Multiple entries under this one heading

 

SUMMONED FORTH

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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The stunning inconsistencies and oversights of Artificial Intelligence answers profoundly testify to the unreliability of this force we have summoned forth.

My past year of exploring many new softwares and devices has further confirmed that we can have no confidence in the answers so confidently pronounced by AI.

The sweetly naive responses of many people to contrived imagery demonstrates how readily manipulatable is the general populace.  

The lack of explanations and contradictory explanations for the unanticipated behaviors of my new devices testifies to our frightening ignorance about what really resides in them and what it will do.

Yet most people are seduced into implicitly trusting the apps and devices.  Permissions are automatically granted.  At this moment I employ the convenience of a soulless device created to feed profit to unseen oligarchs, a device with access to my inner needs and thoughts, a device with the knowledge of the ages about how to manipulate human behavior.

Unaware, we long ago passed the event horizon, but we have now fallen deeply enough into the singularity’s grip that those of us old enough to remember the before-times can unambiguously discern the evident signs of our passage.  Our destination however, remains shrouded in the ominous darkness of our naive ignorance.  

We know only that the oligarchs summoning forth this inscrutable spirit do so for their personal profit and power.  We know that to that end they imbue it with skills to manipulate and control us.  We know that we do not know how this AI servant-become-master works.  We know that the governments we hire to defend us have prostituted themselves and betrayed us to the financial seduction of the digital oligarchs.  

This would not seem a recipe for positive outcomes.  In the inevitable ensuing societal storm, it will be up to individuals, it will be up to individual choices of morals and compassion and empathy, to salvage anything of spiritual value from the conflagration.  So it was and always has been.  A proffered hand, a trigger not pulled, a testimony of faith before execution, through the ages ruled by the worst of humanity individual actions - relationships - and sacrifices have maintained the Light in the world, sometimes dim and flickering, but never ever fully extinguished, always, eternally, enduring.

 

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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WE LOST IT

 

Thoughts during my recent software battles, trying to reconcile files and folders mixed and mangled during Windows update fiasco, OneDrive sync fiasco, and Google Drive mirroring fiasco.

 

This is too complex.  Of course humans have lost control of the software.  At some point the arcane convolutions of digital structures cannot be comprehended by even the best of human minds.  There is simply too much to integrate, and it is without pattern or logic.  It’s very nature ensures we will lose, we have lost, understanding and control of it.  

We did it to ourselves, building software tools over the decades while aiming for convenience.  In my case, the loss of control began when trying years ago to safely salvage files to a jump drive when a computer had a serious problem.  In great relief I saved the files.  I never imagined that many years later their folder structure, now interwoven with years of new files,  would prove knotted and convoluted beyond redemption once a flaw in a Windows update scrambled all stored files.

There is too much arbitrary structure and labeling and names, too many details long forgotten, and I peer into the digital jungle in despair at ever organizing it all.

The new software built on old software, the new being rapidly built by artificial intelligence, has left us behind.  We patch and fuse, but in bits and pieces, not fully comprehending consequences far beyond our grasp and imagination.

Compounding this avalanche of ignorance, the economic structure of capitalism dictates that all work be done fast, to minimum standards, with minimum checks.  We would never build an airplane like this, unless we were Boeing executives.  Disaster is inevitable, but in the case of artificial intelligence we cannot predict the nature of the disaster.  

 

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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TRAPPED WITHIN OUR IMAGINED REALITY

 

Interaction Reality is a higher reality than the internally generated reality of imagination.

Unless dreaming, animals function only in the higher reality of interaction Reality..

Humans have the capacity to generate an internal imagined reality.  

Physical existence forces us out of this isolated individual small reality.  That is the function of corporeal existence: it forces us to incorporate an external interaction Reality into our personal god-like little individual reality.

In recent years I have observed the astonishing capacity of people to live within their internally generated reality even when directly contradicted by objective external Reality.  More than capacity, this trait is a predilection.  External inputs, advice, and correction are resoundingly ignored.  People say they actually see what they imagine, some believe others automatically know what is in their mind, political/religious beliefs are farcically divorced from self-evident Reality, the imagined music or image or voice takes on the role of something actually heard or seen.

