(SOME) THEMES IN (SOME OF) THE WORKS OF TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
Acceptance (new & needs search)
Activism
Anger, rage
Animism
Anticipation
Art
Art and activism - THEMES
Attention (new)
Balance, equilibrium
Beauty
Biocentrism (new)
Bioregionalism, Place (new)
Birds
Birth
Body
Bones
Buddhism
Building a positive alternative
Capitalism (new)
Change, transformation, motion
Choice, decision
Circle, cycle, spiral
Collaboration (new)
Community
Compassion (new)
Connection
Creation
Creativity
Critique of society
Critique - THEMES
Dance
Dark
Death
Democracy (new)
Desert
Disappear, dissolve
Dream
Ecofeminism (new?)
Ecopsychology
Effect, impact (new)
Emptiness
Energy
Engage
1
Engage with nature
Equality
Erosion
Erotic, sexuality, sensuality
Erotics of place
Ethics
Faith, trust, optimism (new)
Family: human
Family: nature as
Fear
Feeling, passion, emotion, desire
Female, women
Fire (new)
Freedom (new)
Generosity (new)
Heal
Heart (new)
Hidden, hide
Home
Hope
Humility
Ideal (partially analyzed into themes – needs work)
Imagination
Internal – external
Interrelationship
Intimacy
Intuition (new)
Japan
Joy, happiness (new)
Language
Let go, yield, flow with
Light
Listen, hear
Location - THEMES
Love
Meditation
Memory
Mormon
Mother
Mysticism
Naked
2
Narrative of retreat
Nature
Nature-culture
Nature-human
Nature-politics
Nature-religion
Nature writing
New
One, unity
Opening
Order
Other
Pain
Patience (new)
Patriotism
Peace, pacifism, nonviolence, war (new)
Perserverance (new)
Pilgrimage
Place
Positive alternative
Power (new)
Prayer
Present
Quaker
Question
Radical (new)
Real, unreal, surreal, illusion
Reform
Refuge, retreat
Religion, sacred, holy, spiritual
Religion and politics
Religion and social - THEMES
Requires: What the situation & ideal require (new)
Resistance
Resistance - Themes
Respect
Science
Self
Service, sacrifice
Silence, stillness
Social and nature – family, community, earth
Social vision
Solitude, solitary
Song
3
Sorrow
Sound
Source
Speak (truth to power) (new)
Spirit, soul
Story
Terrorism
Time
Tranquility, peace, serenity, calm
Transformation, change in ourselves (new)
Uncertainty (new)
Vigilance
Vision
Voice of the land, listen to the land, dialogue with the land (new)
Vulnerability (new)
Walking
Whole
Wild, wilderness
Wisdom
Witness to beauty and value
Witness to loss
Wordless (new)
Yellow
4
ACCEPTANCE
…………
There are miracles in the world. Dawn. Light cresting over the Rocky Mountains.
Convergances in our lives that we do not plan, could not have imagined. Synchronous
moments when we wonder what is real, what is true, what do we fight for and what do
we simply accept. Where is there room for hope and when does hope collapse into denial?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
ACCEPTANCE
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ACTIVISM
Red
“It is a simple equation: place + people = politics.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 3
“If a sense of place can give rise to a politics of place, where might an erotics of place
lead?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 16
I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is
destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate
participation by those who saw what was coming.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
The canyons of southern Utah are giving birth to a Coyote Clan – hundreds, maybe even
thousands, of individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they are
infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails
tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 26
“We have a history in this country of environmental courage, and its roots are found in
direct contact with the beauty of the natural world that sustains us. The sacred heart of this
continent beats in the unagitated and free landscapes of North America.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 69
“This country’s wisdom still resides in its populace, in the pragmatic and generous spirits
of everyday citizens who have not forgotten their kinship with nature. They are individuals
who will forever hold the standard of the wild high, knowing in their hearts that natural
engagement is not an interlude but a daily practice, a commitment each generation must
renew in the name of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70
“What we have witnessed in the ongoing struggle to protect America’s Redrock
Wilderness is that responsive citizenship matters. Individual voices are heard, and when
collectively spoken they reverberate on canyon walls. This passion for the wild endures
and can lead to social change long after a specific piece of legislation has been forgotten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70-71
We are not separate.
We belong to a much larger community than we know.
We are here because of love.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 71
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112-113
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“These remnants of the wild, biologically intact, are precious few. We are losing ground.
No matter how much we choose to preserve the pristine through our passion, photography,
or politics, we cannot forget the simple truth: There are too many of us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
On Mary Austin: “I view her as a sister, soulmate, and a literary mentor, a woman who
inspires us toward direct engagement with the land in life as well as on the page.” She was
unafraid of political action embracing the rights of Indian people, women, and wildlands.
Mary Austin was a poet, a pioneer, and a patriot.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mary Austin’s Ghost,” Red, 166
“Political courage means caring enough to explain what is perceived at the time as
madness and staying with an idea long enough, being rooted in a place deep enough, and
telling the story widely enough to those who will listen, until it is recognized as wisdom—
wisdom reflected back to society through the rejuvenation and well-being of the next
generation who can still find wild country to walk in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
181-182
“As we step over the threshold of the twenty-first century, let us acknowledge that the
preservation of wilderness is not so much a political process as a spiritual one, that the
language of law and science used so successfully to define and defend what wilderness has
been in the past century must now be fully joined with the language of the heart to
illuminate what these lands mean to the future.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187-188
“In the decade to come, we have bills pending to designate national parks, national forests,
wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas in every western state. These bills will not translate
to the preservation of what we love if we do not engage ourselves fully in social change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 188
“We, too, can humbly raise our hands with those who have gone before and those who will
follow. Hand on rock. We remember what we have forgotten, what we can reclaim in
wildness.”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 188
Democracy is full of strike moments, when injustice rubs against justice and a
flame is carried by a man, a woman, a community, who lights a path of right action in the
name of social change.
Burning passion. A slow burn. Coals. Smoke. On our hands and knees we blow the
embers back to light. How close must we get to the source that burns to singe our souls
into action?
A book of matches. Each turn of a page. Strike moment. A fire in the mind
believing it is possible to read or paint the world differently.
The vision and match play of Chema Madoz is the endeavor of a true arsonist who
is the artist who is the activist who understands the transformative power of fire.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Strike Moment,” Red, 191
The American West is burning, millions of acres are burning. It is the summer of
2000. It is the summer of 2001. It is Sept. 11: New York City is burning; the Pentagon is
burning [later addition] with apocalyptic skies, where the sun glows red and round through
gray-black clouds. The fire is now internal, moving underground. What have we
suppressed that has led us to this flame-jumping, blazing inferno?
Strike the match.
Stare into the flame.
Dare to be burned by the heat of our own ambitious hearts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Strike Moment,” Red, 191-192 (with later addition from the
internet)
Unspoken Hunger
The canyons of southern Utah are giving birth to a Coyote Clan – hundreds, maybe
even thousands, of individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they
are infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails
tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts.
Members of the Clan are not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in
their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh louder than
anyone on the planet. And they have enormous range.
The Coyote Clan is a raucous bunch: they have drunk from desert potholes and
belched forth toads. They tell stories with such virtuosity that you’ll swear you have been
in the presence of preachers.
The Coyote Clan is also serene. They can float on their backs down the length of
any river or lose entire afternoons in the contemplation of stone.
Members of the Clan court risk and will dance on slickrock as flash floods erode
the ground beneath their feet. It doesn’t matter. They understand the earth re-creates itself
day after day. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 78
“I believe that out of an erotics of place, a politics of place is emerging. Not radical, but
conservative, a politics rooted in empathy in which we extend our notion of community, as
Aldo Leopold has urged, to include all life forms—plants, animals, rivers, and soils. The
enterprise of conservation is a revolution, and evolution of the spirit.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
> all three types of engagement
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Essay “Mardy Murie” all
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 89ff
Essay “A Patriot’s Journal,” all
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 97ff
Peter Matthiessen said “the American psyche that wants war is the same psyche that
doesn’t want wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Patriot’s Journal,” Unspoken Hunger, 108
Essay “All That Is Hidden,” all
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 115ff
Essay “The Wild Card,” all
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger 133ff
“I allow myself to struggle with the obligations of a public life and the spiritual
necessity for a private one.”
Am I an activist or an artist?
Do I stay home or do I speak out?
When Edward Abbey calls for the artist to be a critic of his or her society, do we
live on the page or do we live in the world?
