Ants, for god's sake

Give me a minute

Lately, I’ve been saving ants. Ants, for god’s sake.

I know. It seems crazy to me, too. Give me a minute.

I’ve been where you are, throwing shade on a woman who came to work blotch-faced and teary, because she hit a butterfly on the drive in, its velvet wings crushed against the plastic grill of a blue Hyundai Elantra.

I told myself she was torn up about something else, that it was penitential, or existential, that it was wanting something to go right for a single, fucking, minute. But when her misery persisted, like a sadness-scented room spray, I found it hard to breathe and lost patience. Pull yourself together, woman! Now is the winter of our discontent.

I’ve been where you are, smirking self-righteously at a farmer for trying to save the caterpillars making meals off her plants and wreaking havoc on her harvests. She’d learn, I said, silently and aloud. She needed to reexamine her priorities. She’d figure out, soon enough, that her job left little room for that kind of sentiment. This was about food. About winning the war. This was about saving her sanity.

But lately, I’ve been saving ants.

I’ve been saving them because I’ve been saving the Asian ladybugs that crawl out of the woodwork and wander around on the sun-loading surfaces of my kitchen every afternoon. Bright, cheery—and non-native—they remind me of childhood as they drop like glossy bits of candy into my hands. Ladybugs are easy to save. So are spiders, pill bugs, and millipedes. Anything I deem worthy, actually. Anything that doesn’t threaten to invade my cupboards, or my skin, or my psyche.

Not mosquitoes. Not ticks. Not cockroaches, though these are, thankfully, infrequent interlopers, only turning up once every few years. They bring forth a revulsion that feels primal. They ignite all my loathing, with their greasy, sneaky, speedy selves.

Or they did, until a month or so ago, when I watched one struggling but not quite dead. Not quite dead but lacking the option to escape, bereft of any defenses and only in this predicament because it happened to wander into the path of a human who’d been taught by other humans to see it as loathsome.

Best I can figure, that was the moment when something shifted. The epiphany caught me off guard. I didn’t really want to see it, to be honest, because it’s a little humiliating, not to mention inconvenient. Truth can be like that.

When a wee ant walked across the counter a few weeks later, I couldn’t kill it, nor the ones that came after it. They always come in numbers.

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

Ants are not among the chosen. Or, they weren’t before now. And I’m not at all sure my newfound conviction is sustainable. Rescuing six or eight a day is an interesting practice, one that brings me to an awareness that feels suitable, urgent even. Long term, when their numbers grow? I can’t say.

I’ve been here before. Reconciling. Killing the very animals I’ve nurtured. Eating creatures that gave their lives for mine. Telling myself to look death, and my role in it, squarely in the eye. Acknowledging where and how I situate myself in the hierarchy of all that exists. I never want to reach the point of not noticing.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Meanwhile, here I am sorting out the notion of ants as change agents. What am I supposed to do with that?

I’m supposed to write about it, apparently, which is awkward because of the whole aversion thing most of you are likely experiencing right now, and because the world is imploding while I’m blowing 1/8^th inch insects off scraps of paper into the late winter air.   

But each time I set one aloft, I remember that I have choices. I can choose to laugh at myself and allow others do the same. I can choose to change my mind. I can learn, and shift, and grow. I can loosen the grip on my opinions and allow feeling to return to the places I’ve grown numb. I can let compassion run amok.

I have the option to study myself and the paths that intersect mine. I am not at imminent risk of death because someone has deemed me unworthy. I can stop what I’m doing long enough to rescue a tiny being because that is my privilege. I can stop what I’m doing long enough to rescue a tiny being because that is, on some level, my responsibility. I can stop what I’m doing long enough to rescue a tiny being because even if I can’t make any meaningful difference in the lives of those who most need saving, I can, for now, hold space for them by saving a few, tiny ants.

~Elizabeth