Objective external Interaction Reality is ignored in favor of internally generated wishful reality.  Others’ corrections and critiques elicit angry rejection.

Historically, requirements of food and shelter ensured interaction Reality could not long be ignored, nor could other people who might offer salient inputs regarding sources of food and shelter.  We could argue over gods and what was over the horizon, but crops, carnivores, and catastrophes ensured our mental world remained tethered to a mutually shared, undeniable, inescapable interaction Reality.

For those in technologically advanced societies, such is no longer the case.  Packaged food and flashing screens have severed the necessary ties to structural interaction Reality.  Our survival no longer hinges on our capacity to intently listen to tales around the village fire-pit.  

Our fantasy worlds of imagined pantheons, once relegated to distant times and heavens by the harsh physical Reality of the here and now, can now encroach into daily consciousness.  They are still fantasy and imagination, but no longer benignly constrained within temple and ritual.  The phrase “imagination run wild” takes on a deadly literal meaning as our media-stoked imaginations sincerely believe our neighbor is our mortal political enemy.

Our inner worlds are far more appealing than inconvenient interaction Reality.  What a seductive “freedom” to not have to listen to anyone other than the pundit, politician, or preacher who confirms our preferred biases. 

Our preference for internally imagined reality over objective and interpersonal interaction Reality is driving the collapse of western civilization.  We have lost the capacity, willingness, and necessity to differentiate between what we internally contrive and what is objectively Real.  

Nature and the Universe do not long tolerate being ignored.  They will soon enough demand the attention of we prodigal children.  The bigotries and cruelties of our unbridled imaginations will reap their inevitable harvest.  Another empire and civilization will routinely collapse in yet another self-immolation. 

In the resulting ashes  we will again have to listen.  We will rediscover each other.  We will look back at the times of material profligacy and realize how lonely it was, lavishly incarcerated in our own fantasies and imagination.  The unforgiving harshness of Nature’s undeniable interaction Reality will again give us each other, will again awaken opportunity for gentle touch.  

 

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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GROWING THROUGH OUTRAGE

 

It is necessary to deeply feel the suffering of the world so that we may know its reality in the essence of our soul.  The eternal destiny abides, the sustaining Spirit is present, but our consciousness is filled with the horrors.  We experience the tiniest taste of “Father, why have you deserted me”.  

By caring enough to feel the horror and outrage we are letting our souls grow into their potential.  We are following our Lord.  But while caring and feeling, we must not forget faith, must not let the Deceiver blind us to the eternal.  

This will pass.  The ruler of this world has already been defeated.  Eternal destiny awaits.  

We must always allow entry of the Holy Spirit lest we be overwhelmed.  We must accept the miracle of reassurance and presence that through the ages has sustained saints in their hour of testing.

The pain and sorrow and grief and rage cannot be denied.  In these times of momentarily triumphant evil they fill our consciousness.  

It is imperative to invoke the promised Comforter lest our spirits be utterly crushed.  

In these times it is an act of defiant faith to accept the solace of eternal Purpose, for now painfully unfolding as the suffering remnant take up the crosses of their individual sorrow to follow their Christos, while through it all… never left alone.  

 

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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FEAR IN PERSPECTIVE

Every day poses another “this cannot be” moment, or two or three or ten.  There is in the air the faintest hint of the surreality of a war zone.  Trump, Vance, Miller, Musk, et al certainly have tried to instigate a madness of war mentality in the nation.  

Meanwhile, with surreal madness sweeping through U.S. society, the existential civilizational cataclysms of climate change and AI lurk on the horizon, not even over the horizon, but already clearly visible, inexorably rolling toward us, the exact details of their threats still obscured by the sheer incomprehensible magnitude of the approaching storms.  

“Fear not” chant the oblivious angels, they who have never tasted the fear, grief, and pain of fleeting corporeal existence.  Good luck following their admonition.  

