18 Degrees F. Outside

 It is 18 degrees Fahrenheit, 5:38 am, here this morning, 12/18/21, here in Bloomington, Minnesota. An inch of powdery snow dropped over night. I took out the trash and noticed fresh rabbit tracks, coming from the backyard, spent the night under my truck, and then went over to the bird feeder to clean up goodies, and then went back into the backyard.

I have known for some years that bush rabbits, the ones that survive, learn to sleep over night under a car to prevent the horned owls from taking them from above. The foolish and the young learn the hard way, and pay the ultimate price, their life.

Three thoughts occur to me this morning. First, even on this frigid northern morning, this bleak, deadly, natural environment is rich and teeming with life, though much less so than in June. If we wicked but smart humans do not get around to adapting by adopting Mavellonialist values before we annihilate each other with weapons of mass destruction, that will be the end of our story, not the end of nature's creatures, even if altered by radiation. They will go on. Some new smart species will evolve upwards so that God can offer them moral values to see if they culturally and personally can get it right before they wipe each other out.

Second, my metaphysical law of moderation might be my way of noting that biologically, animals live and propagate, by eating each other to survive. All around us, nature is red in tooth and claw. Life is sustained by death, and death allows carcasses to be eaten by other predators, so that they and their young can propagate. Maybe Heidegger is right: Being comes out of Nothing, and Nothing comes out of being, as life and death are so inextricably interwoven in nature. Perhaps my presented law of moderation is some sort of true account, both descriptive of reality and normative (the rule governing reality). Consistent, logical, orderly reality is cause and effect and cosmos, law guided and predictable, and then reality at the same time, in the same  place is conflict, passion, chaos, lawlessness, randomness and violence and raw power struggles. Perhaps these contradictory states of affairs are both true at the same time, but we seek order while understanding that all that other stuff will be inexorably popping up and disrupting our neat conceptions and plans.

Third, Ayn Rand posits that a human's life is the ultimate standard against which he assesses all choices and actions. She may be right, though her conception of physical life may need to include a moral (Reality is constituted by an eternal struggle between good and evil, and the good person's job to to affirm biological life, and, by praying and doing good, to extend the kingdom of heaven on earth, and then end up, going to heaven after death.) and spiritual dimension, adding the idea of soul to human consciousness.