It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. Otherwise,
who will be there to chart the changes?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 133-134
“We can flood Congress with our wild cards. . . . This is the kind of politics we must be
engaged in—nothing marginal, nothing peripheral, nothing inessential, not anymore.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 140
Others
“Rachel Carson has called us to action. Silent Spring is a social critique of our modern way
of life, as essential to the evolving American ideals of freedom and democracy as anything
ever written by our founding fathers.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 59
To bear testimony is to bear witness; we speak from the truth of our lives. How doe we put
our love for the land into action? This book is one model, an act of faith by writers who
believe in the power of story, a bedrock reminder of how wild nature continues to inform,
inspire, and sustain us.
--Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, Testimony, 3.
“We believe in the power of story to bypass political rhetoric and pierce the heart. We live
in the geography of hope.”
--Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, Testimony, 7
“What is means to be married to the earth, to our dreams, to community? What it means
to be married to a politics of place that can both inform and inspire us?”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 313
Our commitment to revisioning and rebuilding community is not a game. It is not us versus
them; it is not power over, or for, or against; it is a loving embrace. We must be willing to
listen in the same manner we are asking others to listen to us. As we approach the twentyfirst century as an environmental community, I hope we hold close to that, realizing the
environmental movement is a collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
The adage that we have been raised within the women's movement--the personal is
political, the political is personal--kept ringing in my mind. Struggling with that notion. As
writers, what are our obligations to a public life and the spiritual necessity for a private
one, and how do we weigh that? Am I an activist, or am I an artist? Do I stay home, or do I
speak out? What is that essential gesture that Nadine Gordimer speaks about? When
Edward Abbey calls for a writer to be a critic of his or her society, do we live on the page
or do we live in the world?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer,
my life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our communities.
Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience, shared lives in a
shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one plus one equals
three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
The environmental movement in its highest form is like water, in that it seeps into
unexpected places, rises, and fills the basins of the human heart; that it is and will always
be decentralized in its power, a power that is most appropriately found within our homes,
neighborhoods, and local communities; that this naturally infiltrates to higher, more
traditional places of power, our churches, our governments, our courts, and most slowly of
all, our corporations. I use the word “our” because we are all complicit in this world we
have created.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
Neighbors. Shared concerns. A respect for our differences and strength in what we
share. This is happening throughout America. I honestly believe this. I look to the people
who are standing their ground in the Bolsa Chica and Ballona Wetlands in the Los Angeles
Basin against tremendous opposition, billion-dollar developments, movie moguls like
Steven Spielberg, oil interests, and freeways. Look to a small group of neighbors in Yaak,
Montana, the North Woods in New England, restoration work in the prairies of the
Midwest, urban gardens, the incredible work of local land trusts to preserve and protect
what they see as critical habitat for wildlife and the human spirit—all these examples
provide models of compassion and savvy, at once.
Faith and stamina.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
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To become biologically literate, to engage with our neighbors and communities, to focus
on small-scale agriculture and commerce and support them, to realize we are deeply
aligned with the life around us—to recognize this movement of the heart and mind and
soul as a movement of love that can never be corralled.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting it Right”
I was invited by the literature department of the University of Hiroshima and the Japanese
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment to give a reading. The
newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun was sponsoring my visit. I read "The Clan of One-breasted
Women," which is the epilogue from my book Refuge, about our family's struggles and
adjustment with my mother's death from cancer and its ultimate relationship with nuclear
testing. I spoke of what it meant to grow up in a traditional Mormon home, our adherence
to strict moral principles and the subtle constraints placed on women in the name of
patriarchy. I shared how the price of obedience became too high as I watched the women
in my family die common heroic deaths. I spoke about committing civil disobedience
with other women from Utah at the Nevada Test Site, of my arrest and release as I sought
to both confront and reconcile my government's irresponsible actions. Blind obedience in
the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Hiroshima Journey,” 3
We have 13,000 members of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and assuming on a
good, cheerful day after showering well from pilgrimages to the desert, each member has a
handful of spirited friends, this is an impressive cadre of "active souls." We need to act.
We need to write letters. We need to stay optimistic and recognize the power and
authenticity of spirit that is ours. And we need to have a good time with it, calling forth
our humor as well as our savvy. We need to call for the favors and assistance of friends
and families to speak out in whatever ways with whatever gifts, talents, generosities, ideas,
plans for creative involvement they have. And we need to take the initiative. We cannot
afford the luxury of a cynical mind. We must believe in the breaking of bread together in
the name of the Wild. Let's make a pact with each other that we will engage in one small
act for wilderness a day until H.R. 1745 and S. 884 are buried. And then together, let's plan
a wonderful wake for the death of this legislation that has found its way to Washington.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Letter of Solidarity”
A friend the other day told me a story of walking up a particular ridge where a bristlecone
pine stood, one of the oldest trees on the Earth. He considered it his Elder and went to pay
his respects as he has done year after year. When he finally found his way to the tree, it had
been cut down. The body of the bristlecone pine lay on its side sawed into pieces. He stood
before the stump for some time and then pulled out his pocketknife and made a small cut
along the tip of his thumb. He let the blood drip onto the stump. These wildlands of
southern Utah deserve nothing less.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Letter of Solidarity”
Open Space of Democracy
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Patriots act -- they are not handed a piece of paper called by that same name and asked
to comply.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Thoreau wrote in his essay, “Civil Disobedience,” “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of
paper merely, but your whole influence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
It occurred to me, over the many weeks that it took me to respond to Senator Bennett's
letter, that what mattered most to me was not what I was willing to die for, but what I was
willing to give my life to. In war, death by belief is centered on principles both activated
and extinguished in the drama of a random moment. Heroes are buried. A legacy of
freedom is maintained through pain. Life by belief is centered on the day-to-day
decisions we make that are largely unseen. One produces martyrs born out of violence. The
other produces quiet citizens born out of personal commitments toward social change.
Both dwell in the hallowed ground of sacrifice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 23
Democracy invites us to take risks. It asks that we vacate the comfortable seat of certitude,
remain pliable, and act, ultimately, on behalf of the common good.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
What will we make of the life before us? How do we translate the gifts of solitary beauty
into the action required for true participatory citizenship?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 42a
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
My eyes travel around the cabin. A Presidential Medal of Freedom is perched on the
mantle of their stone fireplace. On the far wall is a piece of calligraphy, the words Mardy
spoke at the Jackson Hole High School commencement in 1974: "Give yourself the
adventure of doing what you can do, with what you have, even if you have nothing
but the adventure of trying. How much better than standing in a corner with your back to
the wall."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 52a
What I wish I could ask Mardy now is, how do we engage in the open space of
democracy in times of terror?
I believe she would send me home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
In the five years that we have been engaged in this process with SITLA, the Castle Rock
Collaboration and its partners have protected over three thousand acres and raised nearly
four million dollars. But perhaps the most important outcome has been the creation of an
atmosphere of engagement with other committed individuals who live along the
Colorado River Corridor. We are learning that a community engaged is a community
empowered.
12
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
If we listen to the land, we will know what to do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
Looking over my shoulder from the rise on the bridge, all I could see was an endless river
of people walking, many hand in hand, all side by side, peacefully, united in place with a
will for social change. Michelangelo was among them, as art students from Florence
raised replicas of his Prigioni above their heads, the unfinished sculptures of prisoners
trying to break free from the confines of stone. Machiavelli was among them, as
philosophy students from Rome carried his words: "There is nothing more difficult to take
in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of things." Leonardo da Vinci was among them, his
words carrying a particularly contemporary sting: "And by reason of their boundless
pride... there shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth or in the
waters that shall not be pursued and molested or destroyed."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
 Obviously the reference to Machiavelli calling for a new order suggests that all
radical change may not be progressive
When I returned home to Castle Valley I went for a long walk on the sage flats. “One does
not walk for peace,” I recalled Thich Nhat Hanh saying, “One walks in peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
As I look back over the story we have been living in Castle Valley, it does not begin to
convey the power and empowering nature of the process. It is through the process of
defining what we want as a town that we are becoming a real community. It is through
the act of participation that we change.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
In my private moments of despair, I am aware of the limits of my own imagination. I am
learning in Castle Valley that imaginations shared invite collaboration and collaboration
creates community. A life in association, not a life independent, is the democratic ideal.
