The little wriggly creatures that churn the ground I walk on are often in my mind. Their small fleshy bodies may appear merely as food to most other people, but I see them as individual beings with souls, motives, and aspirations.

I like to think that they spend their days wriggling around near the surface and then, after a hard day's work, they burrow down deeper where they fall asleep and dream of a day when they can safely return above the surface as their ancestors once did long ago, when the worms were the apex species of Terra Vermis. When shall they reclaim their throne and enslave both their invertebrate cousins and the vertebrate devils such as ourselves who lay waste to the great wormdom?

We homosapiens must acknowledge that we walk on occupied lands, neither indigenous nor dominant for eternity, for we may believe we don't walk through paths carved by creatures of time immemorial not belonging to our own ancestry, but this falsehood is simply the ego of man. We owe everything we have to the groundwork laid by the smallest beings around.

It's easy, as a technologically advanced species, to believe we are superior to all around us. But evolutionarily, we were not so far from apes just a few hundred thousand years ago, and apes walk around with crusted-up shit on their backsides, for they have not invented toilet paper. Are we really to say we are so much better? Should we not consider ourselves merely a work in progress, seeing as we are constantly changing even as recently as a few thousand years ago, whereas worms and the Bilateria have remained mostly unchanged for hundreds of millions of years – thus proving their superiority? A creature that remains unchanged has reached perfection; one that is still changing isn't complete, isn't whole, and isn't pure.

The worms are owed all that we have carved out, for they remained unchanged when all others decided to wander. Our exploration may have found new heights, but we must acknowledge our place in the heirarchy.