For the ant that drowned followed by a reflection on empathy

The black ant in the pot of Brussel sprouts

Did not die easy.

The pot had been sitting on the stove

While we were eating.

When I went to finish them

I saw the ant struggling

To get a purchase on a Brussel sprout

Like a slippery rock,

And his instincts were short circuiting.

He couldn't climb out and was panicking,

His tiny black shiny body

All arms or legs flaying as a last resort.

I guess he knew it was hopeless.

I tried to get my finger tip under him

But he was confusing my efforts to save him

With his hopeless state

Of having run out of time

And was pushing away from contact.

When, finally, I was able to transfer him

To the countertop

He was barely moving.

I watched him, half-expecting

This fabled animal of countless wonders

To resurrect

And creep away to the ant ER

But no miracle happened.

But it was while I waited for my miracle

That I couldn't help but remember the day I fell into

A neighbor's pool at the deep end.

All the mothers were laughing and talking

At the other end,

To this day I don't know what finger tip

Lifted me out before I drowned

Which cannot be avoided (death I mean),

But only, If we are lucky, delayed.

With respect to death

It doesn't matter

Whether we are ant or human.

The fact is, we are both

Remarkable forms of life

Equally loved

By life and death.
.....................
I want to explain how I can seriously be affected by the drowning of an ant. Empathy is something you have or you don't. That sounds harsh, but empathy is an ability, the ability to feel what something or someone is going through, and there is the catch. When you feel what an ant is feeling, that ant is no longer a "thing", it is a tiny being, a "someone". In Braiding with Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer has a lot to say about this in her chapter "Learning the Grammar of Animacy". In this chapter she is sharing the joys and revelations and struggles of learning the language of her Native inherited culture, (as a member of the Potawatami Nation) which recognizes most of creation as a world of living beings, including objects and places and spaces that, to most folks of European descent, are essentially, if not "dead", just somewhere between dead and alive. For instance, she gives the example of a "bay" which, to us, is a place embellished by adjectives. If we like or love the bay, it is "beautiful" or "wild" or "relaxing"; we associate it with good-times, good eating, the nightlife, or we like that it is undeveloped, or, the opposite, there are great shops, a nice boardwalk. In other words it is a mirror for us. If we like it it is because of how it makes us feel. While in Potawatami, the language is a mirror for the innate ability to "see" the animacy of the world.
As a poet with only a quantum of Native blood (my mother always said that we have Native blood, which she prized as much as our quantum of Irish), I am committed to breathing life into English. Kimmerer is doing the same thing, by, for example writing Braiding with Sweetgrass, but she is also committed to owning her much deeper linguistic rootedness in her Native language before it disappears, as Native languages have a history of doing. So, I have used language as a way of explaining how empathy is more than just an inborn ability to see the life in everything, it is also a language, or maybe what I am saying is, empathy is more than just seeing and feeling what a tree feels or what a drowning ant feels, it is the first wave of a whole culture, which is language, art, dance, music, visions, dreams, clothes, praying, teaching, learning, initiating!.
That English is a language of things is a step in the right direction, but my advice is, don't get lost in a world of things and adjectives. Sit with a tree or a rock or a private spot in a park and try to open to the animacy of where you are and what is around you.
Back to the question of whether empathy can be a learned ability. Short answer is, yes. There are lots of ways to learn empathy (such as read empathic writers, listen to empathic singer / song writers, take a mushroom journey). . . but you have to be open to it. You have to agree that empathy is more than just a word or just a synonym for compassion. At the end of the chapter, "learning the grammar of animacy" there is an encouraging anecdote: "I remember the words of Bill Tall Bill, a Cheyenne elder. As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. "They love to hear the old language," he said, "it's true." "But," he said with fingers on his lips, "You don't have to speak it here." "If you speak it here," he said, patting his chest, "They will hear you."