Elsewares recently featured this, the latest necklace in Anne Kiel's Curios series: "Meditation," a "reflective and tranquil image" of a person communing with nature. The light in the horizon; the spiraling tree of knowledge and life--the symbolic resonance is clear.

Yet nature has not always been viewed as a source of transcendental insight. Contrast the appealing imagery of "Meditation" with that of Tennyson's famous turn of phrase from In Memoriam:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.

Perhaps our image of natural harmony is as much a work of creative transformation as the city and machine.