We participate in the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
Castle Valley is one example in thousands of local narratives being written around
America. Enlivened citizenship is activated each time we knock on our neighbors' doors,
each time we sit down together and share a meal.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b-57a
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
A wild salmon is not the same as a salmon raised in a hatchery. And a prairie dog colony is
not a shooting gallery for rifle recreationists, but a culture that has evolved with the prairie
since the Pleistocene. At what point do we finally lay our bodies down to say this is no
longer acceptable?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
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We are in need of a reflective activism born out of humility, not arrogance. Reflection,
with deep time spent in the consideration of others, opens the door to becoming a
compassionate participant in the world.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
This is what our community is in need of now. Fire. Fire that wakes us up. Fire that
transforms where we are. Fire to see our way through the dark. Fire as illumination. We
witness from the front porches of our homes the exhilaration of pushing an idea over the
edge until it ignites a community, and we can never look at Parriott Mesa again without
remembering the way it was sold, the way a sign disappeared and reappeared in Arches
National Park, the way the community bought the land back through the gift of
anonymity, and the breathing space it now holds as the red rock cornerstone of Castle
Valley.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
[On Wangari Maathai] For decades, Wangari has said over and over to anyone who
would listen, "The women of Africa are carrying the environmental crisis on their backs as
they spend 8 to 10 hours a day in search of firewood to be able to cook dinner for their
children."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” letter to
Brandon Hollingshead
Together, the women of the Green Belt Movement literally gathered seeds in the
folds of their skirts and planted them in their villages. They watered them, nurtured them,
and when they were tall enough to transplant, they took them to the elementary schools
where the children became the caretakers of trees. Thousands of schools have responded.
Millions of children have participated. Green Belt forests were planted, while educating the
next generation about the perils of deforestation.
She is a beacon of passionate engagement in the name of environmental justice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Salt Lake City, UT
A gentleman who has been a diplomat for more than 50 years said, "There are no solutions
to problems, you just keep working on them because the problem keeps changing."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Golden Colorado
Other brief essays
“Bearing Witness”
“Bow to the Caribou”
Interviews
...It will take an enormous amount of time to really find out what habitation means in this
country. We're just beginning to get a taste of it. And patience. We don't need to have all
the answers right now. We may never have the answers, but as long as we keep driving the
questions, or keep finding pockets of humility, maybe it won't seem so overwhelming or so
difficult. Then maybe a rancher and an environmentalist can burn their labels and see
14
each other as neighbors. The environmental movement right now is not listening. We are
engaged in a rhetoric as strong and as aggressive as the so-called opposition. I would love
to see the whole notion of opposition dissolved, so there's no longer this shadow dance
between "us" and "them." I would love for us to listen to one another and try to say, "What
do we want as members of this community? How do we dream our future? How do we
begin to define home?" Then we would have something to build from, rather than
constantly turning one another into abstractions and stereotypes engaged in military
combativeness. I believe we all desire similar things. The real poison of our society right
now is that everything is reduced to such a simplistic level. There is no tolerance or hunger
for complexity or ambiguity. Do you want this or that? Black or white? Yes or no? It strips
us to our lowest common denominator, creating a physics that is irreconcilable just by the
nature of the polarity. As a result, we miss the richness we can bring to one another in our
diverse points of view. It is not about agreement. It is about respect.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen Interview, Listening to the Land
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
Indy: What's the current status of the Redrock Wilderness Act?
TTW: The Redrock Wilderness Bill currently before Congress, in some ways has never
had more support. But it also has never had such strong opposition. The Bush and Cheney
agenda is an energy agenda, and they'll take the wild lands for that purpose unless we are a
vigilant, responsible citizenry. All I'm asking for is a healthy, conscious discussion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: What do Westerners stand to lose?
TTW: I see it within my own family. My dad's the Marlboro man without a cigarette. He
always wears cowboy boots; I've never seen his feet. Last week he said, in response to
following the terrorist attacks in the media, "I can't wait to get back down to the desert. I
just can't stand the noise and the television any more." I think even the most conservative
westerners love this Western land the same way I do. We need to open our hearts and
minds. How do we learn to speak out of an integrity of place? How do we create that
middle ground in a world that is so often defined as black and white? It may require a new
vocabulary.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: What can we do to raise the issue to a level of national importance?
TTW: We need to remember that there are other definitions of natural resources, like
courage and beauty. Those of us who believe in the value of wilderness are going to have
to get stronger and stronger. There will be a time when speaking out about the environment
is going to be seen as anti-patriotic. Maybe we will have to create a new vocabulary. It's
not them and us, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals; it's all of us
trying to survive and live together on Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
TTW: How do we create that middle ground in a world that is so often defined as black
and white? It may require a new vocabulary.
15
Indy: Perhaps the language of red?
TTW: Yes. How do we find red in a world that is often defined in terms of black and
white? The subtleties of our own perceptions are being lost to time. There's no time to
enter the deep color of red. In a very real way, it's the color of the country that I live in, the
red rock desert of southern Utah with its red rocks, red rivers, red sand. Red is blood. It's
passion. It's the body broken open. It's love. There's danger in red. It's the color of rage, of
destruction. To see red over time is to see red as a way to transformation. I'm asking how
do we learn to live in the center of red. How do we act out of our own hearts? How do we
stand inside the integrity of our own souls? How do we speak the language of red? How
can we find and speak a language indigenous to the heart?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3-4
Indy: How do we get schools to respond to this critical need?
TTW: Up until this point, we have viewed environmental issues and education about
ecological awareness as a luxury. It's necessary that we begin to see conservation as an
integral part of our communities, our society. My hope is that we can begin to weave
conservation into the conversation about who we are in the world. "Shall we now
exterminate this thing that made us Americans?" Aldo Leopold asked in the 1920s, on the
verge of the Great Depression, the dust bowl. Leopold was brave enough to stand up for
wilderness at a time when the nation was poised for postwar buildup. We need authentic
"home work." I hope to see us weave a land ethic into every aspect of our lives, even our
concept of patriotism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 4
Indy: Yes, there's been so much talk about freedom and our shared values, but very little
talk about the greatness of the land.
TTW: Talk about symbols of freedom! Unagitated landscapes! I think it's going to become
even more powerful to us now, when we realize what kind of police state we're likely to
become. I'm hopeful, though, and I am constantly amazed. I find that some of the most
interesting things in the newspaper post-Sept. 11 are the post scripts, the asides. The other
day there was a statement by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, whose policies I
normally don't agree with. But she made a point of saying to the American people that the
national parks and the wildlife refuges were now open to the public. She pointed out that
they are powerful symbols of freedom for this nation and urged people to visit the national
parks at this dark time. Then there was a little piece about a group of lobbyists from Alaska
stranded in Washington. They were saying that the conservation community in Alaska
were trying not to refer to the wildlife refuge as Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or
ANWR. They only refer to it as the refuge. I think these are the kinds of small things that
we can do to change the discussion, to turn it into a slightly different discussion. We need
to talk about how wildness, wilderness is a deeply held value in America. Look at the
effect of the American landscape on literature. Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea;
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The power of landscape looms large when you look at
the American tradition in literature, for example.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 4-5
Indy: How do we reconcile the need to conserve wilderness when government is clamoring
to divide and conquer the land?
TTW: We need to view conservation as an act of democracy. As locals tied to the
exploitive susceptibility of the land we live on, we wind up thanking our federal
16
government for saving us from ourselves when they act to preserve wilderness. I know this
sounds like a completely idealistic statement, but I believe that a nation's appetite for
beauty transcends a state's hunger for greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 5
TL: What influence, if any, do you think such writing is having on the larger public
debates about environmental matters?
TTW: Writers who see the land for its wisdom such as Aldo Leopold, A Sand County
Almanac, and Rachel Carson, Silent Spring made an enormous contribution to public
awareness, even policy changes in the government agencies and the establishment of
NEPA and the EPA. Writers such as Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, I know for
myself, inspired my own thinking about place, alongside Peter Matthiessen, Simon Ortiz,
Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard. The diversity of writers today who are not afraid to
articulate the truth of our lives, the depth of our humanity, writers such as Denise Chavez,
Benjamin Saenz, Chuck Bowden, Gary Nabham, Susan Tweit, Tony Nelson, Linda Hogan,
Naomi Shihab Nye, Pico Iyer, Rachel Bagby, too many to name, are giving us a new
language to see the world with, new stories born out of individual landscapes that enable
us to see the world whole and extend our notion of community to include all life forms,
plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. And these writings in all their eloquence
are also political.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
TL: I suppose it is fair to say that most people do not equate Mormon culture with
environmentalism. Yet you are very forthright in being both a Mormon and an
environmentalist. What do you see as the connection between the two?
