"What's essential is invisible to the eye."

Dr Abe V Rotor 
A heap of plant residues being transformed by mushrooms, protists, and other decomposers, to become "nutrients" to nourish the next generation of life. (University of Santo Tomas Botanical Garden)

The soil breathes, it's true. It opens to the warmth of the sun, incubates seeds and eggs, nurtures the dormant and juvenile organisms. There is no such thing as waste in the ecological system. Quite often we don't know the dividing line of the living and the non-living; everything is part of a web, the web of life. (UST)

 There is more to the photographs, just like what the fox told the Little Prince. "What is essential is invisible to the eye."

It is because we can't see bacteria, fungi, small insects, protists and monerans, without the microscope, and without digging them out of their abode.

Without mushrooms (fungi), bacteria and earthworms, et al, our world would be full of dead bodies of plants and animals, and their accumulated wastes. Not only that there will be no more space for the next generations of organisms - there will be no more resources that will sustain their existence.

It is because they are the bridge of the dead and the living, the transition of one form of life to another, and of generations. Decomposers break permanence of places, open new horizons for life. They enhance ubiquity and demarcation, assigning all living things a place and role in the economics and ecology of living. Which can only translate to the biodiversity and universality of creation.

It is because the living world is dependent on recycling. Dead things decompose into materials to be used by new organisms. Organic become inorganic materials, and vice versa. Elements become compounds, and compounds return into elements. This is the essence of death and resurrection, the meaning of altruism, the power of giving and receiving, of cooperation, of sharing. This is unity and harmony in the natural order of the world.

The physical world and the biological world become one as energy transforms into various forms - and into matter itself - and matter into energy. That energy is matter, and matter is energy, as shown by Einstein's E=mc2. As firewood becomes energy, leaving but a pinch of ash; so with a dead body, becoming dust, and the rest is energy realeased.

And the world is bathed with the radiance of the sun that transforms into matter through photosynthesis - ultimately into protein, the building blocks of cells, tissues, organs. Then when the organism dies, these are released once more into forms of energy. Thanks to the decomposers. How little do we know of the mystery of life, more so of that in the world of the living minutae.

And this is what makes the world go round and around through space and time. And the concept of infinity, eternity. It is us humans who measure time as past, present and future; and space as niche or boundary.

Not our world. Our world goes on and on - even without us - so naturally, there is no measure of matter and energy, of space and time.

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