Perhaps there are kingdoms in the sky and empires beneath our feet whose borders are drawn in currents of air, scents, magnetic fields or memories beyond our comprehension.
We assume that because we cannot decipher the politics of ants they have no history, yet ant colonies expand, divide, raid their neighbours and collapse. Bird populations migrate, compete, establish territories, remember routes across continents and return to places they have not seen for years. Why should they not also know ambition, loyalty, rivalry, catastrophe?
Their empires may be every bit as demanding as ours; we simply cannot read their maps.
The ants have no passports either. As far as we know. They cross our property boundaries, our driveways, our carefully tended gardens and our national frontiers with exactly the same indifference as the birds. They build roads without surveyors, carry their dead without ceremonies we can recognise, and continue with astonishing determination despite the fact that every few minutes one of us arrives with the footfall of a minor apocalypse.
They may notice us only as patterns: crowds leaving football stadiums, tractors moving through fields, children carrying chips.
We are not standing above nature looking down upon it. We are suspended between overlapping worlds, each organised according to a different grammar of meaning. We occupy a narrow layer between the soil and the sky, convinced that history belongs to us, while above and below us other histories continue to unfold without witnesses, without passports, without maps we can read, and without the slightest need for our understanding.
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