I love the book which this excerpt comes from. It is by Cole Arthur Riley and is entitled, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories That Make Us.

“Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom – the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky – if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?”

Read that last line again, will ya? Not only is it exquisite writing, but portrays true shalom in the most profound of ways.