Life flows into life. Life flows out of life. Life makes shapes and forms which determine how these processes will come about. Life is simple and complex. Life is not static, but active.
Life needs energy in order to live.
The energy is used to grow and sustain itself, to move with, and to sense or know. Life is born, lives, and dies on the individual level and on the species level, creating developmental rhythms. Life on the planet level seems constantly to articulate itself toward greater and more complex action, sensing, and knowing, with a rhythm that includes being born and developing itself but not yet the process of dying. Yet surely other planets, in other solar systems, have given birth to life, have seen it flourish, and then die. Consider a tree.