Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding principle and animating force for our lives,

a powerful love that helps us live in sacred relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world.

Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

For centuries, the Western world read the Bible as a call to dominate the earth and subdue it.

For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we re-experience this sacred text as a call to reframe the human relationship to the natural world,

the land as theologian Ellen Davis says on which our life depends.

With the poetry of Genesis alongside the poetry of Wendell Berry, we remember the lost art of being creatures.

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day blind stars waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Ellen Davis is a professor at the Duke University Divinity School.

I first met her in the early 1990s when she was at Yale Divinity School and my teacher of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.

Over two semesters she captivated our imaginations, excavating nuance in the biblical writings.

And in the years that followed she became actively involved with an emerging network of theologically and scientifically informed initiatives on ecology.

She eventually brought all of that together in her scholarship with the farmer and poet Wendell Berry as one of her friends and collaborators.

He is famously private but agreed to read poetry to us from his home in Kentucky to accompany this conversation I had with Ellen which happened in 2010.

But this episode includes never before released conversation and poetry as an offering to our world in crisis.

I'm slightly daunted interviewing my teacher like this and I'm going to have to be in a different role with you.

...