I’m one of those “spiritual not religious” people. That means I don’t have an almighty God to turn to for pat answers to pressing problems. And although I hold a definite political ideology, I’ve lost confidence in politicians being able to get us out of this current mess.
So when my faith is lagging and I need advice on dealing with our mounting mega-problems, I turn to: authors. At the top of the list for restoring my faith in humanity is Terry Tempest Williams. Grounded in the red rock of the Utah desert and enriched by fierce convictions and the wisdom of her Mormon ancestors, she’s evolved over the years from nature lover to environmentalist to political activist to eco-visionary high priestess and sacred guide.
Some may search psalms. I wait for the latest Terry Tempest Williams book. Luckily, she’s prolific, with more than 20 dating back to the late 1980s. Understory author Richard Powers, another of my favorites, agrees. “I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and Thoreau: to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world,” he wrote in his blurb to her latest book, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. “She gives me something bigger than hope.”
I’ve been along for the ride since 1991’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. A memoir entwining grief over loss of her mother to cancer with a lament over flooding of the Great Salt Lake, the book not only established a new form of hybrid creative nonfiction but went on to become a beloved environmental classic.In Refuge, she was mourning the flooding of her beloved Great Salt Lake, which was destroying nesting areas for the birds she frequently watched. Nearly three decades later, in The Glorians, she is reconciling herself with drought and agricultural overuse leading to the inland sea’s potential demise.
That transition from flood to drought underscores one of the main tributaries of her work: that nature is always changing, possessing a superhuman power to chisel new canyons with flash floods and turn nesting spots for migratory birds to cracked salt flats, that the fates of humans and nonhumans and natural forces are forever intertwined.
There was much to lament when Refuge came out. But there is exponentially more to lament now. War, evisceration of environmental protections, and the climate crisis, to name a few major problems that aren’t easy to solve. But although still mourning, while simultaneously maintaining a fierce conviction that wilderness needs saving, in Glorians she’s advanced more fully into a state of appreciative awe.
Inspired by a pandemic-time dream in which she vowed to create “the Epic Documentation of the Glorians,” she writes of all the glorians (roughly meaning, something that possesses glory). An ant carrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen. A horned toad. A black widow. A ladybug. A mountain lion. A double rainbow bisected by a curving black line. But also a hollow bone and a flash flood and a dewdrop and the now-chopped-down Divinity Tree at Harvard Divinity School, where she’s been writer-in-residence for the past decade.
In the preface, she writes: “The Glorians are reaching out to us inviting us to dream a new world into being.”I love that she could write an entire book based on a dream of climbing a spiral staircase and finding herself in the ruins of Cassandra’s Temple. Oddly, it makes me think of a powerful dream I had, back when I was doing a lot of yoga and meditation. In my dream, I also climbed a spiral staircase. But in my case, I had to make a choice between two golden statues: one of a lion and one of a snake. I chose the coiled snake, a symbol of Kundalini.
In The Glorians, she shares the importance of dreams in her family. Her grandmother, Kathryn Blackett Tempest was a Jungian scholar, who taught her grandchildren that what was revealed in dreams was tied to voices of the Divine.At the time of Refuge, I was also reading other “nature writers” of that era: Dianne Ackerman, whose verdant lyrical descriptions in books such A History of the Senses were more akin to poetry than prose; John McPhee, who revealed the beauty of geological epochs in Basin and Range; and the late Barry Lopez, who began his contemplation of the natural world with Of Wolves and Men in 1978.
But Terry Tempest Williams drilled deeper. Not only did she explore the power of the natural world, but spirituality, humanity, and family from a fierce woman’s perspective. I read Desert Quartet in 1991 and Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness in 1996 when I was living in the oak-studded foothills north of Los Angeles and spending my free time exploring California from north to south with my then-husband.
A few years later, I’d be leaving California and my marriage behind, and heading to Colorado with a new partner and a fresh graduate degree in writing. Shortly after arriving on the Front Range north of Denver, with a view of purple mountains rising from the flats, I discovered that Terry Tempest Williams was holding a workshop in Moab, Utah, just a five-hour drive west.
I’m not sure how I learned of the workshop—perhaps I saw a poster at the beloved Tattered Cover Bookstore in LoDo while picking up a copy of her 2001 book Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. The theme of the workshop was Involuntary Exile.
Feeling exiled from the roar of freeway traffic and fragrant aroma of citrus blossoms, I invited L.A. grad school friends Julie and Sky to join me. It was November when we met amid the red rock arches of Moab. It felt warm to me, but my friends from the coast were shivering. While Julie and Sky cranked up the heat inside, I sat under an ancient cottonwood and wrote longhand on a yellow legal pad.
There were four instructors and the usual assortment of people writing interesting stories. But Terry Tempest Williams is the only one I still remember. I’m not sure what words of wisdom she shared, but whatever they were inspired the beginning of an essay called “Into the Heart of the Storm.” Examining my family’s lack of religious faith, the essay went on to be published by Canadian journal blank spaces, which nominated it for a Pushcart.
At the end of the workshop, she signed my copy of Red and stared into my soul with her brilliant sapphire eyes. Something intense was being transmitted: courage, fierceness, hope. It made a definite impression. It still does 25 years later.After leaving Moab, and beginning my ascent into the Rockies, I found myself in the middle of a early winter snowstorm. I could have stopped in Glenwood Springs for the night and soaked in the hot springs, but I decided to press on.
It took me more than nine hours to make my way through the mountains. My hands trembled on the steering wheel as snow accumulated and traffic lanes disappeared. Some vehicles skidded off the road. But there was no stopping, no turning around. My only choice was to keep going. Every dozen miles, I’d eat a square of the chocolate bar I’d stowed in the center console. Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that I might slide off the road and into the nothingness of a deep canyon. That I might die. After facing my biggest fear, the trembling in my hands stopped.
I proceeded into the heart of the storm, and emerged on the other end with a story.What that experience taught me—one reinforced by The Glorians—is the necessity of staring into the darkness and finding beauty, and perhaps also uncovering an iridescent spark of truth to guide your way.
Read more of my writing on Substack.