From Alone to Ant

I befriended an ant the other day as I sat in solitude in my mom's backyard. A squirrel scurried along the fence line straddling our compartments of social distancing. How the tables turn, I remember recalling. We, now trapped by our own doing, and you, now free. But you've always been free, huh? No...I thought about my most recent drive back from Los Angeles, and those ears of a jackrabbit that stood hauntingly up, attached to a flattened corpse on the road...what have we done to you all...to ourselves? I shook my head. A wise, diminutive Intelligence then captured my focus. I presented my hand flush on the concrete as an offering of dialogue. Ant accepted and climbed around the scaly grooves of my skin, like a desert plain as it fuses into hilly veins and knuckles. Ant scuttled-upside down to my smooth, oily palm, and I instinctively flipped it right-side up and stiffened it flat as if to be a respite for such a small being, as if Ant found dis-ease in the grooves and the gravity. But Ant wanted to explore, surely leaving a pheromone-scented trail of loop-d-loops and Möbius strips across and between each digit. Ant then climbed the barky log of my pointer finger and remained there at the lookout momentarily, tickling my fingertip with an electric levity. If I concentrate enough, I can feel each of your footsteps as they start and stop, typing a Morse code of conduct on terms I did not know to be possible. Earth speaking through you to me and back to you...She must love when we walk on Her barefoot and let Her energetic thoughts transmit. I offered Ant my friendship, and Ant reciprocated, knowing the mystic ways of universal dialogue and understanding. In this shared fabric of space-time, Ant's antennae opened and closed in the deepest of concentrations, radiating a message I could only interpret as a peace pact...I then prayed for Ant and apologized for my people's mistakes and nodded my well wishes to Ant's friends and family. Ant then curiously quickened pace, as if consciously off course from the mission of the day that our connection temporarily dissolved. I placed my hand gently back on the concrete. Ant understood this gesture and stepped down to continue on with the day's work, sending a quick message, like an AirDrop ping, to each and every ant in line before scuttling down/into/between the cracks...in the grooves and gravity. This is how I learned from Ant that solitude is a matter of perspective.