Kairos is pulling no punches

You have it wrong in thinking the value of a life is decontextualized and immutable. You cannot divorce it from the flow.

The value of a life is woven into the fabric of being and dependence and connections and, most importantly, the future.

We live time and to assure the future is to assure the continuation of time.

Life for plants and animals has this profound future orientation such that the deepest value and mattering lies in the doings which ensure a future.: children or a habitat’s greater generativity. It's not that the individual life does not have value- of course it does, to whomever is alive- but value is not an object. It is a part of the mattering tapestry, and the threads without the tapestry are very little. You mean more to yourself in actions that tend towards creation. And creation does not come ex nihilo: it is a parturition of what you have absorbed. It is an act that takes place in a world of being and doing.

So the bird is most alive when she sits on her eggs, when he feeds his young.

But not all parents are engaged.

You mistake: All their lives are in preparation for and nurturing of creation. An animal who is no longer able to be of service to the future is losing their soul.

And this is why there is a sense of despair in sanctuary: when the belief in the future that is beyond you has gone, with it goes your soul.

Your soul is the pull of the future- of a future of life and creativity and responsiveness.

This is why humans these days are often soulless- deep within lies the knowledge that all they live for will not enhance the future of the living earth.

What about my cats?

Your guilt is all about this. Everything tends to the future- the hunting and the fleeing, the singing and the silence. Where there is no future, there is a sole deprived absence.

We want to make life liveable for those without future.

You do- and the effort is better spent on the future to come.

It sounds brutal: you say that an animal who cannot breed is a waste of space- and I am an animal that cannot breed.

Leave yourself out of it. They are not a waste of space- but their value to themselves is largely lost and they know it. They must create value elsewhere, and that is either a cause for despair or a supernatural effort. And largely they're reliant on you for their value- which can be hard to bear.

This is the letting go.

What now is the future asking of you?