I’ve confided in friends who have confided in me. It seems at one time or another, we’ve all glimpsed an inner magic that’s been curiously witnessed and swept under the rug in near disbelief. We go about our days with the fairy dust still dancing beneath our feet.
Recently, my sprinkling of magic was through a peculiar series of interactions with large, black ants. It started one day in my art studio when I observed one crawling around on the wall, walking down to the pedestal sink, freefalling to the ground, and then wandering about from here to there around the perimeter of the room. I’m not sure what compelled me to do so, but I pressed my index finger onto the floor and tried to get the ant to come to that exact point. I spoke only inside of my mind and tried to focus all of my energy on attracting him to me.
For the first twenty seconds or so, he continued going from here to there, looping around in many directions. I tried to intensify my focus. The ant turned towards me, bumping into the leg of a rack, rounding its corner and making a direct march all the way to my finger in a perfectly straight line. I pulled my hand back, startled by what just occurred.
For myself, these events or synchronicities provide doorways into guided introspection. I use them as references to parallel my own experiences and derive wisdom from. This practice spans millennia and has been documented through nearly every belief system. Biblically, one will find correlations made as if the natural world around us is a spiritual guidebook. In Proverbs, “go to the ant… consider her ways, and be wise.”
Themes of community, persistence, and strength initially came to mind. Each ant I encountered wandered alone, separated from its colony. But then a friend who has closely observed their behavior called them Explorers and Sentinals who search for treasured resources and call in their friends when food or water has been discovered. Until she shared this insight with me, I associated their lone wandering and lack of community with weakness and applied that filter to my own experience. But now I consider the presence of these Explorer ants as a reminder that there is also great strength in spreading out to cover more ground, calling in a broader network of friends in times of feasting or distress and knowing that community spans far beyond what the eyes can see.
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What are some lessons and experiences that you have collected from the world around you? Has your understanding of them changed with time?
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