Sylvia's Journal

I have this gnawing feeling inside my stomach. It must be the ants. Here I was all high and lofty preaching and writing about not harming ants, when I succumbed a few days later to the neat-housewife syndrome and decided there were too many of them in our kitchen. They had to go.

A participant, from another part of the world, who I met during a Global Forum that ended yesterday, and to whom I had mentioned my ant problem, wrote me that I should have talked to the ants, told them to go outside.  I am sure native Americans from this part of the world would have told me the same thing. But I ignored the message about patience, I am embarrassed and sad to say, and headed out to the hardware store to buy an ant trap. 

After weeks of engaging with the Gaia community, and these two last intensive days of the Forum, I willfully ignored its key message: look after one another, all of us who are part of mother earth. I put a small plastic container filled with borax and some smells that attract ants, behind the sink, where the ants most often showed up. I felt a bit guilty then, and even more so when the next morning several ants were lying dead or twitching in the sticky liquid. 

And then something strange happened. A few ants circled around the trap, frantically of course, as they were, I assume, trying to figure out how to rescue their kind. I left them and assumed that sooner or later they would also enter the trap and meet their death.

But this morning the trap was empty. There was no trace of ants, no sticky tracks from having dragged the bodies out. No ants in sight, no dead ones, no live ones.

This was the ultimate Houdini act. I am still scratching my head. How could they have dragged out the dead ones, especially those deep inside the trap, without getting trapped themselves in the sticky deadly liquid? And even if they had succeeded, where did they go, and why were there no traces or tracks anywhere? This is when the gnawing feeling inside my stomach started. Even a delicious breakfast of very fresh eggs, homegrown potatoes and shiitake mushrooms did not ease the feeling of unease.

I packed up the rest of the traps and put them away in the cellar, out of sight, not daring to put them in the trash, a problem for someone else to solve later (also not good). I resolved to heed the message from the ants and not let selfish motives trump my deeper wisdom about the sacredness of life, any life.

My chatroom friend told me that the ants are our antsisters (pronounced nearly like ancestors) and that they do listen when we tell them to go back to the garden.  I can only hope they did go back to, if not this earthly garden, then maybe to the garden of Eden.