Recently, I’ve been fascinated by learning about artist Theo Jansen’s “Strandbeests”—wind-powered sculptures that stride along the beach. In their elegance and purposefulness, they really look like creatures created by nature.

In thinking of the immense, god-like pleasure that must come from fashioning those figures, I was reminded of two quotations that haunt me, by two writers I admire tremendously.

A mysterious observation from Iris Murdoch’s novel A Severed Head:

“The best thing about being God would be making the heads.”

A beautiful passage from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home:

“And there was the oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung its imponderable branches out over the road and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa.”

Onward,