It’s hell out there, the lady said, while sitting by the window, looking at the natural world, which so many see as heaven, while she spoke of owl hunting mouse, and cat hunting bird, and fox tearing a vole apart, blood, guts, opened heart; while I thoughtfully sliced my breakfast sausage, and watched the animal grease glint on the knife. Heaven? Hell? Whatever it is, it is life. But some have such a rosy view of the reality playing on out there, in the meadows, the woods, the forests and the seas. Natural selection is cruel. Not deliberately cruel, just uncaring. What is good at surviving survives. What is good at reproducing reproduces. No care, no compassion, no morality, unless such things have been proven in the slowly burning evolutionary furnace of the past to assist survival and reproduction. As the spider traps and devours the fly, the bird eats the bug, the cat eats the bird. The flesh eats the flesh, as it will do in all life across the multitude of galaxies and their stars, if driven by natural selection, the remorseless driving force behind every living thing, everywhere...
Unless we are mistaken...
