ANTS

Taoists, and many indigenous people, some martial artists, and some other folks, look to Nature to learn how the world works. Sometimes even I get smart enough to do that.

     Here’s a short lesson I received from some ants.

                                    Ants

     One day in late 1992, the water went off in our house above Soquel, near Santa Cruz. I went up to the 2,000‑gallon storage tank to see what was wrong. The pressure gauge rested at zero. The pressure switch, which hadn't turned on when it should have, was in a little grey steel housing next to the gauge. I unscrewed the cap nut and lifted the cover. There it was: the ants again.

     The switch had two pairs of ignition points. There were so many dead ants between the ignition points that their accumulated carcasses prevented the points from making contact.

     The small spark emitted when electrical points close a circuit ionizes the air immediately around it, emitting ozone. Ozone has a sweet smell, which attracts ants. They crowded their bodies into the small space between the points until the points made only partial contact. This caused a bigger spark, which ionized more air, emitting more ozone. Although a number of ants, finding nothing sweet at the source of the smell, had already paid for their mistake with their lives, their living kin crowded in among the carcasses, their movements ever more urgent, dying in ever greater numbers, until their accumulated crushed bodies prevented any current at all from sparking across the gap. The ants were being killed, serving no purpose of their own, by something they couldn't see ‑ not because it was too far away to see, but because it was too near: it was in their own natures.

     Just like us when we go to war, I thought.