Penguin has something to say

Penguin has something to say. When I woke one morning, this was in my ear: What does it mean to be in community? What does it mean to serve the common good?

This is the question Emperor Penguin came to answer.

Emperor Penguin lives in the most inhospitable place on the earth. Moving through frigid waters as if flying through the air. Diving deep into the Southern Sea. Feeding and fattening to achieve its purpose. To survive. To reproduce.

For that, as breeding season nears, Penguin returns to the place of its birth, leaping from the waters with its feet landing solidly on the ice. With that, the mating ritual begins. The male must show a female that he has the strongest genes, for the strongest babies. That he has what it takes to care for and protect their egg. That he is the one.

Once mother penguin produces their egg, father begins his watch, and mother, exhausted and depleted, must return to sea. To recover, to fatten up, to be ready when she is needed. All around them, thousands of other Penguins are taking part in this ritual reenacted year after year, millennia after millennia.

To survive, the colony of male penguins, with singular purpose, move together to form a huddle. The huddle is formed from a shared awareness of the threats they face. At the huddle's center is Egg—their common good. Their future.

In harmony, they move. In small steps, no more than an inch at a time, taking care not to disturb the eggs they carry. Packing closely together to preserve and share their body’s heat.

From those small, careful, individual steps, the huddle begins to move in a spiral. From the outside to the inside and back out again. Each taking a turn in the warm center and then to the outer rim, exposed to the cold. Any penguin who doesn’t understand the threat is quickly consumed by hungry predators or the savage cold.

They move this way for 35 days, give or take, sleeping in short, almost imperceptible naps. Eating only the ice below them. Spiraling in and out. Until the first chick pecks its way through the shell.

It chirps. Other chicks, hearing this sound, peck at their shell, break free, and they, too, begin to chirp. The sound fills the Arctic air and awakens them all.

The mothers, now fattened, as if hearing them call, rejoin the fathers who are famished and need their turn to feed. As the females arrive, the huddle dissipates. Co-parenting begins. Feeding themselves. Feeding their chicks. Protecting. Guarding. Guiding. Preparing for their leap into icy waters ahead.

In the sea, they travel vast distances, swimming together to ensure maximum survival. In their travels, they are guided by the Earth’s electromagnetic fields, by the movement of the Sun and moon and the stars.

The breeding penguins return to this ritual every season. The young birds remain in the Southern Sea where they swim for four to five years, until they are called to find a mate. Then they return to the place of their birth, rejoin the colony and repeat the cycle. To protect their future.

What Penguin wants you to know is that survival, to have a future, depends on shared purpose, shared understanding of the common good, shared awareness of the threats faced, and a willingness to move in harmony not just with each other, but with the breath of the planet.