Nature's Place

For a green head ant it is, heaven. Fresh meat delivered to the door and nature embraces the bounty, heedless something died for it. And heedless of the observer, absolutely un-self-conscious except with reference to the instinctive need to survive, these little beauties process the red meat into pieces small enough to carry back to the nest, to live. Heaven is relative here.

An honest ant, you always know where you stand with a green head ant, they bite and sting, what ants do. You could say the ant is the same no matter what it is doing, and that is true, ant is always ant, never a pretense at being anything but what it instinctively is.

That’s what makes its state of being heaven to this observer, no mind to confuse or conflict, no mind but ant mind. Human mind is something else, potentially full of conflict, with itself reflecting off self in the hall of mirrors the mind is.

Human being is something else, being what being is beyond human, or ant.

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Then, later when I went to see how things were, the meat was gone and there were paw prints in the earth around the area. Something, maybe a feral cat, had come and eaten the meat, ants and all.

So much death in one day, any day now – ‘heaven’ comes to us all in time.

We are lucky that way …

© Mark Berkery … CLICK any picture to enlarge in a new tab …

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