LIFE
This morning I walked a mile up Jones Mountain, across from my house, and back on a beautiful trail through the woods. All around me life was bursting out.
I was thinking about a New York Times report that liquid water had been discovered within the cracks of rocks deep down in the core of Mars. There is ice at the Mars poles but this is liquid water and huge amounts of it. Water is necessary for life as we know it. The question raised by this discovery is whether there might be some primitive form of life deep within Mars. The question is how the first life forms.
That article made me wonder again about the profusion of life around me. Apparently every mushroom with its astonishing network of tendrils, every tree growing slowly above me, every bird flitting though the trees, the bears hidden out of sight beside the trail and even every virus and bacteria within me had resulted from the first shift from chemical processes to self replicating life by one life form. All life came from that one source.
I thought of Jain nuns in India who find all life to be sacred and walk the roads sweeping life away so that they kill nothing, wearing masks to not swallow and harm any insect. I may not describe the nuns accurately, but if I am simply one form of life of which a tree or a bee is another and life is scacred, then the way I describe Jains protecting all life makes sense.
I feel cruel when I put ant poison in the kitchen to wipe out a colony of ants who are simply doing with the life force within them pushes them to do. All life has this selfsustaining life force embedded in it. We all have DNA which forms us and impels us along. I am not cruel to spiders in the shower. I use a dry wash cloth to lift them to safety before I shower. But I know my attempt not to harm life is futile and know that as a meateater who finds meat delicious, that I am an enormous hypocrite.
But, my hypocrisy aside, the real question for me is my own life and what impels me along. I‘ve been dropped here on earth for a brief time and have a tremendous need to be conscious of my presence here and to make the most of it. And central to this is the unconscious life force that through my DNA impels me along. How can I be fully alive in the brief time I am here (not much time left, todays is my 87th birthday) and what in my DNA and unconscious inner life driving force do I need to open up to?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 