TTW: It is true, many people would say "Mormon environmentalist" is an oxymoron, but
that is only because of the stereotype and veneer that is attached to the religion. Our history
is a history of community created in the name of belief. If you go back and look at the
teachings of Brigham Young, his journals and sermons, they are filled with very strong
notions of sustainability. Early brethren of the Mormon Church gave rousing speeches on
the perils of overgrazing and the misappropriation of water in the desert. Unfortunately,
much of this ethic has been lost as the Mormon Church has entered modernity. Like so
many other facets of American culture it has assumed a corporate and consumptive stance
with an emphasis on growth and business. But I believe there is change inside the
membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. Bill Smart, another
Mormon, and I put together an anthology of Mormon essays that celebrate community and
landscape, with Gibbs Smith, a Utah publisher. We asked around 40 members of the
Church in good standing, if they would write a piece about how their spiritual views have
enhanced their views of nature, or conversely, how nature has added to their sense of
Mormon theology. What emerged was an evocative testament New Genesis: A Mormon
Reader on Land and Community, a very diverse (and I must say surprising in its content),
collection of wide-ranging ideas, that we hope will be a touchstone for other Mormons to
contemplate their relationship to place. It could be said that the environmental movement
in the past has been a political movement. I believe it is becoming a spiritual one. Native
peoples have always known this. It is my hope that my own people within the Mormon
culture will remember what our own roots are to the American West and the responsibility
that comes with settlement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
17
I think about Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a
writer, I believe that it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social
injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that
capacity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, How do we find
refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with
my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a
sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in
community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place
translate into a politics of place? And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning
inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1-2
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a
writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a
community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing
is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of
my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing
about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse -- to try to make sense of the world, to try
to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries
of what is acceptable.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live
among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community,
to include all life forms -- plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings -- then I believe
a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to
our neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are
not home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay
put ... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't
know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living
a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of
true desolation. I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the
MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have
not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a
place. And she sounded the alarm.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
I think that what I was talking about was that as a woman growing up in a Mormon
tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, we were taught -- and we are still led to believe -- that the
most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism
ultimately takes our souls. So I think it's this larger issue of what is acceptable and what is
not; where do we maintain obedience and law and where do we engage in civil
disobedience -- where we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No,
this is no longer appropriate behavior." For me, that was a decision that I had to make and
did make personally, to commit civil disobedience together with many other individuals
18
from Utah and around the country and the world, in saying no to nuclear testing. Many
people don't realize that we have been testing nuclear bombs underground right up until
1992. President Bush at that time placed a moratorium on all testing in this country and
President Clinton has maintained that.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 4
London: In this culture we tend to draw very distinct lines between the spiritual world and
the political world. And yet you don't seem to see any separation between them. You've
said that for you it's all one -- the spiritual and the political, your home life and your
landscape.
Williams: I think we learn that lesson well by observing the natural world. There is no
separation. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about -- the
patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.
Somewhere along the line we have become segregated in the way we think about things
and become compartmentalized. Again, I think that contributes to our sense of isolation
and our lack of a whole vision of the world -- seeing the world whole, even holy. I can't
imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would
be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
So I love the interrelatedness of things. We were just observing out at Point Reyes
a whole colony of elephant seals and it was so deeply beautiful, and it was so deeply
spiritual. It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak
of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. How the males, the bulls, have this
capacity to dive a mile deep, can you imagine? And along the way they sleep while they
dive. And I kept thinking, "And what are their dreams?" And the fact that they can stay
under water for up to two hours. Think of the kind of ecological mind that an elephant seal
holds. Then looking at the females, these unbelievably luxurious creatures that were just
sunbathing on this crescent beach with the waves breaking out beyond them. Then they
would just ripple out into the water in these blue-black bodies, just merging with the water.
It was the most erotic experience I've ever seen. We were there for hours. No separation
between the spiritual and the physical. It was all one. I had the sense that we had the
privilege of witnessing other -- literally another culture, that extension of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
London: How do we address this in our personal lives?
Williams: I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los
Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of
questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods. How do we want to govern
ourselves? How do we want to regulate development. We've just started an Emigration
Canyon watershed council. We had our first meeting in our living room last week. And
what was our goal? Simply to talk to each other, because there is a huge rift between those
people in the canyon who want more development, those people in the canyon who want
less, and the way that we are bound on this issue is the water -- how much water we have.
So I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle. Maybe that is one of the places,
particularly in the arid West, we can begin thinking about these things.
London: Trying to find common ground.
Williams: Absolutely. And also respecting each other's differences and then figuring out
how we can proceed given those different points of view.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 9
19
London: With all the talk about the ecological crisis we are facing now, environmental
policies seem to be losing ground. How is it that such a big gap has developed between
what we say we value on the one hand and what we legislate on the other?
Williams: I feel we have to begin standing our ground in the places we love. I think that
we have to demand that concern for the land, concern for the Earth, and this extension of
community that we've been speaking of, is not marginal -- in the same way that women's
rights are not marginal, in the same way that rights for children are not marginal. There is
no separation between the health of human beings and the health of the land. It is all part of
a compassionate view of the world. How we take that view and match it with what we see
in Congress with the decimations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act, child care... I think it's an outrage. You and I have spoken about what we
can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have to
shatter our complacency and become "active souls," as Thoreau puts it, and be prepared to
engage in aware -- that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't
think we have any choice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 10
When I met Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet, in Mexico -- it was a
symposium on landscape and culture -- we were talking about this revolution, this
evolution of the spirit. As you know, he is an extraordinary poet who wrote True
Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and had been involved for years in the anti-apartheid
movement, was imprisoned for seven, and he knows the shadow of the active soul. I
remember asking him, "What can we do if we are interested in this revolution, this
evolution of the spirit?" And he looked at me, dead-eye center, and he said, "You
Americans, you have mastered the art of living with the unacceptable."
I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the
boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend
our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination
that can take us into the future.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 10
She lists changes in the West. “all these lands are at risk . . . and that’s one of the things
that fuels my work as a writer. Not so much as a polemic, I hope, but writing out of a sense
of loss, a sense of grief and a sense of joy, because I think passion encompasses that full
spectrum of joy and sorrow. That passion creates engagement. And I think that all we can
ask as writers is for engagement in our life and on the page.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Siporin Interview, WAL, 101
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
“This was a curious juxtaposition in my own life. On one hand, I was completely
immersed in the idea of Eros and nature, writing out of the body, wanting in some way to
respond to the beauty of these sacred lands of the Colorado Plateau through language. And
then on the other hand, I was asking, What can we do to stop this legislation? As a writer
how can I be of use? . . . These are the kinds of confluences we experience as writers and
yet they were both the same thing—a love of land. A response to home.”
20
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 17-18
(On op-ed piece in the New York Times): “How can we as writers serve the culture in a
long term sense and in a short term sense? I felt my family was under siege; I responded.
It’s immediate. One is held accountable. It was the only weapon I had against my senators
Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett and my representatives Jim Hanson and Enid Green Waldholz,
among them. Would they understand Desert Quartet?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 18-19
“I want to see how we might redefine the erotic, how an erotics of place might lead to a
politics of place. Ultimately, it’s about the love we fear. We are so afraid of loving the
Earth, loving each other, loving ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 131
“I have made a personal commitment to stop nuclear testing. My pen is my weapon, and
as an act of hope or ritual, I choose to cross the line and commit civil disobedience. . . .
You do what you can on whatever level you can, and you do what you do best. And by the
power of our minds and our own hearts, we can write the world. This is about passion and
presence. . . . Our obligation as writers is to make people uncomfortable, to push the
borders of what is possible.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
Told of the nightmare. “Suddenly, my poetics of place evolved into a politics of place. It
was then that I made the decision to write Refuge. And once I crossed that line—
physically, at the Nevada test site, as well as psychologically in recognizing that the price
of obedience is too high—I could never go back . . . back to the same place in the family,
the same place within the Mormon culture.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
This is my place. It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay
home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community?
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because
you’re not going to go away. It also means making a commitment to bear witness, and
engaging in ‘casserole diplomacy’ by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the
children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitments are real.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322-323
Open Space of Democracy (“Commencement,” “Engagement,” “Ground Truthing”
My eyes travel around the cabin. A Presidential Medal of Freedom is perched on the
mantle of their stone fireplace. On the far wall is a piece of calligraphy, the words Mardy
spoke at the Jackson Hole High School commencement in 1974: "Give yourself the
adventure of doing what you can do, with what you have, even if you have nothing but the
adventure of trying. How much better than standing in a corner with your back to the
wall."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 52a
21
ANGER, RAGE
…
Leap
“The stakes are high. High on the ridge. Pull the stakes. One by one by one. Count your
many blessings see what God has done. Take the wooden stakes out of the Earth into our
hands one vertical the other horizontal tie them together with orange plastic tape turn them
into crosses plant them in the soil see how rage grows see the rage flies dragonflies be
calm they say sit at the table they say come into consensus they say with the power vested
in them they say oh say can you see my body a clear cut my voice a serpent wrapped
around the tree the power vested in me like a fire burning.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 126
Red
“The redrock desert of southern Utah teaches me over and over again: red endures. Let it
not be my rage or anger that endures, but a passion for the bloodroot country of my
burning soul that survives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 138
Refuge
“We spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth
have been mined.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 10
“Restraint is the steel partition between a rational mind and a violent one. I knew rage. It
was fire in my stomach with no place to go.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 12
“I want the walls down. Mother’s rage over our inability to face her illness has burned
away my defenses. I am left with guilt, guilt I cannot tolerate because it has no courage. I
hurt Mother though my own desire to be cured.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 76
“I stood at the side of my mother’s casket, enraged at our inability to let the dead be dead.
