feet above the floor just to get a little closer to the action. Needless to say, it was a truly blissful moment.
After 45 minutes or so, the tide and the choppy water shuffled me away from the crowds of snorkelers into a less populous part of the reef. It was only one ridge away from the central hub of life. Nevertheless, it could not have been a more different sight. Chalky, white, and utterly flattened, this coral looked like a bombed-out city. Only a few fish were skirting the edges of the rubble. This neighborhood was a victim of coral bleaching which occurs when the water temperature increases, and disease takes hold of the coral community. This sobering sight was no longer just an article, a documentary, or a concerning headline, it was a reality before me. I got back into the boat feeling absolutely enamored by my experience and simultaneously haunted by the destruction I witnessed.
“It was a whole new world of color, light, and life revealed to my astounded eyes.”
When I recall this memory, I see it now as the beginning of a new relationship with coral communities. It was my first encounter with this incredible ecosystem, one of the most powerful organs of the body of our Earth. After becoming friends, it was now harder and harder to stand the news of coral bleaching, red tides, and uncontrollably rising sea temperatures.
At the time, I was focused on a musical career and deeply troubled by the state of our climate and natural environment. Now, six years later, my work focuses on the intersection of the arts and the environment. Days like the one I spent at John Pennekamp State Park are essential to my unfolding story. The encounters I had on the reef invited me to consider how my inner relationship with seemingly faraway places was not one of simple concern, it was an awakening of how I was internally related to these living places. When part of the body of the Earth is hurting, part of my body is hurting.
This transformation in my life from that day until now looks like a turn from a life of conservation to a life-seeking restoration. I was pursuing a career to become a professional classical musician to conserve and uplift powerful music from the past that still speaks today. I wanted to write music to admire the living spaces of our Earth. I wanted to tend to my own inner state park or preserve and create a space for people to care for that cordoned-off territory.
John Pennekamp State Park, like thousands of others across our country, is a remarkable testament to the conservation efforts of thousands of people. Collectively we decided that we value protecting land and conserving it as a place for all to enjoy. There are large swaths of ocean that are protected in national and state parks in southern Florida. They are sanctuaries free of fishing, mining, and other commercial activities. However, they are still not safe from rising sea temperatures or ocean acidification.
Protecting these areas of natural wonder has safeguarded the well-being of life within the boundaries of each park in the last century from the dangers of development and commodification. It stops short of asking how the two worlds are interrelated. In other words, conserving an area of land (or life) is an act of separating it from the tide of human interest and development. It becomes a set apart space to “tour” or visit. It is seen as a concession of the developed world so that the rest of the land can be used for our various needs and purposes.
“When part of the body of the Earth is hurting, part of my body is hurting.”
What I want to invite us to consider is that it is truly impossible to separate the two. All land is connected just like all water is connected. When one part of the system becomes poisoned, impacted, polluted, or altered in some way, it affects the whole system, regardless of whether part of that system is set apart for protection.
How do we bridge the gap? We can seek restoration. The natural ecology of the world has so much to teach us about the balance that is required to maintain wellness for all living creatures. When we tend to ecology the way it natively emerges in any given ecosystem, we allow the many interrelated beings to live the way they were intended to live. We surrender to the unending prayer for healing echoed by the mystic Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” All manner of things shall indeed be well as they were created to sustain wellness from their beginnings.
Scientists are embarking on coral planting projects in southern Florida in protected areas like John Pennekamp State Park and Biscayne National Park. There is an effort to restore coral life by learning from the way it grows and develops and replanting it after tending to it in the nursery for a while. The more we work to strengthen the powerful organs of the sea, the more the sea will be able to filter the toxins and imbalances we have inflicted upon it.
Rather than continue to separate the layers of life further, we can return to the source of life in the first place. We can nurture and develop the natural beings who have always known how to support one other for millennia. While the air and water may be warming, we can work with our natural neighbors to hold the line together.
The work that I do now is not simply trying to admire the land and remember the music of the past, it is working to create new art that evokes the energies of emergence and revival. I look for my teachers in flora and fauna, especially those who come as healers, such as nitrogen-fixing and early succession plants. I seek to learn from their healing ways and invoke their wisdom in the stories I tell through my art. I hope to integrate the force of restoration that is always waiting on the wings in the face of destruction. Life always has the final word.
We are students of a cosmic force of life that nourishes and sustains every creative spirit in eternity. May we always remember that we are part of the great web of life and that the spirit of life dwells within us all.
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Will Rand
Will Rand is a creative visionary who is passionate about spiritual wholeness, social justice, ecological wellness, and building new communal practices of healing in our world. Will has facilitated storytelling festivals where people shared stories of their lives, concerts cultivating a multiplicity of creative disciplines, and communal gathering spaces where people come to heal and be spiritually renewed. As the founder of EarthStory, a project that convenes community in the pursuit of ecological wholeness, Will draws together creatives, storytellers, and community members to remember their stories of belonging as a part of the biotic community. Will’s deep passion is creating in collaboration with co-conspirators who share the intention of bringing more healing, joy, and grace into the world.