A run that ended with a walk in a wood. Maybe a badger sett. Maybe not. A lot of cherries. Swedish hornbeam. Planted trees. And a fallen oak. A big old tree. Fallen maybe a decade ago, maybe more.
It was raining and the sheen on the wood was beautiful.
It is hard to grieve when dying is so lovely. And, of course, when so many creatures benefit from the fallen giant.
And yet, to take beauty. What I need... does that... signify anything? Isn't that a narcissist's ethics... I find this beautiful, therefor it has value, therefore it matters?
Maybe not. Maybe things matter for all the different ways they matter to the confederacy of beings or systems for which things can go better or worse, with better being related to either wellbeing or, perhaps, neg-entropy.
This matters to me for beauty. For the invertebrates for food. For the birds as a perch - and perhaps a place to find food. For the mammals as shelter or a vantage point. For the soil as sustenance. And so on.
When we realise that we are not the only ones for whom things matter, then mattering increases exponentially.
But then, even a bacteria matters... in that it is better for a bacteria to be with other bacteria so that they can function together, share genes as so on.
Is that a reductio ad absurdum? Proving that my theory can't be right?
Does a thing matter more if it matters to more things? Are their more and less important things, whose decisions about what matters matter more or less? Is there a hierarchy?
Or maybe it's not added up like that. Else a could be better if all oaks were dead (given that a dead oak supports more life).
Maybe it's added up in a way that means that matterings are fractals. Parts of systems that need all the parts to make up bigger systems and bigger systems and finally a world.
Or maybe there's a simple way to see this: it simply is good to see beauty, wherever you find it.
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