And I wept over the hollowness of our rituals.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 235
“One Patriot”
“Call it sacred rage, a rage grounded in the understanding that all life is intertwined. And
we can come to know and continue to learn from the grace of wild things as they hold an
organic wisdom that sustains peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
Others
To wonder. To contemplate that which is never lost but continues to move outward
forever, however faint, until it is overcome by something else.
To wonder. To throw pebbles in pools and watch the concentric circles that reach the shore
in waves. Waves of water. Waves of electricity. Illumination. Imagination. To say "I love
22
you" one day and shout with rage on another. Our words are still moving, churning; this
sea of spoken languages oscillates, around us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on
moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth
and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it
as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an
acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true
source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of
personal engagement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
[Discussion with Gale Norton, Secretary of the Interior] What I remember is saying how
weary we all are in the American West, that we feel we have no say, that public process
has been thwarted in the name of oil and gas priorities. She spoke of their community
collaboration projects and how we had to find ways to balance the various demands on the
land. She promised to send me a copy of their brochure (which she did). We were both on
edge. I fear I went into a mad rant, but have to trust some part of me held back my wild
frustration in an attempt to be gracious and respectful of the office she holds. The space
between us was vast and tense and palpable. We were both women of the west, from the
west, Colorado and Utah. Neighbors. What shaped our different views of landscape? What
would we agree on? And at what point in our development did we forge such contrary
allegiances? This is the conversation I wish we could have had, that maybe one day we can
have. I would be curious to know what we would agree on. Instead, the awkward silences
exposed both of our ideologies, our beliefs, our hopes. The difference was one of power.
She didn't have to talk to me. I was desperate to talk to her.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Salt Lake City, UT
Interviews
TTW: How do we create that middle ground in a world that is so often defined as black
and white? It may require a new vocabulary.
Indy: Perhaps the language of red?
TTW: Yes. How do we find red in a world that is often defined in terms of black and
white? The subtleties of our own perceptions are being lost to time. There's no time to
enter the deep color of red. In a very real way, it's the color of the country that I live in, the
red rock desert of southern Utah with its red rocks, red rivers, red sand. Red is blood. It's
passion. It's the body broken open. It's love. There's danger in red. It's the color of rage,
of destruction. To see red over time is to see red as a way to transformation. I'm asking
how do we learn to live in the center of red. How do we act out of our own hearts? How do
we stand inside the integrity of our own souls? How do we speak the language of red?
How can we find and speak a language indigenous to the heart?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3-4
London: How central is your Mormon faith to your identity as a writer -- has it had a big
influence on your work and ideas?
Williams: It's hard to answer because, again, I don't think we can separate our upbringing
from what we are. I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which
23
I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep. There are other
things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's
not just peculiar to Mormonism -- it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies
our creativity. So the question that I'm constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of?
I think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of
growth. I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear -- of
women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
London: With all the talk about the ecological crisis we are facing now, environmental
policies seem to be losing ground. How is it that such a big gap has developed between
what we say we value on the one hand and what we legislate on the other?
Williams: I feel we have to begin standing our ground in the places we love. I think that
we have to demand that concern for the land, concern for the Earth, and this extension of
community that we've been speaking of, is not marginal -- in the same way that women's
rights are not marginal, in the same way that rights for children are not marginal. There is
no separation between the health of human beings and the health of the land. It is all part of
a compassionate view of the world. How we take that view and match it with what we see
in Congress with the decimations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the
Clean Water Act, child care... I think it's an outrage. You and I have spoken about what
we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have
to shatter our complacency and become "active souls," as Thoreau puts it, and be prepared
to engage in aware -- that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't
think we have any choice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 10
He is unafraid of his anger. His views can be militant and compassionate at once.
Author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, he unravels
hope, asks us to liberate ourselves from these expectations. The students are completely
riveted. Some are uncomfortable. "If you want to keep someone active, give them love,
not hope...."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
ANGER, RAGE
24
ANIMISM
Refuge
The pulse of the Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island’s shores, becomes
the force wearing against my mother’s body And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing
their way toward quiet bays on the island, I recall watching Mother sleep, imagining the
dreams that were encircling her, wondering what she knows that I must learn for myself.
The light changes, Antelope Island is blue. Mother awakened and I looked away.
Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is my mother’s body floating in
uncertainty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 64
“The heartbeats I felt in the womb—two heartbeats, at once, my mother’s and my own—
are heartbeats of the land. All of life drums and beats, at once, sustaining a rhythm audible
only to the spirit. I can drum my heartbeat back into the Earth, beating, hearts beating my
hands on the Earth—like a ruffed grouse on a long, beating, hearts beating—like a bittern
in the marsh, beating, hearts beating. My hands on the Earth beating, heart beating. I drum
back my return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 85
“First stars appear. A crescent moon. I throw down my sleeping bag. The stillness of the
desert instructs me like a trail of light over water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
Dad: “Politicians don’t understand that the land, the water, the air, all have minds of their
own. I understand it because I work with the elements every day. Our livelihood depends
on it. . . . Sure, this lake has a mind, it cares nothing for ours.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 139
“There is something unnerving about my solitary travels around the northern stretches of
Great Salt Lake. I am never entirely at ease because I am aware of its will. Its mood can
change in minutes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“We toast to marriage and the indomitable spirit of Great Salt Lake.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 153
I lay out these ten sections on the flat granite rocks I am sitting on. The sun
threatens to dry them. But I wait for the birds. Within minutes, Clark’s nutcrackers and
gray jays join me. I suck on oranges as the mountains begin to work on me.
This is why I always return. This is why I can always go home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 160
“The way I look at it, John,” Brooke said. “We’re never going to figure it all out, so we
might as well acknowledge the intangibles. Who knows, maybe these trees do have souls.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 195
“It was a dreamscape where the will of the land overtakes you. I felt as though we were
standing under the wing of a great blue heron.”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 201
“Brooke and I slip our red canoe into Half-Moon Bay. Great Salt Lake accepts us like a
lover.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
Her grandmother Mimi. “She was not only fascinated by energy, but obsessed by it—how
energy is used and expelled, conserved and stored, wasted, and recycled. Much of her
philosophy of life resided in her belief in an open system of energy, not closed, why she
saw the Earth as alive not dead, and why she believed the Universe was similarly
constructed. It is also why she believed ‘her energy’ would continue after she died.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 312-313
Unspoken Hunger
“The umbilical cord between man and earth has not been severed here. The Maasai pasture
their cattle next to leopard and lion. They know the songs of grasses and the script of
snakes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 4
Interviews
“I find my spirituality in the connectedness of all life. Everything is endowed with its own
spirit. I was taught there was a spirit world that was created before this Earth and that it
exists now, and therefore all life is sacred.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 131
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ANTICIPATION
“I know the subtleties of place. A horned lizard buried in the sand cannot miss my eyes,
because I anticipate his.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 9
“As we advance closer and closer, the anticipation of seeing rhinoceros is like crossing the
threshold of a dream.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 11
I write from the stillness of night anticipating--always anticipating.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
Expect anything.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
ANTICIPATION
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ART
Damien Hirst, one of the artists exhibited in "Sensation" writes, "Art is about life.
There isn't anything else." He goes on to say, "Art is dangerous because it doesn't have a
definable function. I think that is what people are afraid of."
I agree with him. Art is the embodiment of an idea and that idea is articulated
through image, color, texture, and composition. It is a language not of words but
impressions, sensations, feelings, emotions that are registered in the body. Of course, art
can be extremely intellectual, conceptual, and abstract, but even so, it evokes a visceral
response, one that bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. The simplistic response is "I like
it" or "I don't like it."
But what happens if we allow ourselves to enter a work of art, to watch a painting
as one would watch a landscape, not simply look at it, but experience it as something
dynamic, note how the light shifts, how the surface changes, how new details and nuances
are revealed over time? I like to believe art is as alive as we are, that we can engage in a
dialogue with a painting, a piece of sculpture, or music.
