Ecology of Eden - Nature simply "is"

3/11/07
The “Cloister and the Plow” was my favorite chapter in the Ecology of Eden. The chapter talks about Byzantium Monks that lived in cells around a central garden. Many people that witnessed these spectacles said that they “looked into a prefigured heaven”.
According to an account from the book, the St. Benedict monastery had “all necessaries” to be found within cloister walls. I think this is an amazing thought. To think that everything was found in these beautiful “Echoes of Eden” makes me want to actually make one of my own.
Many people thought that these were so perfect geometrically that they were heaven itself. Many people that I have talked to in my church relate to the fact that everything in nature is symmetrical and “planned”. Our body parts and many objects in nature are symmetrical and perfectly the same on both sides, many which say is a “miracle.” These phenomenon are natural, but many would say that the gardens transcended these things and brought us into an entirely new plane.

The Plow section of the chapter talks about a chain reaction that was brought about by the invention of the plow. Now that horses and work animals could plow fields, oats could be fed to horses and animals, which could in turn, pull the plow, which led to the stiff collar harness, which led to the iron shoe. These inventions led to the invention of many other inventions.