Approximately half a million surface-feeding earthworms are in any given acre of soil—nature’s backhoe. Epigeic worms weave the autumn detritus, mote by mote, into the earth. Meanwhile, burrowing anecic worms force air into soil-like billows. Earthworms use simple designs to thread nutrients, water, and air into life-fabricating soil. However, it takes years and years (and years).   The process by which these marvelous creatures assist in generating energy, nutrients and substances of life is such a beautiful thing to behold (John Adams was said to have plunged his hands into a pile of compost in London and proclaim it inferior to his own).   
It is often wrapped around our feelings of mortality and thus, reviled. I propose looking at it differently in The Elegance of Decay.

Charles Darwin suggested few animals have played such an essential part in the history of the world as these “lowly organized creatures.”   Darwin, Charles. The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. (London, England: John Murray, 1881. First Ed.)

What, exactly, does he mean by lowly? A pun on the fact that they are beneath our feet? (Herein, I shall substitute “small” less pejoration). We must define the terms. Otherwise, anything could be lowly or small.

By “small,” I mean—likely as did Darwin—not grandiose. Simply constructed, 'small' is inconsequential to its environs yet demonstrates surprising greatness in the right conditions. And by “greatness,” I mean presence, holding one’s space and welcoming others into it.

Imagine a small, circular clay disc. Handmade, the size of a penny. Small and simple. Perhaps precious to its owner but invisible otherwise.

And yet, in the hands of a professional, like the late British ceramic artist Fenella Elms,   Fenella Elms is a wonderful British ceramist who spent a career as a therapist and turned to ceramics later in life. She uses repetition of form and shape to suggest movement and depth in her nature-inspired shapes.   
Read more about her work in “In Praise of Slowness and All Things Snails.” this small disc can be turned, angled, tilted, or even nestled between other discs, and suddenly, we have movement, depth, and even a narrative. 

Fenella Elm's Comb

Or behold these small, smooth flanks of pink shell, like rosy nail beds.

The fragments have a narrative. We know a creature layered calcium carbonate, lived in and abandoned it. Waves and sand broke it apart, filed it down. But it’s still not great.

Yet, add multiples—many, many multiples—in a completely haphazard way, and they aggregate to form a place. A much more prominent position than it ever was as a shell. This small pink shell becomes a rosy-pink beach, a home, a location, something to experience.

Pink Beach, Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda spent his life gesturing towards the small, compelling us to notice. A republished selection of his work Ode to Common Things collects poetry about the greatness of the primarily inconsequential.   Lest you imagine Neruda a pithy writer of simple jest, his “I’m Explaining a Few Things,” is a visceral description of a people bombed and destroyed: “One morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth…”   
Among these words and memories of a war-battered Spain, Neruda’s love of simple elegance makes more sense.

When I pick up
a bar
of soap
to take a closer look,
its powerful aroma
astounds me:
O fragrance,
I don’t know
where you come from,
-what
is your home town?
From Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to a Bar of Soap”

Environmentalist Rachel Carson, a biologist and gifted writer, called the small “a window to what matters.” In her 1962 book Silent Spring,   Carson was an extremely talented writer and trained biologist who patiently wrote throughout the 1940s and 50s of the effect of pesticides on land, water, and air.   
It was only with the 1962 publication of Silent Spring that she gained national recognition, however. The response was so strong it kept her writing and speaking for the remainder of her life. As a result, her most personal project, a book about the wonder of nature, she never saw published. Carson paid vital attention to the power of agricultural toxins at the smallest possible level:

It is only when we bring our focus to bear, first on the individual cells of the body, then on the minute structures within the cells, and finally on the ultimate reactions of the molecules within these structures – only when we do this can we comprehend the most serious and far-reaching effects of the haphazard introduction of foreign chemicals into our internal environment…The extraordinary energy–producing mechanism of the body is basic not only to health but to life the nature of many of the chemicals used against insects, rodents, and weeds, is such that they may strike directly at this system, disrupting its beautifully functioning mechanism.
From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

Positioning our gaze at the cellular level,   Nobel laureate Paul Nurse echoes the criticality of the cell in his bright guide What is Life?   
“Scientists are always interested in identifying fundamental units, the best example being the atom as the basic unit of matter. Biology’s atom is the cell. Cells are not only the basic structural unit of all living organisms, they are also the basic functional unit of life.” showing the harm of pesticides and insecticides, Carson noticed the small and left no question about its codependency with the large. Her writing catalyzed the modern environmental movement and changed how we view habitat dependency and human ecological responsibility.

Let’s notice the small. Let’s value the small. The seemingly insignificant. Let’s be affected by the microcosms which, in the words of Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, “occupy a space only be charitably be called a spot.”

From Szymborska’s poem “Microcosmos:”

They don’t even have decent innards.
They don’t know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are – or aren’t.
Still they decide our life and death.
From Wislawa Szymborska’s Here

Let’s notice the snails, the earthworms, the soap. What current, place, or life lies therein? What latent greatness can be ignited? What single beginnings can be sparked?

Of our beloved, hardworking worm, Carson echoes Darwin: “Of all the larger inhabitants of the soil, probably none is more important than the earthworm.” Carson’s minute focus, unfortunately, makes our beloved earthworm prominent, but it retains greatness.