Ants Help Me Remember

I have to refill my hummingbird feeder every morning now. The hummingbirds are frequent feeders, but evening grosbeaks and Bullock’s orioles visit, too. This time of year, they are draining it once a day. Every morning, there are ants circling the feeder, trying to get a drink. Every morning, when I empty the dregs and bring the feeder inside to wash it and refill it with fresh nectar, I find dead ants floating at the bottom.

When I first pull down the feeder, there are ants that are alive, ones that haven’t made it into the feeder yet. I plop them back onto the ground, away from the bird feeder pole and the feeder which hangs up high. The ants have to climb to make it up there. It’s a long way for them. How many stories in ant equivalency would that be? Seems like it must be close to us trying to scale Mt. Everest. But they do it every day, striving  to reach the summit, the nectar. But then the ones who make it? They die.

It must be horrifying for the ants that I put back on the ground. All the territory they’ve lost. They were so close to the treasure! And then to fail, to be plunged back to earth, unsuccessful.

What they don’t realize?

I saved them.

They would have died. If they would have crawled into the feeder, they would have joined their brethren who drowned, who ended up in a puddle at the bottom, whose bodies would then get washed down my drain.

Every morning when I do this, I have the same thought. The ants think they have failed, but they survived (probably to make the trek up the pole another time and then die. I know that.) But at this moment? They are still here. They are still with us.

Sometimes a few ants make it back into the kitchen, and when I start to clean the feeder in the sink, they scurry away. I do my best to set them free, to put them outside again. I hope they have a way of rejoining their group.

I think all of us can feel like those ants, the ones who try so hard and think they are accomplishing something, only to be rudely (in their minds) tossed back to earth, unsuccessful. So many big life changes happening for people I love lately. Some rough times. Disappointments.

But what if I started to think about these not as setbacks but as fortunate events? Maybe I’m really just a lucky little ant. I was so close to the thing that I thought I wanted: the thing that would protect me and provide for me and save me. Sweet nectar! But maybe it wasn’t the right thing at all: maybe I would drown in it. Maybe it would kill me.

Fr. Thomas Keating, one of my centering prayer mentors, talks a lot about the false centers for happiness that we strive for. Success is one of them. It’s like an ant climbing a pole, heading for a feeder, making it to the top, only to perish.

What would it mean for me to realize when some of these rough things happen that it might be at the hands of a gentle Handler, a Divine one, who loves me and is taking care of me when I’ve moved too far in a direction that would destroy me? I might feel like I’m close to reaching sweet nectar, of finding security, esteem, or success, all the while forgetting that those things are mirages. They don’t satisfy. They sometimes even destroy us.

Just something I’ve been thinking about.