We drive to work on the stored energy of ten thousand years of sunlight.
More on Ragan\'s work can be found at his website RaganSutterfield.com..
His work also appears regularly in the Englewood Review of Books .
He has worked as a teacher, librarian and farmer, but he is most of all a reader and writer.
He is an endurance athlete and long-time naturalist who loves records, film, and seeking the good Life with his wife Emily and their daughters Lillian and Lucia.
His work has also appeared in a variety of magazines including The Christian Century , The Oxford American , Men\'s Journal , Triathlete , Gourmet , Fast Company , and Books & Culture .
About author(s): Ragan Sutterfield is the author of Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us , and a memoir, This Is My Body .
The audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.
Wendell Berry and the Given Life articulates his vision for the creaturely Life and the Christian understandings of humility and creation that underpin it.
His insights flow from a Life and practices, and so it is a vision that can be practiced and lived--it is a vision that is grounded in the art of being a creature.
His work helps us remember our givenness and embrace our Life as creatures.
Berry presents us with the sort of coherent vision for the lived moral and spiritual Life that we need now.
Through his essays, poetry and fiction, Berry has repeatedly drawn our attention to the ways in which our lives are gifts in a whole economy of gifts.
But how can we, when we have moved so far from our Life source in the soil? For the past 50 years, Wendell Berry has been helping seekers chart a return to the practice of being creatures.
In all this we hear a whisper of the truth that we are creatures--and we long to live in this reality.
We hear this truth when we tune out the traffic and listen to the song sparrow\'s melody, eavesdropping on a beauty that serves no human economy.
We feel this truth when we take up a shovel and sense the satisfying heave of dirt as we plant a modest garden.
The glimpses of this truth come when we lose cell reception on a long hike in the forest and our eyes are lifted to the simple marvel of trees.
Yet in this lonely world of mastery, in a time so dominated by human desire and design that it has been dubbed the "anthropocene," the human age, many of us feel that we are missing some essential truth about who we are.
For us, the idea of being a creature can seem passé.
And our communities can be connected with a billion ones and zeros over fiber optic cables.
Our daily bread seems to generate miraculously from store shelves.
We drive to work on the stored energy of ten thousand years of sunlight
