The Majesty of Life

The great mystery of life and its majesty here on Earth is a theme in my thinking these days, so I decided to create this blog to write about it. If you are reading these words, welcome. I hope you will enjoy exploring some of these ideas with me. 

 

Life has become harder since the pandemic and many people are feeling pessimistic. But beauty is worth living for. It is everywhere, as if it is one of those basic attributes of nature—as if the very physical laws cause it as they play upon the universe.

 

 If the study of the universe has taught us anything, it is surely how precious life is. The intricate network of living things that covers our planet from pole to pole is like a jewel, while reality, for countless light-years in all directions, consists of uninhabitable chilling darkness and incomprehensible gravitational sinks. So is there not every reason to consider the manifestation of life here, in this planetary system, to be remarkable? Never has it been more important to recognize the true nature of the biosphere and treat it with all of the wisdom with which we pride ourselves.

 

Life on our planet started as soon as it settled down enough to provide stable conditions. Energy, water, air, and a variety of complex molecules came together and organized themselves into increasingly complex structures. Yet they did this in defiance of the law that decrees that entropy—disorganization—must always increase. How the elements of life, alone, could possibly have defied this basic law of physics remains a mystery to science. As is life’s strange manifestation: the mystical elixir of consciousness. 

 

Through all of my years watching the actions of wild animals, if one thing has seemed inarguable, it is that we share consciousness with the other forms of life. Consciousness of the same reality appears to be the medium that permits living things to interact appropriately. Reality makes sense to us all because we are all conscious of it, and this shared understanding is the ground for interaction among individuals and species.

 

Indeed, the spirits of nature and humanity are interwoven upon our spectacular planet. 

 

Now, scientific evidence of consciousness is being found in increasing numbers of species—not only in dolphins, crows, and apes, but also in octopuses, plants, bacteria, moulds, and amoebas. It presents as a fundamental aspect of life—an awareness of the objective world in which the life form understands its environment and deliberately furthers its interests as it pursues its existence.

 

We are enraptured by the unicorn of the imagination, but is not life itself the miracle?

 

The delicacy, the beauty of the biosphere, conveys something of the underlying quality of the consciousness behind it. The peacock, for example, in its quest to become beautiful, did not just grow a radiant plume to attract the gaze—it evolved a fabulous fan of intricately designed feathers, each detailed to the microscopic level, all fitting together to produce a breathtaking over-all design. Then there is the intricate and precise colouration of butterflies. Their flamboyant patterns tell us something of the minds of these delicate life forms who, through aeons of evolution, have chosen their dress.

 

 

The beguiling beauty of Nature on Earth is well beloved by its inhabitants. 

 

Each creature, even the tiniest, is an individual with his or her personal ways. Including snakes.

I chose the title of this blog as a way of saying, Fear not. Fear is one of the things that has stood between modern humans and nature, but it is a phantom, a ghost. Animals will not hurt you if you do not hurt them as I know from many years of wandering the wilderness alone, both above and underwater. Indeed, it is us who are the dangerous ones. 

So take heart and behold the majesty, the transcendental splendour, of Earth!

(c) Ila France Porcher 

Ethologist, Author and Wildlife Artist