Of Ants and Aphids

I stopped killing ants yesterday.  Striving towards my sugar bowl?  Trembling up my hand?  Hustling in my window well?  Hello, fine, fellow species, stay awhile.

I stopped desiring to banish them, to contain their lives inside of my imagination of their lives.  Even if my kid found one in his mac n cheese this afternoon.

If this all sounds noble, it's not.  The reason my beliefs and feelings changed is because I read that ants farm aphids and, besides humans, are the only animals to farm other animals.  I love them because I see myself in them.

Biologists claim the ant-aphid relationship is symbiotic, based on mutualism.  Ants consume aphid excrement- known as honeydew- which they encourage production of by stroking their abdomens. Ants protect the aphids at night in their home, returning them to the plants in the morning.  Ants even cull diseased aphids from the community.  Just like the pastoral images of humans and cows, shoulder to shoulder from dawn to dusk.

But what relationship between living things is not, in some way, symbiotic- which is to say, mutually dependent?  What makes "farming" different?  Why did my empathy for their lives burst forth only when I could see the ways they were like me and my kind?  Why did I not identify with the aphid who, after all, gives birth to live young?  

________________________________________________________

It is a rare gift to watch a conviction fall away in real time and to be ready to receive the questions that surface in its wake as friends awaited.  At a different moment, I may have rooted down in my commitment to squash the little bugs who invaded my territory.  Now, they look like fellow travelers.  What other kinship have I been missing when I see only my sugar spoons, scoured counter-tops, and skin as the harbor of the whole-and only- relevant world?

__________________________________

Ignatius the Beggar, by Catalonian sculptor Lau Feliu

Ordered Loves is my attempt to dive into spiritual discipline- to begin, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.  I do not attend church.  I have not been brought up in any faith tradition.  I couldn't even tell you the difference between Jesuits and Franciscans.  But something about my life has always felt vacant, while my soul has insisted: "There is more.  Keep looking." And I'm tired of looking alone.  

As St. Augustine wrote:

"Living a just [. . .] life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things [. . .] in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally." 

I can begin in my own yard, with the ant- familiar, meet uncommon.  As St. Ignatius wrote, "For what fills and satisfies the soul consists, not in knowing much, but in understanding the realities profoundly, and in savoring their interiority."  So much to learn, right here, where I am.  

So I begin.