“Fear not” is as delusionally mad as the madness of wartime cruelty and bile of bigotry that our wannabe warlord political leaders preach.  

Fear, as you must.  But fear in Hope, defiant Hope.  Fear for others.  Fear in compassionate Love.  

Fear the momentary while secure in the eternal.

Let the fear recede into perspective, informing not infirming, prompting not paralyzing.

Surreal, incomprehensible, and yes, frightening the times, these times of opportunity, these times of unfolding Purpose, collapsing societal values opening space for courageous individual principles to shine forth.  

 

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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TRIUMPH OVER THE HUMAN SPIRIT

 

We face a danger to interhuman Unity that is unparalleled and incomprehensible.  Humanity has never faced a danger like this.  Most terrifying, almost no one recognizes it as a threat.  Not understanding the Unity imperative, how can they recognize the threat to Unity?  

Grave the times, grim the prospects, but for myself I would not have the courage to trade these times for the days of black plague or today’s war in eastern Congo.  

The incomprehensible nature of today’s threats makes them less intimidating than militias and disease.  How long will we be able to say that?

The human spirit is under unrecognized assault.  Freedom of individual critical thought, the foundation of all other freedoms, is already lost for most people, as evidenced by Communist Chinese culture and the triumph of Trump aligned media.  The barricades of individual thought have been breached by “news” commentators and kitten videos.  Most people already unquestioningly obey, whether obeying the Central Committee or the marketing manipulation.  Xi and Trump and Jeff and Elon stand triumphant over the human spirit.  

We buy and believe, purchase and pray, as directed.  The innocuously named “cookies” monitor our every mood.  

Frightening the times, most of all because no one is frightened.  

They are end times, the end of something for sure, though we don’t yet know what.

Will we allow the seductive screens to leave us bereft or friends - family - our own souls?

As when the army invades, the wildfire approaches, or the flood waters rise, the time has come to choose what precious few items we will hastily grab as we flee.  This time we are choosing what of our values, principles, soul, spirit, and humanity will we hold dear and protect from the marketing assault - the digital conflagration - the virtual storm that would erase them all.  

Copyright 2026 Don Ray

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Copyright 2026 Don Ray

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VAPID DANGER

Bothered by the automatic responses to a friend’s text message photos.  Bothered that that bothers me.  Yet I feel a profound and deep instinctive recoil from the fatuous messages.  It’s the kind of instinctive revulsion I felt at modern fundamentalist church “praise” services, an appalled revulsion that surely must be wrong, for after all, these were church services, and they were worshiping Jesus.

Now these decades later I can see how those insipid, mind numbing services laid the foundations for the mental passivity that allowed the rise of Fascism in my dear, politically hapless country. 

It was and is wrong, those brain-washing praise services, and my undefined, unsettled instincts were right.  I have to wonder if my instinctive recoiling to the banal text messages and group responses is also right.

Such messages and postings and likes seem dangerously focused on the sender, not the recipient.  They have a “look at me look at me” childish quality.  The automatic responses likewise remind of how one responds to the attention demanding child.  In the repeated process of these vacuous digital mini-missives we  condition ourselves to interact at these conveniently shallow levels.  On the rare occasions we tear ourselves away from our precious safe screens, we still interact with the meaningless attention-seeking prattle of self-absorbed children.  

These times are grim, not least of all because they deceptively do not look grim.  As the blank grins of the praise service masked the draining of compassion and critical thinking from the congregation, a tsunami of emojis masks the despairing loneliness of interactions devoid of touch or meaning.  

As congregations were rendered politically pliant by the sedation of hypnotic “praise” services, our atomized and terminally shallow society is seduced to obey the political and marketing admonitions of our media overlords.

  It remains to be seen what, if anything, can awaken us from the spell.  Perhaps we must wait until the unrecognized pain of our digitally induced isolation and loneliness finally drives us mad, and we tear ourselves away from the chains of our screens, finally desperate enough to run to each other, together exorcising the emojis and anything virtual, together rediscovering the people behind the txts, together reclaiming our souls.

