Have you ever…

Knelt close enough to the earth
that your breath feels oversized,
a clumsy wind among precise lives,
and the anthill lifts itself toward you
like a quiet answer you are not certain
you deserve to hear?

Have you ever…

Watched the ants move,
each one a filament of purpose,
as your own thoughts fray and tangle,
while your days often collapse
under the softest weight of doubt,
as if your spirit were made of thinner glass
than your body admits?

Have you ever…

Seen how they carry both nourishment
and their dead without ceremony,
no pause to marvel, no language for grief,
no fracture in momentum,
while we, who often over react at small things,

are so easily broken
by what we cannot overcome?

Have you ever…

Felt the starkness of it,
their continuity against our interruption,
how we falter at loss,
build monuments to remember
because memory leaks from us
like water’s hampered flow through cupped hands.
fascinating that they need no monuments,
only motion?

Have you ever…

Considered how fragile we are,
how a ill-spoken word can undo us,
how a silence can hollow us,
how time presses into our skin
leaving signatures we cannot refusem,
while beneath us, this small republic of dust
outlives catastrophe as habit?

Have you ever…

Measured your hunger for legacy,
your longing to leave a mark,
a name etched into something that resists erasure,
compared with their unmarked persistence,
their endless rebuilding without witness,

without inscription,
without the need to be remembered
in order to remain?

Have you ever…

Watched one ant stumble,
correct itself,
continue,
and felt the quiet accusation:
that survival need not be heroic
to be enduring,
that resilience might be nothing more
than refusal repeated beyond exhaustion?

Have you ever…

Sat beside the hill long enough
for gratitude to find you,
unexpected, almost undeserved,
for this contrast:
our fleeting brilliance,
our tender, breakable interiors,
our need to be seen before we’re gone,
all whil sitting beside their tireless anonymity,
we witness their seamless belonging to the work of living?

Have you ever…

Stared into that small, dark threshold atop the mound—
food and fallen kin alike
vanishing into longevity’s patient mouth,
and felt the strange humility of being temporary?

Have you ever…

Wondered, honestly,
whether our fragility is a flaw
or a different kind of inheritance,
whether our disintegrating is simply the cost
of knowing we are here at all?

Have you ever…

Asked yourself if we could endure as they do,
without the ache of memory,
without the need to matter/?

Would we still call it living,

or have we, in all our vulnerability,
our brief flare of awareness,
our trembling, luminous impermanence

already built a different kind of legacy,
one that survives not in their ground,

but in the fact that we can kneel,

and wonder?

Have you ever…