train station

this morning, i am a train station for the arrival and departure of good things. i have found myself today, twice moved to chills. the first, when i recieved a call from a very old friend of mine telling me that one of my other good freinds had finally passed on from his long battle with cancer. my friend told me that lying there, not two hours before he died, my beautiful dying friend had looked over and said that he was happy with his life except for one thing. he hadn't loved fully or hard enough. he asked my friend to pass on his feelings of love to a list of people, of which i was honored to be one. i resolved myself to do a better job loving the people around me.

the second moving thing of today happened after i got to work and was out smoking a cigarette in the rain. i noticed this cluster of ants climbing all over what i soon realized was a dead bee. i can only assume that some kind of fight ensued between the bee and the ants as when they began to clear off of the bee, i noticed that there were several ants who had not survived the skirmish. what moved me is that the ants stopped messing with their hard-won prize long enough to carry the dead ants back to wherever they came from. i imagine that the ants knew intuitively that there was the possibility that the bee could be taken by another "tribe" of ants or some other manner of creature before they returned, but still they carried off their dead in honor before collecting their prize.

i don't know why they fought or how it began, but to see those ants risk losing the thing that they had fought so hard for in order than their dead may be properly placed in accordance with their customs of which i no nothing, was as moving a thing as i have ever seen. my body was overwhelmed with chills and i realized just how often we (as people) get it all wrong. how often i get it all wrong. backwards.

it didn't take the ants long to carry off the dead and when they returned, the bee was still there, motionless, dead. they picked it up and carried it off to where they carry the creatures that didn't survive the natural selection process.

it baffles me that when we have such superior intellect to ants, we have so little comcept of what really matters in comparison to them. it's sad that i sometimes miss those little lessons that can be learned just from watching the world around me.

we may very well be the most highly evolved creatures on planet earth, but by no means do we have it right yet. but the ants, the ants have it right without even trying.

2004-06-26 | 11:09 a.m.
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