A Higher Perspective

The ants flew this morning on their colony's annual matrimonial breeding flight!

Now this afternoon an alate (winged ant) lands on me as I write!  What a little surprise blessing!  What a marvelous and miraculous focal point of life, that shiny black body with silvery wings.

Life arising from life.  We see life the way we do because of our experience of consciousness as an individual.   Viewed without the lens of individual experience Life becomes a wholeness, a flowing reaction.  Viewed from a distance, life is akin to a fire or a rising cumulus cloud, complex but comprehensible self-driving exothermic chemical reactions and thermo-dynamic processes.

Take away our individual awareness of pain and fear and death, and Life becomes a wondrous phenomenon to marvel at as it spreads across the planet and changes and evolves and adapts.  Viewed in detachment, all the carnivorous consumption and competitive combat become academic functionalities in a localized entropy storm.  .

But being part of that consumption and combat makes us look at life with other than detached academic objectivity.  We know all too well what it feels like to be prey and target.  Curiosity at the ability of chains of nucleic acids to self-replicate becomes our personal imperative to replicate.  

A biochemical process on a singularly rare blue marble orbiting a propitiously located star has been infused with conscious awareness, and henceforth demands that it, at least the individual elements of conscious experience, i.e. humanity, be taken into account in any speculation about universal Purpose and meaning.  

The little alate still sits on my shirt.  Its wings are now extended out perpendicular to its body instead of held along the length of its body.  I touch it.  It does not move in response.  Its life seems to have expired since landing on me minutes ago.  

I doubt it mused about meaning or Purpose.  I suspect it unambiguously, wholly, and completely knew its meaning and Purpose, and that was enough.  I, on the other hand, am not so sanguine about the whole Life, death, meaning, and Purpose thing, so I keep closely watching the tiny proboscis for signs of movement and life.  I watch to no avail.  

Now expired, but she-he-it did fly, earlier this morning, a triumphant launch carrying the  colony's hopes into the unattainable sky.  The colony will never know this particular genetic package of hope lies now upside-down on a purple t-shirt.

This morning I cleaned out old files with records of students I had taught.  Those students would now be in their thirties.  Did my lessons help launch their lives on successful careers?  How many have kids of their own?  How many are under indictment?  How many are dead?  I will never know, just aa the ant colony cannot know the fate of its hundreds of winged messengers launched this morning.

Surely localized, individual, and personal meaning and purpose must be part and parcel of universal meaning and Purpose.  But the extrapolation from this season or this semester to the eternal seems deucedly indirect, leaving us wondering, if we can ask the question must there necessarily be an answer?

My little deceased alate buddy would chuckle at my naivety.  Maybe asking the question is the meaning and Purpose.  Maybe that's our version of the ant-colony's' matrimonial flight.  Let us launch forth in our conjectures, a triumph of this exothermic self-propogating life process, launching our questions and speculations, landing we know not where, but fulfilling, perchance even defining, even dare we say choosing, meaning and Purpose for the individual elements of conscious awareness infusing the sheen of organic material coating this exquisitely rare blue marble.