Ant in a Pile of Ants
One Night While Shooting lightning: It was dusk in Avra valley as I headed West, through the hot dusty cotton fields of Maranna Arizona. In the western fading sky a source of unknown beauty awaits my arrival. There might be lightning tonight, I thought, as a wall of towering thunderheads were enticing me to capture their beauty. A large group of boulders on the Avra Valley floor would be an ideal shooting location, high enough to shoot a clear photograph over the thick Saguaro and Mesquite fields.
Many generations of man had visited this site before, this sacred spot has existed for thousands of years. I wondered about the storms that had been here thousands of years ago, who was the first person to see bolts of lightning streak across the Avra Valley sky? Who was the first person to set foot on Signal Hill, and why did they come here? Not only a great place to shoot lightning, this location was also significant to the long vanished Hohokam Indians. Hohokam artists would come here in the hot desert sun with their rock tools to chip designs into these rocks. These artists left behind a trace of their once thriving civilization.
Signal hill is one of the best ancient Indian petroglyph sites in southern Arizona. This was a significant ritual site for the long vanished Hohokam Indians, last seen in this valley around 1200 AD. The only remains of this once thriving village is hundreds of petroglyphs which were chipped into the rock faces, nearly 1000 years ago. It is a mystery what happened to the Hohokam, but these works of art remain in the year 2003. While waiting for the big lightning bolt to drop from the cloud, I looked at one specific etching, it's a large spiral and Archeologists believe this was the symbol for life, infinity or origin, all with similar meaning.
Looking closer: As I looked a little closer to the spiral rock I noticed a small ant walking across the surface of the rock, his other ant friends were about five feet away, all scurrying about on a discarded Dorito tortilla chip. I noticed the Ants were in a pile of ants on that chip and they didn't seem to be making much headway. There was just too many ants and the Dorito was too big. Sure they had found a couple weeks worth of food but it was too big to carry back to the anthill. I thought for a while about the irony of this situation.
Ant ant ants, ants everywhere? How many people do you know, survive in a job a like an ant in a pile of ants? How many people head off to work every day filling the freeways with a never ending stream of cars just like a trail of ants heading out to a new source of food? How many people work in mindless jobs never asking themselves these important questions. Why have I chosen to work in this career? How is my job using my creative intelligent brain? I am an integral part of this company, but what is this company doing for its employees, the environment, all of the people on earth, the growth of mankind? How is the integrity of my job going to be viewed next year, ten years, fifty or even a hundred years from now? Is this job making the world a better place to live? Or do I profit through exploitation, manipulation, and destruction of earth's resources and people? Is the only redeeming quality of my job of choice to make money to pay my bills, to survive?
Have you ever thought your life was similar to a tiny ANT? Now back to the ant crawling on the Spiral rock, can you see a parallel between yourself and this ant? This ant sees the pile of ants and the Dorito but knows there is something better out there. This ant searches, until he finds something which makes more sense, maybe a discarded M&M that he can feast upon all by himself. Hmmmm....
You have already begun your search what are you looking for?
Although most of this concept is not on the website maybe you get the idea?
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