EMERALD paradise is what I call the place where I work. Not only because it is green all around but because emerald is very precious green. Actually this place is not so special. But I guess I have simply learned to consider this green world precious green because my experience here has taught me to look at all leaves, big and small and tiny, as very precious gems.

Aided by a simple magnifying glass, and at times using a microscope, i have come to catch a peek at another world.  One discovery I accidentally made was about the intimate relationship between the leaves and the ants. Yes, ants, in various sizes, cutting leaves into very small pieces and hauling them into the holes on the ground.

Pila-pila sila (they form a queue), each small ant would carry a piece of leaf much more than twice its size, hauling this load in a line into the ground.

In our office library, deep in this forest, i have read about a kind of ants that uses these minute pieces of leaves, chewed and spat out inside those underground “ant cities” by all those millions of ants, as some sort of fertilizer for growing a kind of fungus that feeds the entire ant colony! These little creatures, with their brains so very small, are engaged in their own brand of organic agriculture!

I don’t ever get tired or bored watching them and admiring them. I imagine a march of activists, each carrying a large green placard, wordlessly advocating sustainable agriculture and protesting human devastation of the environment.

I talk to them mentally to express my admiration. Their agriculture is sustainable because their 'insectine' instinct (is there such a term?) is apparently superior to the chemicals-dependent agriculture of the supposedly wiser humans.

Maybe it’s because their insectine instinct has not discovered any use for money. Except perhaps to cut up in small bits and haul away in a line streaming into those holes into the ground. (Maybe) they’d sense that even the fungus would not derive much nutritional value from paper money even if that legal tender is colored blue-green (as in our thousand-peso bills).

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