“Ants are a curious race.” Robert Frost
I was all set to go with a story about ants and I had no idea where I was going to go with it and I still really don’t. At the time, I was thinking, over the course of nearly five hundred stories and my 300+ page book to my grandson, what the hell was left to write about? Then, I saw this stream of ants, going from some place to another place and I thought, “What the fuck? I’ll write about them”
Well, last night reality made its presence felt, when I sliced my finger, cutting some parsley for dinner with my sweetheart. Unlike yours truly, who is the poster boy for minimalism, my lady has an incredible collection of too many things to name. What I will say, is that absolutely everything she has, has meaning. Nothing is in her home without an unusual, personal story and I find it remarkable, endlessly fascinating and always interesting.
She has a variety of fantastic knives from all over the world. What they all have in common is being sharp as fuck, because that is exactly how knives are meant to be. I had a good grip on the handle in my right hand and I gingerly moved the parsley over to be guillotined. My left index finger wandered over a bit too close to the blade and I couldn’t instantly feel the efficiency of the diamond, slicing steel.
Surprise! Surprise! I started bleeding pretty good from this very small, but deep incision. The presence of comedy reflects the absence of pain, because these things are not usually funny. I raised it exaggeratedly above my head, squeezing as hard as I could, which did nothing. Next, my medical staff sprayed some painful disinfectant, which my finger defiantly laughed at. Next, I buried it in baking soda, at least I think it was. Eventually it did stop, in case you are sitting on the edge of your futon.
Next, it was wrapped like a faceless finger puppet and that is when I started thinking about pushing the ant story down, at least a page or two. It was the source of great concern and affection last night and I milked it for all it was worth. I drove home this morning, with a story writing itself in the memory of the prior evenings blood lust.
When I get home from evenings with my love, I settle in and do my Zen sit as quickly as I can. Unlike other, at-home mornings, I will have already checked out the world prior to leaving under the cover of the pre-dawn sunrise. Well, sitting on my ass on the cushion with hands resting on my lap was not about to test the superhuman challenges I would have to face with a bandaged, left index finger.
I do a yoga practice every morning. It hasn’t changed in well over thirty years. I was wondering how it would go with my special finger. You know, every day I do that practice, with the same, exact routine. Of course, my music is on and the fact that the routine is so deeply engraved, my mind goes off wherever it wants and sometimes I even forget if I have already done a pose. No, not doing a Joe Biden. I have always been that way with it.
Well, that is not what happened this morning. One of the keys to the practice is to treat both halves of the body exactly the same. Symmetry is very important in yoga, the alignment of the body is critical. My hands were not the same and some things were difficult and others not possible. While I wasn’t surprised, it threw me off.
I started thinking about how many small things I just take for granted. Every blink, every step, every breath are unconscious, automated, mindless moves, even worse, not even thought about at all, ever. In a way, they are unimportant, when, in fact, there is nothing more important. It is called being alive. In meditation and in reading about this kind of self-awareness, it feels like theory, great to think about it, but what does it really mean? On the one hand (no pun), you could go nuts thinking about it and on the other, grow numb by ignoring it. Being alive is an incredible miracle, with an incalculable number of moving parts, infinite if you ask me.
When I finally had some time to put my fingers on the computer keyboard, like this moment, it was entertaining. I was surprised I could type at all with this balloon finger, but I could. However, now that I am home, once again taking for granted how easy it is to get my words on the screen, it ain’t the case. You would have to envision the keyboard to see the fucked up letters that pop up while I am doing this. Each time I stop to correct a letter, casualty to a fat finger, I am reminded about that idea of how much I take for granted. I can’t even get this story flowing, before I have to go back and “unspell” a word.
Several days have passed and while rucking up the hill, I peeled of the bandaids and finally got a look at my finger. It was a nice cut and you could tell it was pretty deep. Obviously, I am at the machine and it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. For the moment, at least for this story, I am not just going to take it for granted. I know very well what I wrote above this. I meant it then and I mean it now. We live in this numb, take it for granted existence, when, in fact, it is a goddamn miracle. Do you have any idea how many things have to happen just to type one letter on a keyboard?
When I saw yet another, perfect column of ants, synchronized in their Rockette routine, tip toeing across the kitchen counter top, it threw me further into the smallness of all life. The smaller you think, the bigger the world and the more miraculous and interconnected it is. We take so much for granted, not like ants, who live for a purpose.
This one time, I didn’t look at their column and immediately sponge them into ant heaven. They are so tiny and they all seem to get along so well. They just seem to be traveling from here to there, with an admirable commitment. We seem to have a helluva time doing the same. They don’t seem to think at all and most of the time, neither do we. My finger episode made me seriously aware of how ant-like we seem to behave. It’s funny, if they thought about it, there would likely be chaos in their world. In our case, I believe it would be the opposite.
We have so many things in common with each other. All the shit we take for granted, takes away from our shared humanity. Our bodies function pretty much the same. Like I said above, blinking and breathing and feeling and thinking and moving are who we all are. No matter where we live or what we look like, we all do those things and so much more.
This past week, Iran publicly hung 29 people in one day. Thailand is a shit show as their royalty clings to power. Bangladesh has thrown out its ruler. England is fighting with right wing extremists. Jesus Christ, Taylor Swift concerts were cancelled in Austria, because some asshole wanted to kill thousands of people. Venezuela just had an election that would have made Trump proud, because of how it was criminally mismanaged.
Our country has become a fertile breeding ground for every variety of crackpot imaginable and it seems to be OK with everyone. Like the ants marching along the kitchen counter, no one seems to want to break out of the chorus line of sameness. We are supplying weapons so Israel can mutilate children! Hey you, keep in step!
What the fuck has happened to our humanity, or is it some kind of myth, best left for poems and prose? How can we treat each other so badly? Are we so different that all our left index fingers won’t bleed if they are cut with a sharp knife?
The first sentence in the last paragraph is the sad truth of our history. I write, because I consider it a light, if only for me. I think when my time comes, I hope am afforded the time to read my stories in their entirety, for the first time. If you took the hundreds of pages that contain my stories and spread them out, end to end, it would be a world class ant trail. I would curl the last page, so they could recount my stories from end to beginning, traveling the circle that all life is.
“Humans are a curious race.” Larry Feinstein
LISTEN TO THE STORY HERE