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Thanks for this.  I too have been thinking recently about "nature's indifference" and the invitation to "live in the entirety rather than in our own puny selves."  A quick trip to Arizona for the Metanexus meeting contributed to this, but the incentive for my thinking was less an experience of the grandness of the non-human world and more one of trying to understand why humans seem to want find things there that reflect the human world.  For more along these lines, see The Scale of Humanness and the Thomas L. Friedman quote (and my comments on it) here.  "Death as a human construction" I am happy to put in my pipe and smoke along with you.  And perhaps Truth, Reality, and God (among other things) as well?  See The Taoist Story Teller and Culture.

The upshot of the story is not to demean humanity nor to trivialize human feelings but rather to suggest that a richer appreciation of our relation to a much larger cosmos largely indifferent to our concerns frees us to play a more creative role in that cosmos and in our own lives as well.  And perhaps that the "ego muted" is nothing more and nothing less than recognizing that the stories we create of the cosmos have tended to be largely stories of the cosmos in our own image.  Being more able to let the cosmos talk to us in its own terms helps free us from ourselves?  An interesting implication in the early stages of an exploration of the emergence of form, meaning, and esthetics?