To interact with art takes time, asks us to slow down and open our minds to new
possibilities, not simply project our own opinions. Art invites us to listen to other voices,
other points of view. I believe art requires a certain degree of openness on the part of both
the artist and the viewer. It is deeply subjective.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 2-3
ART
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ART AND ACTIVISM – THEMES
The collage of her writing
“I have added to this mix of essays, congressional testimony, newspaper clippings, and
journals entries, to create both a chronology and collage for the reader, to feel the swell of
a community trying to speak on behalf of wild places that are threatened by development
or legislation in the United States Congress.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 9
The obligation of activism
I think about Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a
writer, I believe that it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social
injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that
capacity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1
The adage that we have been raised within the women's movement--the personal is
political, the political is personal--kept ringing in my mind. Struggling with that notion. As
writers, what are our obligations to a public life and the spiritual necessity for a private
one, and how do we weigh that? Am I an activist, or am I an artist? Do I stay home, or do I
speak out? What is that essential gesture that Nadine Gordimer speaks about? When
Edward Abbey calls for a writer to be a critic of his or her society, do we live on the page
or do we live in the world?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Epiphany
Questions about art and activism
“I allow myself to struggle with the obligations of a public life and the spiritual
necessity for a private one.”
Am I an activist or an artist?
Do I stay home or do I speak out?
When Edward Abbey calls for the artist to be a critic of his or her society, do we
live on the page or do we live in the world?
It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. Otherwise,
who will be there to chart the changes?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 133-134
The adage that we have been raised within the women's movement--the personal is
political, the political is personal--kept ringing in my mind. Struggling with that notion. As
writers, what are our obligations to a public life and the spiritual necessity for a private
one, and how do we weigh that? Am I an activist, or am I an artist? Do I stay home, or do I
speak out? What is that essential gesture that Nadine Gordimer speaks about? When
Edward Abbey calls for a writer to be a critic of his or her society, do we live on the page
or do we live in the world?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Epiphany
“This was a curious juxtaposition in my own life. On one hand, I was completely
immersed in the idea of Eros and nature, writing out of the body, wanting in some way to
respond to the beauty of these sacred lands of the Colorado Plateau through language. And
then on the other hand, I was asking, What can we do to stop this legislation? As a
29
writer how can I be of use? . . . These are the kinds of confluences we experience as
writers and yet they were both the same thing—a love of land. A response to home.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 17-18
(On op-ed piece in the New York Times): “How can we as writers serve the culture in a
long term sense and in a short term sense? I felt my family was under siege; I responded.
It’s immediate. One is held accountable. It was the only weapon I had against my
senators Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett and my representatives Jim Hanson and Enid Green
Waldholz, among them. Would they understand Desert Quartet?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 18-19
I think about Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a
writer, I believe that it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social
injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that
capacity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, How do we find
refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with
my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a
sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in
community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place
translate into a politics of place? And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning
inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1-2
Artistic life and activist life the same
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer,
my life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our communities.
Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience, shared lives in a
shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one plus one equals
three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Epiphany
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a
writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a
community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing
is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of
my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing
about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse -- to try to make sense of the world, to
try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the
boundaries of what is acceptable.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
30
As a writer I am interested in relations, deep relations, the patterns that emerge through a
conscious life, through a committed life. I am interested in collaboration, the alchemical
marriage that exists when seemingly disparate elements merge. Call it friction by fire. One
plus one equals three. Something new is created much more than the isolation of the
separated two. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Epiphany
Art AS activism
“I have made a personal commitment to stop nuclear testing. My pen is my weapon, and
as an act of hope or ritual, I choose to cross the line and commit civil disobedience. . . .
You do what you can on whatever level you can, and you do what you do best. And by the
power of our minds and our own hearts, we can write the world. This is about passion and
presence. . . . Our obligation as writers is to make people uncomfortable, to push the
borders of what is possible.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
TL: Your work is part of what seems to be a renaissance in the genre of nature writing.
Why do you think this renaissance is occurring, if you think it is?
TTW: I think there has always been a strong tradition in American letters of place-based
literature, literature that sees landscape as character. Look at Melville, Thoreau, Emerson,
Dickinson, Whitman of the nineteenth century and in this century, Mary Austin writing
about the desert, Willa Cather writing about the prairies, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck
honoring the land in their novels and short stories. The list goes on and on, poets, too. W.S.
Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver. Is this to be called "Nature Writing?" If there is a
"renaissance" in the genre as you suggest with contemporary writers particularly in the
American West, perhaps it is because we are chronicling the losses of the exploitation we
are seeing, that we are trying to grapple with "an ethic of place" and what that means to our
communities in all their diversity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
TL: What influence, if any, do you think such writing is having on the larger public
debates about environmental matters?
TTW: Writers who see the land for its wisdom such as Aldo Leopold, A Sand County
Almanac, and Rachel Carson, Silent Spring made an enormous contribution to public
awareness, even policy changes in the government agencies and the establishment of
NEPA and the EPA. Writers such as Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, I know for
myself, inspired my own thinking about place, alongside Peter Matthiessen, Simon Ortiz,
Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard. The diversity of writers today who are not afraid to
articulate the truth of our lives, the depth of our humanity, writers such as Denise Chavez,
Benjamin Saenz, Chuck Bowden, Gary Nabham, Susan Tweit, Tony Nelson, Linda Hogan,
Naomi Shihab Nye, Pico Iyer, Rachel Bagby, too many to name, are giving us a new
language to see the world with, new stories born out of individual landscapes that enable
us to see the world whole and extend our notion of community to include all life forms,
plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. And these writings in all their eloquence
are also political.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
I believe in the power of imagination to carry us into new terrain; it is why the arts are so
powerful in creating social change.
31
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
Crossing the line from poetry to politics
Told of the nightmare. “Suddenly, my poetics of place evolved into a politics of place. It
was then that I made the decision to write Refuge. And once I crossed that line—
physically, at the Nevada test site, as well as psychologically in recognizing that the price
of obedience is too high—I could never go back . . . back to the same place in the family,
the same place within the Mormon culture.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
Wild words of passionate participation
I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is
destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate
participation by those who saw what was coming.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
Example of activist artist
On Mary Austin: “I view her as a sister, soulmate, and a literary mentor, a woman who
inspires us toward direct engagement with the land in life as well as on the page.” She
was unafraid of political action embracing the rights of Indian people, women, and
wildlands. Mary Austin was a poet, a pioneer, and a patriot.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mary Austin’s Ghost,” Red, 166
Writing the world differently
Democracy is full of strike moments, when injustice rubs against justice and a
flame is carried by a man, a woman, a community, who lights a path of right action in
the name of social change.
Burning passion. A slow burn. Coals. Smoke. On our hands and knees we blow the
embers back to light. How close must we get to the source that burns to singe our souls
into action?
A book of matches. Each turn of a page. Strike moment. A fire in the mind
believing it is possible to read or paint the world differently.
The vision and match play of Chema Madoz is the endeavor of a true arsonist who
is the artist who is the activist who understands the transformative power of fire.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Strike Moment,” Red, 191
Writing out of grief and joy from engagement
She lists changes in the West. “all these lands are at risk . . . and that’s one of the things
that fuels my work as a writer. Not so much as a polemic, I hope, but writing out of a
sense of loss, a sense of grief and a sense of joy, because I think passion encompasses
that full spectrum of joy and sorrow. That passion creates engagement. And I think that
all we can ask as writers is for engagement in our life and on the page.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Siporin Interview, WAL, 101
Bypassing political rhetoric
“We believe in the power of story to bypass political rhetoric and pierce the heart. We live
in the geography of hope.”
--Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, Testimony, 7
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Poetry and politics
“In Silent Spring we . . . witness how a confluence of poetry and politics with sound
science can create an ethical stance toward life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
Literature of hope
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
“We believe in the power of story to bypass political rhetoric and pierce the heart. We live
in the geography of hope.”
--Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, Testimony, 7
ART AND ACTIVISM – THEMES
33
ATTENTION
“The burden of a newcomer is to pay attention.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 5
Pay attention. Listen. We are most alive when discovering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
In the open space of democracy, we are listening -- ears alert -- we are watching -- eyes
open -- registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private;
some are public. Our oscillations between local, national, and global gestures map the full
range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to
what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
ATTENTION
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BALANCE, EQUILIBRIUM
“To find one’s own equilibrium,” he tells me this morning by the river. “That is
what I want to learn.”
He finds rocks that stand on their own and bear the weight of others. An exercise in
balance and form. Downriver, I watch him place a thin slab of sandstone on a rock
pedestal, perfectly poised. He continues placing pebbles on top, testing the balance. In
another sculpture, he leans two flat rocks against each other like hands about to pray.