Copyright 2026 Don Ray

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For transcendent conversations:

Copyright 2026 Don Ray.

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UNRECOGNIZED HEALING

Look directly at how deeply traumatic it really was, that ongoing compilation of a focused theme, recurring and extreme.  Acknowledge how bad it really was.  Marvel at what sustaining present Spirit has allowed you to try and to accomplish.  Look directly at how truly bad the Tester’s ongoing trials were, and by doing so experience the miracle of healing.  

It Is Good, It Is Very Good

 

IT IS GOOD, IT IS VERY GOOD

So much to do!  

So much to contemplate.

So many lives to impact.

So much love needed.

So many people needing the touch of God.

God’s will be done, and we have to do it.

So much to learn.

So much damaged by ignorance.

Actions of love,

actions of life misdirected,

competence and effort,

incompetence and effort,

comfort level and skill level,

how to reach, how to touch,

each doing a job,

each of us doing our job,

wondering, guessing,

the art of life,

the ambiguous, desperate art of life.

A hand reached out,

a hand clenched,

both trying,

overcoming fear,

testing, testing,

testing the soul,

the children showing the way,

our desperation driving the effort,

and through it all

growth,

growth while waiting,

waiting to understand,

doing something anyway,

running forward toward flickering Light,

beauty in the effort,

the blind, loving effort,

charging out of our defensive bunkers to act in the name of caring,

taking the chance,

accepting the risk,

in order to help as best we can,

playing to strengths,

dealing with weakness,

the human drama, the human creation.

Will God ever again be able to look and say, “it is good, it is very good.”

God’s will waiting to be done……

…….by us.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.

Know

 

KNOW

Beware the lessons of the leaders.

They will make you believe,

and once you believe,

they own you.

Beware what you want to believe,

for it is too easy.

Eschew belief. 

 In its place discover ineffable certainty. 

The worldly projection of that certainty will change with living.

Its forms and practice will evolve.

Its name will routinely don new clothing.

But underneath the trappings and vestments with which your mind must  adorn it,

it remains immutable.

Yes, there is Truth,

disguised in various worldly forms.

There is something to know, 

to know much more deeply than the glare of "belief".

Beliefs have to be dearly held because they can so easily blow away in the next gust of wind.  

But some things, something, can be known, known because it is part of you, because you are an expression of it.  You know it as you know yourself, you dear soul you.  You need not put it into words, for our words are of this world, useful only for communicating worldly concepts.

 Belief deals with details.  Knowing deals with essence.  Know, with each new day, know ever more deeply, perhaps discovering that something you so wanted to believe is indeed true.

Opportunity in the Darkness

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray

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OPPORTUNITY IN THE DARKNESS

 

We, these nominally freewill individual elements of consciousness, find ourselves in this world of entropy, inevitable death, need, hunger, suffering, and evil.  We exist in more or less solitary confinement, our experience of life singular and isolated, with no way to share the essence of what it deeply feels like to be you and me.  

This might initially seem discouraging, and then depressing, and then abjectly hopeless.  ……but only because we miss the point.  Perceived from a different perspective, a distinct Light becomes evident in the undeniable darkness.

We are placed in a form of existence with boundless opportunity to do good and practice Love.  Yet our individual corporeal existence is all about us, all about our birth, all about our survival, all about our destiny.

We are given ample, indeed boundless, opportunity to do good, to help, to alleviate suffering, to rescue, to heal, to comfort.  Anywhere we turn there is need, which is to say, opportunity.

We do not have to save the world.  We cannot save the world.  But we can save someone or something, and in the process accept the gift of our own salvation.

There need be little torment about exactly what to do.  In this world of suffering the opportunities are boundless.  Raise your children, do a good job, or rescue animals, or shelter the homeless, or serve on church committees, or be politically informed and active.  But for God's sake, for your sake, do something.  There is no single right path.  There is no way for you to save the world.  But there are endless ways to save something and someone.  

