The Small Path
(Inscribed on bark with what appears to be a thorn. Faint impressions, some letters missing.)
They ask me for teachings, and I have none. Only the memory of having once been smaller than I am.
I was crossing a path by the river bend when I noticed the ant. It was dragging the wing of something dead - perhaps a moth - ten times its size. It moved with conviction but no hurry. Its legs flickered like questions written in a language I had never dared to learn.
I stopped walking.
The wind passed. The sun shifted. I did not.
Time rethreaded itself through the hourglass of that moment.
I leaned down to watch with my full attention. The ant heaved its burden over a pebble. Circled a twig. Paused, then carried on.
I knelt to watch more closely.
After a while, the sound of my breath disappeared. It did not stop - it simply stepped aside.
The sound of the forest thickened. It grew layered, swollen with undercurrents I had never noticed: the minute cracking of bark expanding, the vibrato of insect wings brushing air, the subterranean churn of roots groping for water. The world became a vast instrument and I, at last, had fallen silent enough to hear it tuning itself.
Then I heard it - the faint drag of the wing, dry and fibrous, rasping over grit. I could feel the struggle of the ant, not as something separate or small, but as a rhythm that mirrored my own heart. Not pity, but kinship. A recognition so old it bypassed understanding.
My face touched the earth. Not reverently, not by decision - my body simply followed the pull.
I watched the ant through lashes dusted with soil. It paused at a knot of shadow, its antennae shifting like quills over a forgotten manuscript. Then it turned - just a slight pivot, a flick of acknowledgment.
“You may come,” it seemed to say, “but you must carry something.”
So I did.
I reached forward - not with fingers, for I had none - but with some new limb of intention. I don’t know when the change occurred. There was no jolt, no cracking of bones. One moment I was kneeling in a forest, and the next I was inside a world too dense and granular for human eyes.
The soil towered around me in glittering cliffs of mica and silt. Pebbles loomed like boulders. Moisture gathered in orbs the size of my head. And the smell - my god, the smell! The earth was a cathedral of scent: a saprophytic sweetness, the tang of fungal memory, iron veins of decay, the ozone trace of storm-fresh roots. Each molecule had weight, color, temperature.
The space between towering grass blades became a canyon system, green light filtering down like stained glass across a sacred ruin. A single hair from a deer’s leg arched over the path like an abandoned column. I passed beneath it in awe.
The nest itself - what we would call a hole - was nothing of the kind. It was a gate, shaped not by hands but by centuries of instinct, vibration, and invisible consensus. A heat emanated from its mouth - a pulsing warmth of mind and memory. It smelled of intention. Of bodies working in concert. Of a thousand thousand lives intersecting without friction as one awareness.
And then I entered.
The dark was not empty. It was patterned with texture and breath. The walls pulsed - they felt as though they listened. There were pores in the soil, each one exhaling some ancient sigh. I heard the low murmur of tunnels breathing, expanding, shifting like lungs beneath the skin of the earth.
Ants passed me without fear or greeting. Some touched me in passing, a brush of antennae, a scent-exchange, a pulse of mutual recognition. I understood things I had no words for: the meaning of warmth. The location of danger. The hunger of the queen. The urgency of rain.
There was no speech. Only a thick knowing. The kind that flows through the body, not the mind. The kind you can't argue with, only join.
No one gave instructions. I simply moved. I felt myself assigned - not by authority, but by resonance. I began to help shift a twig. To carry a soft mass of food. To clean a brood chamber. Each action accompanied by a rising joy, subtle but persistent, like a vibration of purpose.
There was no "I" anymore. Only motion. Friction. Contact. The scrape of body against body. The percussion of a thousand feet on packed earth. Each antenna a sentence. Each corridor a hymn.
I felt safe in the deepest way - not because nothing could harm me, but because I had become indistinguishable from the thing I feared.
Time stopped making sense. The work continued. It changed shape. It echoed through me. It was me.
I do not know how long I was there. There is no time in the tunnels, only direction and scent. The body becomes compass. The labor becomes language. The whole becomes self.
And when I returned - if I did return - I was no longer asking what the teaching was.
I was only listening
for the weight
of a wing.
