Like ants

   My daily walks around Stow Lake have been started in near darkness for the past couple of months, mostly because the days are fairly short this time of year (but getting longer), but also due to the fact that I've been trying to walk an extra mile when possible in order to lose a few pounds added around the December holidays.The extra exercise feels good, too.
   I quite often find Stow Lake magical, but in the predawn hours it can be especially lovely, due in no small part to the the way the area looks when barely visible, where things in the distance seem mysterious, and my eyes and brain misread the material world. I believe I see animals in the distance that are not actually there, the lights from the few surrounding lamp posts illuminate what's nearest them in strange ways, and I see the distant interactions of people in a way that I only do here; I see them like ants.
   I recall coming home to my apartment after close to a week away on vacation, and seeing a line of seemingly thousands of ants stretching in and out of my refrigerator. While a bit horrified and disgusted (there were hundreds of dead members frozen to death inside inside the cold door), I was also fascinated by their organization, and saw that somewhere amidst the two ends of this line, stretching from the food source towards the nest, was a place where the ants would pause before passing each other.
   I imagined at that time that the individual members would relay some kind of information that was necessary to perform the large scale operation they were undertaking, although what was being transmitted was inaudible to me, Even if there were sounds being made at those many brief meetings, I doubt that I would have been able to decipher them anyway.
   In a similar way, I understood that whatever the people that I saw in the distance at Stow Lake were communicating was not for me to know, and although I assume that it was mostly in a form that I understood, the English language, it may as well as been as foreign to me as the ants' manner was.
   Often, when looking outside of my own subjective experience, I find the ways of others as strange and hard to comprehend.