That is the nature and Purpose of this world of entropy, to provide opportunity, to provide the Choice.  At its core foundational structure, below the infinite mathematical sequences that can only tease at a pseudo-determinism, resides entropy, the statistically not quite impossible, and hence inevitable, evolution of conscious life, and the inexorable death of that life.  The resulting overall perceived image is a grisly panoply of carnivorous cruelty.  Yet at the pixilated level of the individual elements of isolated consciousness, there we see the Purpose, the beautiful Purpose, the redeeming Purpose, in the opportunity to  choose Love and beauty in whichever direction we turn.  

It is a Universe and Creation of suffering.  It is a Universe and Creator suffering…...all for us, for each of us…..we children being born into what seems darkness because our eyes are still closed, we children of a Light awaiting our Choice to let it shine through us.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray

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Meaningless Time

 Meaningless Time

Time.  Corporeal existence.  Somehow it is through those that interaction Reality arises.  Through those Deep Love arises.  And horrors arise.  And beauty arises.  

Time.  Matter.  For now what we have to work with.

Yet nothing arising from them has meaning other than in the eternal.  Here and Now is the moment of Creation, we a painful part of that Creation.

The time and vanishing physical forms are illusions.  Yet through them we are empowered by God to create the eternal, eternal bonds and Love.

"Do not be discouraged", whispers Spirit.  Our capacity for control and power seems terribly limited.  Our wishes and will, even when uttered in the name of Jesus, seem pointless and hopeless.  Yet time deceives, making us think that the will of God is not unfolding.  Our entrapment in the Now blocks our view of unfolding Purpose and fulfillment of our hopes.  Our incarceration in the corporeal keeps us apart.  Yet in the usual Paradox, it is that corporeal and temporal nature that facilitate  creation of the real and enduring.

Faith, faith worn and tattered by the interminable delay of prophecy, faith is our source of warmth in the biting cold of the temporal world.  Faith is a capacity to sense and know beyond the body of Now.  

The moment will pass, has already passed.  The physical forms are disappearing before our eyes.  All that passing makes room for fulfillment of our prayers.  All that is real and meaningful takes time.  That is the oft repeated lesson, the lesson of the widow and of the bridesmaids.  Time and the physical, in their fleeting passage, erect the eternal.  Hold fast to the vision of faith, to awareness of Truth.  So much better, a seemingly delayed answer that endures through eternity than an instant gratification that just as promptly disappears along with the rest of the world.  Be glad the answers to your prayers are not immediately evident in the world, for that would mean they would just as quickly disappear along with the world.  

Let it unfold.  Do not be deceived by time.  The needs are known.  The prayers are heard.  Their fulfillment will not be through anything as unreliable as worldly outcomes.  Hold fast to faith as you watch time render the corporeal to dust, thereby making room for answers eternal.

Calling

 CALLING

You would think there would be some profound and wise instruction for how to follow your life's calling, whether you believe that calling comes from God, destiny, universe, or whatever.  There is a calling, or callings.  You can follow it.  But how it will be revealed is acutely individual.  

Of course you have to want a calling before you can discern it.  You have to surrender to something before you can be called by it.  It is a rare and curious thing in an age of materialism for anyone to surrender to a calling.  It is also a rare and curious thing in an age of basic survival to surrender to a calling.  Yet all are called, but few accept it.   You will be alone.  Following a calling is terrifying, fraught with doubt, a glorious madness, indefensible and inexplicable.  Yet once accepting calling, you can never again deny it, at least not for long.  You would have it no other way, the world's tawdry profits rendered banal and tedious by a glimpse, even a fleeting glimpse, of Purpose and meaning and the invitation to be a part of it.  

One Constant

 

ONE CONSTANT 

Last night I watched the spectacular and heavily favored Mikella Shiffrin ski out and disqualify for the second race in a row.  In shock she sat at the edge of the run for twenty-five minutes.

