The answer is literally always to touch grass, even when it seems like that’s what you were doing before this. Like, the answer is to touch more grass. Touch it more deeply. Poke it and prod it. Because there is shit that you can watch for hours on end out there. Like, there are lessons to be learned in, like, every square inch of, just, like…. Everything.

The walk started out with noticing a dead tree leaned up against a few living trees. I’ve gotten into the habit recently of freeing these dead trees and branches… or, rather, freeing the lviiging things that continue to support them… support, as in, like, carry their weight… by, like, taking the branch from where it’s positioned and, just, like, reveling in how the living tree recoils and bounces back to a more neutral position once it’s freed of the weight.

But this tree was bigger than any other dead trees I’ve attempted to release, so I didn’t know how to approach it. I started off with a strong kick to its base, and that released a big chunk of bark, the kind that seems like it was ready to get peeled off by the littlest of shakes, or, I guess, rather, a significant kick.

That’s when I saw a shit ton of ants just, like, crawling around where the bark had been, and crawling around in the nooks and crannies of the piece of bark that I’d kicked loose. I was like, “Oh shit, I just did some damage to this superorganism.” And I felt bad, but I felt good knowing that it was just another lesson about samsara that I’d learned. Every action has a consequence, and quite often your actions have the consequence of doing significant harm to a living thing. Or a lot of living things.

The trouble with being so large an organism is that you often can’t see the damage you wreak, and the trouble with living in this particular flavor of temporality is that one’s attention span is not long enough to really sit with the implications of one’s actions. In this case, I mean that I won’t exactly be sitting by the dead tree monitoring the ant colony for how it adapts. And even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to see deep inside the tree carcass where most of the ant colony is likely still thriving. So, like…. I would never be able to see the full iceberg.

So I moved on. And that’s when I saw, in the driveway, a pretty big black ant walking along quickly. It looked like something was attached to it. I crouched down and saw that it was, in fact, carrying another ant of its size, but seemingly dead. It was carrying, presumably, a dead ant of the same species as itself. I watched for about 20 minutes as the ant traversed the driveway and eventually darted off into the grass.

In the grass, things got more epic and intriguing. Every pine needle, every blade of grass was an obstacle for this ant, who was even more insistent with each passing second on carrying its dead counterpart to… wherever it was going. Where was it going? I really wanted to find out, but my legs objected to my staying in a crouched position for that long, and I was being bitten up by mosquitos the longer I crouched out there. But it was truly a thrilling twenty minutes. Though I’ll admit I don’t really know how long it was that I stood around, alternating between standing (to get my circulation going, and my joints a little lubricated) and courching (to get the optimal HD view of the ants).

It dropped the presumably dead ant only a few times in those presumably twenty minutes, only to change positions and get the presumably dead ant into a position more comfortable for carrying. More comfortable for the living ant, that is.

It makes me wonder a lot of things. The primary thing I wonder is why, and where.