A Kind Of Moral Order
The warm cup of coffee comforts. The sky is solid with gray rain clouds. Driving through a stout downpour I was thankful. At last the smaller plants and the trees are getting a drink. More is needed, considerably more. Life and maybe even reality is a matter of maintenance. Rainfall maintains life. Life is a matter of flow. Not enough flow and things die. We die.
It has been many weeks since the last rainfall here in Batavia. I know that some of the shrubs growing around the yard are lost due to insufficient moisture. Trees around the house are starting to shed leaves in response to insufficient ground water. I’ve done what I can with the hose to save flowers and some smaller bushes. This is a delaying tactic, like transfusing blood into a fading patient in the hope that the loss can be stopped.
Perhaps reality itself is a matter of maintenance. I do not know and can never know. I’d have to be outside or reality, with the view of a god in order to know one way or the other. I am not a god, I’m only a partially conscious aspect of reality and have no sense of what is meant by “the real” in a non involved fashion.
Upon reflection everything that I observe achieves increased articulation, complexity, apposite of fit, — the effect of it’s give-and-take relationship to it’s surroundings. At the level of simple organisms we call this “evolution” since the discoveries of Darwin. A living cell, or community of cells takes it’s surroundings into account. There is give and take, a give in order to get. Everything hangs together, progresses in that sweet spot of equilibrium, in concert together.
Does it make sense to recognize this as a kind of moral order? Certainly it is an order. The absence of order is another description for death.
Perhaps that is the way of things, of reality, of being — all the way down to the dance of energy fluctuations, and all the way up, to the wheel of the rotating galaxies, containing thousands of suns.
I do not know. But I am betting that is the way it is.
It’s raining again, steadily, giving the earth a fulsome drink. There’s lightning too! Yea to Mother Nature; sky and earth dance!