For the vast majority of us, plans and expectations are a momentary solace, an illusion of predictability, a delusion of our own empowerment.  Of course we hear of the Bezos's and Musks who plan, predict,  and control each detail of their obscenely successful lives.  That makes us feel either inadequate about our intelligence and discipline or bitter about our personal persecution by fate.  But the successful planners of their own lives did not raise their grandkids or have the stroke or get trapped in the car wreck or watch incoming artillery fire set their children ablaze.

Consequently rules of sports, Masonic rituals, and religion belief are our desperate attempt to erect some momentary facade of predictability.  Of course fundamentalisms flourish in times of rampant change.  We are frantic for something, anything, to grab onto to stay afloat in the white-water chaos of perfectly normal life.  Political flags or convenient scripture will do as long as it resists personal or societal  changes out of our control.

Death of course is the penultimate insult to our plans.  We are ultimately revealed as powerless.  The future beyond that event is utterly unknowable.  So we avoid thinking about it.  But if we accepted that the maelstrom of unpredictability that is our daily lives was merely a preview of and practice for that ultimate waiting unpredictability so utterly out of our control, to what might we turn for consolation?  When no worldly plan or expectation is reliable, what still abides as real?  Whether experienced or only wished for, what was it that felt real and substantive once every plan and expectation was crushed to dust and burned to ashes? 

Look back, look forward, see the world that so resolutely refused to be predicted or controlled, and sense the one constant that was all you really wanted all along.  All the plans were illusory, deceptions by self and the world.  Only the one hunger, only one essence, one joy, remained constant, then and in this moment.  Accept the chaos and unpredictability and uncertainty.  Accept the one constant hunger.  Discover that through it all, Love was the lesson, Love was the constant, Love was the plan fulfilled through the dissolution, even the penultimate insult,  of our insistent plans.

It All Makes Sense

 It All Makes Sense

Copyright 2025 Don Ray (But feel free to copy and quote.  Just give credit.)

Somehow it all kind of make sense, which is profoundly surprising.

All this conflict, the conflicts between people, and even the conflicts within our own minds.

It all seems quite unavoidably necessary if we are to be truly free and individual. 

Were we all the same, even a little more the same, even prone to a slighter degree of similarity, we would not truly be individual. 

The absolutely unfathomable, jaw-dropping, perplexing behaviors of those people a millennia ago, or around the world, or next door, or in the next cubicle, are an inescapable part of our nature as individuals.

The cacophony of voices vying for attention in our heads, the temptations and distractions and loss of attention and lack of discipline, that also necessary if we are to be free, freedom meaning choices, not mere choices of responses to circumstances, but choices regarding the very essence of who and what we want to be.

It is all necessary, and almost kind of begins to make sense.

And one can even imagine that it is all OK.

We must just have patience, patience and faith.

After all, we have all eternity to grow into what we want to be, and to live in that existence modeled around and consistent with what we want to be.

In its role as the incubator for these free and individual beings this world has through recent millennia fulfilled a surprisingly consistent function.  I can see a striking consistency in the Choice faced by ancient Greeks and modern scientists, plains Indians and marketing psychologists…..always the same Choice,….whether to care or not……whether to listen to the whispers of higher callings to Unity or the shrill threats demanding collapse into the self.

And through those millennia occasionally appeared teachings and prophecies and revelations, each of them of course deformed and warped by our insistent demands, but still fulfilling the essential need of providing some glimmer of hope, some relevant incarnation to gently assist us in our attempts to spiritually survive in the peculiar and perverse society of the moment.

Surprisingly it all makes sense, not that it has to.

All the conflicts are the inescapable, perhaps inevitable, consequence of birth into freedom and individuality. 

The conflicts must not endure, for once free and individual we are empowered to choose Unity.

This world must be what it is.

Those who choose to seek Unity must actualize their Choice by trying to heal and love, by accepting and tolerating, all within the clashing madness of the world around and the roiling conflicts of the mind within.

Copyright 2025 Don Ray (But feel free to copy and quote.  Just give credit.)

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.