Ants

A few weeks back when the evenings were still warm and hazy with leftover sun, E and I were walking and I stopped to bend close to earth, watch an ant shudder with the weight of a burden ten times it’s size.

There was no hill in sight. And I wondered aloud how far into the stubby grass it’s home was hidden.

Isn’t it amazing that most of their homes we can’t see, E said.

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Today I flatten three monstrous ant mounds in attempt to uncover–I soon realize– an unessential piece of plastic. I feel bad. First I haphazardly destroyed their homes. Then I only retrieved some ineffective ant-poisoning kit. (I feel less bad for the world of insects when I think the giant horsefly that psychotically circled my head during my entire run earlier that day.) Then I am additionally comforted by E’s words about ant homes.

There’s labyrinth beneath the earth.

People

It’s been said that you can never really know someone. And though I wish it weren’t true, I think it mostly is. There is so much to us–our minds, souls, spirits, desires, emotions, fears, dreams, experiences. There are miles of underground yearnings to uncover.

But this is the hard part. Because to uncover is hard work. Because to uncover haphazardly is to hurt, to be careless in our digging is to be destructive to the ones we want to love most.

And at the same time, to leave it all buried is to ignore the intricacy and beauty with which our loved one is built, to deny our call to find it out and love them better.

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There are places in a soul that cannot be discovered or much less explored, and yet there are beautiful and sacred paths we must travel to fully love a person well. But we cannot simply swipe away at what we easily see to get beneath the surface. We must enter as the experts do, by becoming as small to our “self” so we can travel beneath the surface as the ants.

Now it’s getting weird, you’re thinking. she’s talking about shrinking to ant-size to do soul-cavern travel. I’ve got to admit, it is weird, and  it makes me laugh. It also hearkens happy memories of Honey I shrunk the kids and the ant who made us all cry.

But it’s crazy how true it is! (the shrinking, not the teary ant-goodbye.)
We need to shrink, to become less. Not less of who we truly are. Not to pervert a healthy relationship into an unhealthy worship/affinity of someone else. But to be truly and rightly less, I think, is is to let go of the things that cause us to be enraptured by ourselves, that cause me to have me as the biggest thing occupying my mind.

And to be less.
self-seeking, self-worthy, self-dependent
is to become more.

More able to travel in the shoes of our soul-mate. More able to understand and relish the unique beauty of our loved one’s soul labyrinth. Able to identify where their weaknesses and fears stem from. Able to spur them on in their dreams and desires. And finally, able to love more completely. More wildly.

To love like one divine man who became less to love the world.
~ MR

>>>>>>>>>>>
i love you E