The stillness of stones, their silence, is a rest not against the music of the river.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 150
“The wide-open vistas that sustain our souls, the depth of silence that pushes us toward
sanity, return us to a kind of equilibrium. We stand steady on Earth. The external space I
see is the internal space I feel.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
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BEAUTY
Red
“I never forget I inhabit the desert, the harsh, brutal beauty of skin and bones.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 5
“The landscape that makes you vulnerable also makes you strong. This is the bedrock of
southern Utah’s beauty: its chameleon nature according to light and weather and season
encourages us to make peace with our own contradictory nature. The trickster quality of
the canyons is Coyote’s cachet.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 24
Coyote Clan. “beauty is not found in the excessive but in what is lean and spare and
subtle.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 26
“It is humbling living here, exposed to the elements of wind, water, and heat. There is no
protection in the desert. We are vulnerable. It is a landscape of extremes. I find myself
mirroring them: hot, cold, wet, dry. The challenge is to live in the midst of so much
beauty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 151
“In this country, wind is the architect of beauty, movement in the midst of peace. This is
what I seek as a writer. Art is created through the collision of ideas, forces that shape,
sculpt, and define thought. There is a physicality to beauty, to any creative process.
Perhaps an index to misery is when we no longer perceive beauty—that which stirs the
heart—or have lost a willingness to embrace change. Does the wind harass sandstone or
caress it? . . . There is a peculiar patience to both wind and rock, alongside a flashpoint of
the fleeting and the eternal.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 153
Unspoken Hunger
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
Open Space of Democracy
What does the open space of democracy look like?
In the open space of democracy there is room for dissent.
In the open space of democracy there is room for differences.
In the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the
wealth of our communities. We remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it.
Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of
36
poverty. The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be
human.
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our
survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but
developed out of a reverence for life.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
Beauty is presence and it resides in the Brooks Range. . . . These are not mountains but
ramparts of raw creation. The retreat o gods. Crags, cirques, and glaciers sing hymns to ice.
Talus slopes in grays and taupes become the marbled papers, creased and folded, inside
prayer books.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 38a
Subhankar Banerjee has become, unwittingly, a celebrity photographer who bears the
distinction of being censored by the United States government. For what? The threat of
beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 41b
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our survival as a
species.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 41b
What will we make of the life before us? How do we translate the gifts of solitary beauty
into the action required for true participatory citizenship?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 42a
Beauty is another word for God.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
I hear Walt Whitman’s voice once again. “The quality of Being . . . is the lesson of nature.”
Raw, wild beauty is a deeply held American value. It is its own declaration of
independence. Equality is experienced through humility. Liberty is expressed through the
simple act of wandering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a-b
On this magical night, we watch in wonder and awe as young people climb, carrying wood
on their backs, and lay down their burdens, striking the match, blowing on embers, fanning
the flames with great faith and joy. Fire. Fire in freefall, over the cliff, reminding us all
what is primal and fleeting. We cannot know what lies ahead. We may be unsure how to
bring our prayers forward. But on this night in the desert, we celebrate this cascading river
of beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
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BIOCENTRISM, ECOCENTRISM
“Oral tradition reminds one of community and community in the Native American sense
encompasses all life forms: people, land, and creatures. Barry Lopez extends this notion
when he says, ‘The correspondence between the interior landscape and exterior landscape
is story.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 135
There are those within the academy who have recently criticized ‘the wilderness
idea’ as a holdover from our colonial past, a remnant of Calvinist tradition that separates
human beings from the natural world and ignores concerns of indigenous people. They
suggest that wilderness advocates are deceiving themselves, that they are merely holding
on to a piece of America’s past, that they are devoted to an illusory and ‘static past,’ that
they are apt to ‘adopt too high a standard for what counts as ‘natural.”’ These scholars see
themselves as one who ‘have inherited the wilderness idea’ and are responding as ‘EuroAmerican men’ within a ‘cultural legacy . . . patriarchal Western civilization in its current
postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.’
I hardly know what that means.
If wilderness is a ‘human construct,’ how do we take it out of the abstract, and into
the real? How do we begin to extend our notion of community to include all life-forms so
that these political boundaries will no longer be necessary? How can that which nurtures
evolution, synonymous with adaptation and change, be considered static? Whom do we
trust in matters of compassion and reverence for life?
I believe that consideration of wilderness as an idea and wilderness as a place must
begin with conscience.
I come back to Leopold’s notion of ‘intellectual humility,’ We are not alone on this
planet, even though our behavior at times suggests otherwise. Our minds are meaningless
in the face of one perfect avalanche or flash flood or forest fire. Our desires are put to rest
when we surrender to a grizzly bear, a rattlesnake, or goshawk defending its nest. To step
aside is an act of submission, to turn back an act of admission, that other beings can and
will take precedence when we meet them on their own wild terms. The manic pace of our
modern lives can be brought into balance by simply giving in to the silence of the desert,
the pounding of a Pacific surf, the darkness and brilliance of a night sky far away from a
city.
Wilderness is a place of humility.
Humility is a place of wilderness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
179-181
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
38
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
“the Navajo culture sent me back home to my own. There are similarities, a strong family
structure reinforced through generational storytelling, a keen belief in the power of healing,
but there are also marked differences. I had to come to terms with the fact that in Mormon
culture, or any Christian religion for that matter, we are taught that human beings as having
dominion over the land. This is one of the things that has led to my own estrangement from
orthodoxy. Most Indigenous People do not view their relationship toward the earth this
way. They see themselves as a part of nature with a sense of kinship extended to all forms
of life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
LEAP is an exploration through Paradise and Hell into the Garden of Delights where the
middle path becomes a path of joyful discovery, where intellectual humility can be found
in relationship toward all living things. Curiosity replaces guilt. We find ourselves in
dialogue with community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 2
JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and
earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but
rather the culture of modernity."
TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was
speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I
think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in
correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of
the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying
that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're
retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very
positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered.
That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but
on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all
know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
Reverence for life.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
What are we willing to give our lives to if not the perpetuation of the sacred? Can we
continue to stand together in our collective wisdom and say, these particular lands are
inviolable, deserving protection by law and the inalienable right of safe passage for all
beings that dwell here? Wilderness designation is the promise of this hope held in trust.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
The open space of democracy provides justice for all living things -- plants, animals,
rocks, and rivers, as well as human beings.
39
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
This is not simply a story of not-in-my-backyard. It is the unfolding tale of how a small
community in the desert is rising to its own defense, saying, we believe we have a stake in
the future of our own community, which we choose to define beyond our own
boundaries of time and space and species.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
Are we ready for the next evolutionary leap—to recognize the restoration of democracy
as the restoration of liberty and justice for all species, not just our own? To be in the
service of something beyond ourselves—to be in the presence of something other than
ourselves, together—this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal
isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59a
BIOCENTRISM, ECOCENTRISM
40
BIOREGIONALISM
What are we to do?
I turn to my own small perspective, a perspective that focuses on the place where I
live and love, to the harvest moon casting blue light over the desert, where color still
registers on the red cliff face of sandstone. I can’t sleep. On my back on our porch, I watch
the moon with my binoculars for hours, and think about the miracle of life, simply that.
Earth is our charismatic leader, the moon, the mountain lion who slips into the layers of
sandstone like a passing shadow.
In these moments, I am flushed with hope and most importantly, faith. Faith in
almost 100 people in the valley where we live showing up to a potluck to discuss the future
of our town of 200 people. One hundred people talking about how they feel about
development, what kind and how much, how we might designate an area in partnership
with the Division of Wildlife Resources for the deer, recognizing where we live now is
their winter range.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
To become biologically literate, to engage with our neighbors and communities, to focus
on small-scale agriculture and commerce and support them, to realize we are deeply
aligned with the life around us—to recognize this movement of the heart and mind and
soul as a movement of love that can never be corralled.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
...It will take an enormous amount of time to really find out what habitation means in this
country. We're just beginning to get a taste of it. And patience. We don't need to have all
the answers right now. We may never have the answers, but as long as we keep driving the
questions, or keep finding pockets of humility, maybe it won't seem so overwhelming or so
difficult. Then maybe a rancher and an environmentalist can burn their labels and see each
other as neighbors. The environmental movement right now is not listening. We are
engaged in a rhetoric as strong and as aggressive as the so-called opposition. I would love
to see the whole notion of opposition dissolved, so there's no longer this shadow dance
between "us" and "them." I would love for us to listen to one another and try to say, "What
do we want as members of this community? How do we dream our future? How do we
begin to define home?" Then we would have something to build from, rather than
constantly turning one another into abstractions and stereotypes engaged in military
combativeness. I believe we all desire similar things. The real poison of our society right
now is that everything is reduced to such a simplistic level. There is no tolerance or hunger
for complexity or ambiguity. Do you want this or that? Black or white? Yes or no? It strips
us to our lowest common denominator, creating a physics that is irreconcilable just by the
nature of the polarity. As a result, we miss the richness we can bring to one another in our
diverse points of view. It is not about agreement. It is about respect.
