The nature of the Whole is an artist (τέχνη), but an artist of a peculiar kind. A carpenter's or cobbler's workshop is full of shavings and offcuts (ξέσματα καὶ περιτμήματα) — and there is somewhere to throw them. Nature has "nothing outside herself" (ἔξω οὐδὲν ἔχει): her workshop is enclosed. In this lies "the wonder of her art" (τὸ θαυμαστὸν τῆς τέχνης): "having circumscribed herself" (περιορίσασα ἑαυτήν), she turns everything that spoils, ages, and grows useless (σαπρότερα, ἄχρηστον) into herself and out of the same makes new and young — importing no substance from without, needing no dump for the rot. A perfect self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια): she "is content with her own space, her own matter, her own art."

The ethical upshot: this workshop has no waste. Bitterness, brambles, decay, old age are not a flaw in the design but the "shavings" of production, which go at once back into use. Hence the complaint "and why is there such a thing in the world?" is laughable: it assumes a defect where in truth there is a flawless economy.

• Med. 08-50 — the full image: the grumbler "why is there evil in the world" is laughed at by the φυσιολόγος, as a carpenter would be over his shavings; but nature, unlike the craftsman, has no dump — she recycles the rot into herself and is content with her own. Here are both the workshop metaphor and the αὐτάρκεια.
• Med. 07-25 — the economy without the metaphor: the governing nature "out of their substance will make other things, and again others from theirs, that the world may be ever new" — the same enclosed household (recycling its own matter, nothing from without), taken from the side of the result: the world does not age because nothing is lost.

The image serves the discipline of desire: to accept the "scrap" of existence (bitterness, decay, old age) as the inevitable and re-used shavings of a perfect workshop — and so to drop the worldview-complaint (μὴ προσεπείπῃς, 08-49). The demarcation matters, or the image blurs into its neighbours:

• Everything is seed (4.36) — generation / futurity: every thing is the seed of the next. There the accent is on forward productivity; here on the enclosed self-sufficient economy (nothing from without, nothing discarded).
• DOGMAThe unity of the cosmos — connectedness: all is one substance, one body. Here it is not connectedness but the αὐτάρκεια of the workshop.
• DOGMAProvidence — the ordering for the good. Here it is the perfection of the economy (no waste), the aesthetic-technical side of the same order.
• TERMTransformation — the mechanism by which the workshop turns scrap into the new.

Kindred in function to the contemplation of nature (this workshop is what one contemplates) and to the "aesthetics of the incidental" (3.2 — the cracks of bread, over-ripeness: also "shavings" in which the maker is seen).