Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes.