ts don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. 8 / Annie Dillard

In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God “set bars and doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?

Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all 4 / Annie Dillard that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will.

very live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac . But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? ” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an un-thinkable profusion of... See more

A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds.

How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them?

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.... “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”

“God is subtle,” Einstein said, “but not malicious.