A Dark Thought in a Green Shade Somewhere in the newly planted earth, a god sits at his bench, creating and curating each little plant and flower. Day upon day he nurses roots, stems and leaves, talks to fragile saplings, puts to work all the surprising symmetries and fractals he dreams of when he sleeps for hours in the afternoon sun. Neither a Moses nor a Prospero, but looking like both, the god puts down his staff and exhales a fragrant cloud that veils the garde

The Cosmic Covenant And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, this place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. – Wendell Berry, A World Lost The cosmic covenant — what Isaiah calls the covenant of peace — is, in Robert Murray’s terms, “the belief in a divinely willed order harmoniously linking heaven and earth.” Murray casts this covenant as a kind of marriage: a union binding heaven and earth, God and Israel, into a si