DURHAM, N.C. — Walking in the botanical gardens one recent, perfect early spring day, a quick burst of movement in the thicket of a yellow Carolina jasmine hedge caught my eye.

It was a mouse. A Peromyscus leucopus to be precise — a white-footed mouse with big black eyes — staring back at me. Neither one of us moved for a few moments, but as soon as I raised my iPhone to take a picture of the adorable, frightened creature, it disappeared into the shelter of the jasmine’s branches.

Later that same day, while perusing the bookshelves of a local independent bookstore, another mouse caught my eye — this one on the cover of a small, gray book that I found in the new fiction section.

The cover featured a detailed pencil drawing of a mouse, one that looked just like the one I’d encountered in the gardens. “Whitefoot: A Story From the Center of the World” was shelved in the adult section, although it appeared to be a children’s book. Until I noticed the name of the author: Wendell Berry.

I snatched the last copy of the book and paid for it without even cracking open the cover, certain that Berry, the great American writer and defender of agrarian values, would have something extraordinary to say.

“Whitefoot” is a beautiful, subtle little book. Perfect for these lean times. It would be easy to dismiss it as a simple children’s book, but that would be a mistake. Berry’s first foray into “children’s literature,” is in fact a spiritual fable with lessons every adult should take to heart in these nervous times.

At a compact 60 pages, Berry tells Whitefoot’s story with the aid of more than 20 stunning pencil drawings by Davis Te Selle. Whitefoot’s entire story takes place an inch off the ground, centered around the solitary nest that the year-old mouse has fashioned inside a glass jar.

“She lived at the center of the world,” Berry writes. “This is one of the things every mouse knows. Wherever she was, she was at the center of the world. That one lives at the center of the world is the world’s profoundest thought. So firmly was this thought set in Whitefoot’s mind that she did not need to think it.

“Like humans, she lived in the little world of what she knew, for there was no other world for her to live in. But she lived at the center of the world always, and of this she had no doubt.”

Whitefoot lived simply, by her instincts — values that the prolific Berry has heralded in his fiction, nonfiction, essays and poems for half a century. Accordingly, Berry doesn’t anthropomorphize his mouse; she doesn’t think human thoughts or act in human ways. She simply lives the busy life of a mouse without much care.

“She worked and lived without extravagance and without waste,” he writes. And when she slept, “Her sleep was an act of faith and a giving of thanks.”

Nearby, a rising river threatens to destroy all that Whitefoot knows and cut her already short life even shorter. When it does, she kicks into survival mode, doing what needs to be done — as Berry puts it, “her unfinished task of staying alive.”

One critic compared “Whitefoot” to the biblical story of Noah’s Ark: surviving a flood, doing the necessary things to survive — in faith — and not knowing what the outcome would be when the catastrophe was over (if it ever would be.)

As I read and re-read “Whitefoot,” I was reminded of Berry’s famous poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.” In this moment when the foundations of our world economy are trembling (along with our souls), it bears repeating:

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.

(Cathleen Falsani is the author of “Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace” and the upcoming “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.”)