I also spend a lot of time watching nature - just yesterday I was marvelling at ants carrying grass seeds to their nest, each carrying the seed the same way aro

I also spend a lot of time watching nature - just yesterday I was marvelling at ants carrying grass seeds to their nest, each carrying the seed the same way around, so that the burrs don’t snag on anything - pretty much the same behaviour as Darwin notes with his worms and leaves. It fascinates me that something with such a limited little mind can still figure out something like “carry from this end”. I actually take a very mechanistic view of nature, and find it glorious - that mechanical processes at a minuscule scale can result in such a panoply and profusion of form is positively miraculous. Matter seems to want to be alive - what enters organic chemistry rarely leaves it, and life always tends to more forms, more individuals, more diversity - and it’s all just chemistry and physics and entropy at play. I guess one can find a spiritual beauty in the idea that living matter, thinking matter, is a preferable state of being for matter in this universe. Cosmos, know thyself.