Sitting on the dock of the bay. Or, rather, at the river

on a big rock.

close brush This is one of the most beautiful places I can think of. It's one of those places where there is beauty in every square-inch. Ants following other ants, giving each other kisses indiscriminately as they pass each other, as is apparently customary. The superorganism travels bidirectionally—probably in more directions than just bi—kissing itself, or giving itself some other such little tap of affirmation: "we are the same." Or something. Some kind of tactile communication happens every time they pass each other by. It’s one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen, and I saw it today, on a Friday in the summer.

there's a word for that I like looking at ants giving each other kisses. I like sitting on the rock of the bay. I like watching two bugs on top of one another right now. Maybe they’re breeding or something. Maybe this is breeding hours. Or maybe they’re not breeding. Maybe they're fighting. But no, it looks like one has mounted the other.

When I look around in other directions, more bugs. Now a dragonfly. There are a lot of cool blue ones out here.

Now I'm standing in front of a tree. I see a moth caught in a spiderweb, writhing around. It looks like the web has been abandoned by its spider. I see no spider here to kill this winged thing.

I extract it from the web. It takes a few attempts—gentle, prescise movements. Once free, it positions itself on the tip of my index finger. I bring it out into the sunlight to see if its cryptochromes will activate and tell it what to do. It flutters its wings, body twitching, but doesn't take flight. I notice that it's still attached—tethered—to a dead little black bug that was also stuck in the web. I try to tug the dead bug away, but it's stuck to the moth’s legs. I imagine tiny cries of pain as I tug on the bug. A tiny drop of blood leaks from the dead bug and sits in a perfectly round bead on my finger. The dead bug finally lets go, and the little white moth with black compound-eyes floats away, its wings suddenly working like magic. It flies into the woods to my left.

A little further west, toward the sun, I tip a rock on its side, revealing a little colony of ants underneath. Hours later, things slow down. Only a handful of ants are left, still hanging out by the rock.

Me and the moth are entangled now. If I hadn't encountered it, I bet it would still be in the spiderweb. It might’ve freed itself without me, but it also mightn't've. I don't think bugs are capable of generating that much force, and that’s what makes us so different from them. I have way more sheer force available to me. Unless I'm comparing apples to oranges somehow, and it's more apt to compare the thing that is "me" to an entire colony of bugs, in which case I imagine we might have access to a more comparable amount of force.

I see an ant wandering near me, all on its own, moving sort of erratically. Going to follow this one. Please hold.