It was an early afternoon in May when I first wandered down the incline, crossed the creek, and looked out over the scene. The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my life at a…profound level. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky…
…This early experience… has become normative for me throughout the entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good, what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good…
That is good in economics fosters the natural processes of this meadow. So in jurisprudence, law, and political affairs—that is good which recognizes the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands to exist and flourish in the ever-renewing seasonal expression.
- from The Great Work
Essays
- The Meadow Across the Creek from The Great Work
- Catching the Power of the Wind from Evening Thoughts
Featured in Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion*
- Introduction to the Special Edition - Heather Eaton
- The Great Work Underway - Larry Rasmussen
- Awakening to Our Role in The Great Work - Stephanie Kaza
- Response to Thomas Berry's The Great Work - Robert Cummings Neville
- Progress, Purpose and Contingency: A Response to Thomas Berry's The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future - Ursula Goodenough
- For the Love of Life - David C. Korten (coming)
- Response to Thomas Berry's The Great Work - Rosemary Radford Ruether
- Response to The Great Work by Thomas Berry - Aruna Gnanadason
- Democracy, Cosmology, and The Great Work of Thomas Berry - Stephen Bede Scharper
- Response to the Essays - Thomas Berry
* Volume 5 no 11/111 2001 Current and back issues available from: Brill