Wednesday February 25, 2009
Room for rebels
A few more reflections after our trip to Honduras.
Outside our room, a colony of ants marched endlessly up and down a tree trunk. As long as there was daylight, one column marched up the tree to the upper branches, and carefully cut little circles out of the tenderest leaves, and carried those circles back down the tree and across the grounds to their ant hill.
“They have their own compost piles down there,” another tourist assured me. “Ants are smart. They figured out the benefits of organic waste recycling long before we did.”
I realized I don\’t know much about ants.
I\’ve heard about them in moral fables, of course. Who hasn\’t been told about the Ant and the Grasshopper. The grasshopper lazed away the summer days, and perished when winter came. The ant stored supplies for winter, and survived.
The moral always said something like, “Look to the Ant, thou Sluggard…”
But I remember another maxim too: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
I suspect that describes ant life quite well.
Lack of creative instincts
Ant hills and termite mounds are marvels of engineering. But as far as I know, ants have never painted a wall in bright colors, just for the sake of doing something beautiful, never composed an ant symphony, never prepared a gourmet meal…
When the leaf-cutting and transporting is done for the day, do they get together in the afternoon for tea parties, or for potluck suppers? Do they go bowling, or watch a sunset in awe?
Somehow, I doubt if they have much of a social life. They rarely pause as they pass each other on the tree trunk to exchange gossip. They certainly never stage a walkout or strike – even though they are probably the ultimate model for labor unions.
People who study these things sometimes suggest that there\’s no such thing as an individual ant. The living entity is the colony itself.
Wrong way Corrigan To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
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But perhaps even in ant colony, some free will is permissible. I was pleased to see that even ants have occasional “wrong-way Corrigans.” Once in a while, I\’d see a few ants heading back down the tree without a leaf. I suppose they could have been supervisors or union stewards, but I like to think that ant colonies may have slackers, just like human societies.
And I saw one ant carrying a piece of leaf back up the tree, against the stream. Others bumped into him – or her – and almost got him turned around, but then he would turn and stubbornly continue taking that piece of leaf back up to the top of the tree.
I have no idea what he hoped to do when he got it up there. I doubt if ant technology includes Crazy Glue capable of sticking the piece back into the damaged leaf.
Was he the first lonely proponent of an environmental movement?
Whatever, I was glad to see that even an ant colony has room for an occasional rebel.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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