"The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god. Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention has unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory — the pattern of hailstones by my feet upon dark earth; a certain cast of light across a hillside through a break in the clouds; the face of a long-eared owl peering out at me from a hawthorn bush — things whose fugitive instances give me an overwhelming sense of how unlikely it is that in the days of my brief life I should be in the right place at the right time and possess sufficient quality of attention to see them at all. When they occur, and they do not occur often, these moments open up a giddying glimpse into the inhuman systems of the world that operate on scales too small and too large and too complex for us to apprehend. What I feel is certainly the mysterious terror and awe of Rudolf Otto's numinous consciousness, the sense of something wholly other that renders me breathless and shaking — and something else, captured in four lines from William Blake's Milton:

" 'There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found
It Renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.'

"I am far from an industrious soul, except in my capacity, perhaps, to pay close attention to things. But these words speak exactly of how those moments seem to me. Not only do they renovate each moment of the day, but multiply into everything there is and will be. They break time itself."