--Terry Tempest Williams. interview by Derrick Jensen, from Listening to the Land:
conversations about nature, culture, and Eros. Sierra Club Books, 1995.
Pete Seeger says, “The world is going to be saved by people saving their own homes.” I
believe him.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
41
This is a town in the heart of rural Utah that believes we can begin to live differently, that
the preservation of one’s homeland is the preservation of the planet.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
In our increasingly fundamentalist country, we have to remember what is fundamental:
gravity -- what draws us to a place and keeps us there, like love, like kinship. When we
commit to a particular place, a certain element of choice is removed. We begin to see the
world whole instead of fractured. Long-term strategies replace short-term gains. We
inform one another and become an educated public that responds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others.
This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be
loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is
all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the
presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live
among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community,
to include all life forms -- plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings -- then I believe
a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to
our neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are
not home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay
put ... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't
know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living
a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of
true desolation. I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the
MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have
not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a
place. And she sounded the alarm.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
London: How do we address this in our personal lives?
Williams: I think that it's too much to take on the world. It's too much to take on Los
Angeles. All I can do is to go back home to the canyon where we live and ask the kinds of
questions that can make a difference in our neighborhoods. How do we want to govern
ourselves? How do we want to regulate development. We've just started an Emigration
Canyon watershed council. We had our first meeting in our living room last week. And
what was our goal? Simply to talk to each other, because there is a huge rift between those
people in the canyon who want more development, those people in the canyon who want
less, and the way that we are bound on this issue is the water -- how much water we have.
So I think that water is a tremendous organizing principle. Maybe that is one of the places,
particularly in the arid West, we can begin thinking about these things.
London: Trying to find common ground.
Williams: Absolutely. And also respecting each other's differences and then figuring out
how we can proceed given those different points of view.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 9
42
Neighbors. Shared concerns. A respect for our differences and strength in what we
share. This is happening throughout America. I honestly believe this. I look to the people
who are standing their ground in the Bolsa Chica and Ballona Wetlands in the Los
Angeles Basin against tremendous opposition, billion-dollar developments, movie moguls
like Steven Spielberg, oil interests, and freeways. Look to a small group of neighbors in
Yaak, Montana, the North Woods in New England, restoration work in the prairies of the
Midwest, urban gardens, the incredible work of local land trusts to preserve and protect
what they see as critical habitat for wildlife and the human spirit—all these examples
provide models of compassion and savvy, at once.
Faith and stamina.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
This is my place. It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay
home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community?
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because
you’re not going to go away. It also means making a commitment to bear witness, and
engaging in ‘casserole diplomacy’ by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the
children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitments are real.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322-323
BIOREGIONALISM
43
BIRDS
Refuge
“There are those birds you gauge your life by. The burrowing owls five miles from the
entrance to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge are mine. Sentries. Each year, they alert
me to the regularities of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 8
“In my young mind, it had something to do with the magic of birds, how they bridge
cultures and continents with their wings, how they mediate between heaven and earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 18
“Back on the bus and moving, I wrote in my notebook ‘one hundred white-faced glossy
ibises—companions of the gods.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 18
“With my arms out the window, I tried to touch the wings of avocets and stilts. I knew
these birds from our private trips to the Refuge. They had become relatives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 19
“The birds and I share a natural history.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 20
The Bird Refuge has remained a constant. It is a landscape so familiar to me, there
have been times I have felt a species long before I saw it. The long-billed curlews that
foraged the grasslands seven miles outside the Refuge were trustworthy. I can count on
them year after year. And when six whimbrels joined them—whimbrel entered my mind as
an idea. Before I ever saw them mingling with curlews, I recognized them as a new
thought in familiar country.
The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a
place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
“The long-legged birds with their eyes focused down transform a seemingly sterile world
into a fecund one. It is here in the marshes with the birds that I seal my relationship to
Great Salt Lake.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 22
“Up ahead, two dozen white pelicans were creating a spiral staircase as they flew. It looked
like a feathered DNA molecule. Their wings reflected the sun. The light shifted, and they
disappeared. It shifted again and I found form. Escher’s inspiration. The pelicans rose
higher and higher on black-tipped wings until they straightened themselves into an arrow
pointing west to Gunnison Island.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 40
I love to watch gulls soar over the Great Basin. It is another trick of the lake to lure
gulls inland. On days such as this, when my would has been wrenched, the simplicity of
flight and form above the lake untangles my grief.
“Glide” the gulls write in the sky—and, for a few brief moments, I do.
44
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 75
“Each trip [to the lake] is unique. The lake is different. I am different. But the gulls are
always here, ordinary—black, white, and gray.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 75
“I pray to birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray
to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—
the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of
what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
I say a silent prayer for the curlew, remembering the bond of two days before when
I sat in their valley nurtured by solitude. I ask the curlew for cinnamon-barred feathers and
take them.
They do not come easily.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“Alongside the biological facts, could migration be an ancestral memory, an archetype that
dreams birds thousands of miles to their homeland? A highly refined intelligence that
emerges as intuition, the only true guide in life? Could it be that a family of Canada geese
journey south not out of a genetic predisposition, but out of a desire for a shared vision of a
species? They travel in flocks as they position themselves in an inverted V formation, the
white feathers that separate their black rumps from their tails appear as a crescent moon,
reminding them once again that they are participating in another cycle.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 193
Heron: “I would like to believe she is reclusive at heart, in spite of the communal nesting
of her species. I would like to wade along the edges with her, this great blue heron. She
belongs to the meditation of water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 266
“But then this is another paradox of mine—wanting to be a bird when I am a human.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 266
“Mimi and I shared a clandestine vision of things. I could afford to dream because she
could interpret the story. We spoke through the shorthand of symbols: an egg, an owl. And
most of what we shared was secret, much like the migration of birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 273
“If I am to survive, I must let me secrets out like white doves held captive too long. I am a
woman with wings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 273
45
BIRTH
…
Red
“Now on shore like a freshly born human, upright, I brush my body dry, and turn to see
that I am once again standing in front of the Birthing Rock, my Rock of Instruction, that I
have sought through my life, defied in my life, even against the will of my own biology.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 162-163
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 162
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
46
BLACK
47
BODY
Red
“Am I running or am I returning to the place where my animal body resides?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 123
“This river has muscle when flexed against stone, carved stone, stones that appear as
waves of rock, secret knowledge known only through engagement. I am no longer content
to sit, but stand and walk, walk to the river, enter the river, surrender my body to water
now red, red is the Colorado, blood of my veins. “
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music, Red, 150
To move through wild country in the desert or in the woods is to engage in a
walking meditation, a clearing of the mind, where we remember what we have so easily
lost.
Time.
Time and space.
The shape of time and space are different in wilderness. Time is something
encountered through the senses not imposed upon the mind. We walk, we sit, we eat, we
sleep, we look, we smell, we touch, we hear, we taste our own feral nature. What we know
in a wild place is largely translated through the body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185-186
“I climb the slickrock on all fours, my hands and feet throbbing with the heat. It feels good
to sweat, to be engaged, to inhabit my animal body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 195
“I stop. The silence that lives in these sacred hallways presses against me. I relax. I
surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal of my breath rises in me like music, like love, as
the possessive muscles between my legs tighten and release. I come to the rock in a
moment of stillness, giving and receiving, where there is no partition between my body
and the body of Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing
with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me
with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only
to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought.
Simply, here. . . . my body mixes with the body of the water like jazz, the currents like
jazz. I too am free to improvise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 201-202
“The fire now bears the last testament to trees. I blow into the religious caverns of wood
and watch them burn brightly. My breath elucidates each yellow room and I remember the
body as sacrament.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Fire,” Red, 208
Refuge
48
“We spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth
have been mined.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 10
“The cancer process is not unlike the creative process. Ideas emerge slowly, quietly,
invisibly at first. They are most often abnormal thoughts, thoughts that disrupt the
quotidian, the accustomed. They divide and multiply, become invasive. With time, they
congeal, consolidate, and make themselves conscious. An idea surfaces and demands total
attention. I take it from my body and give it away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 44
“I feel like a potter trying to shape my life with the material at hand. But my creation is
internal. My vessel is my body, where I hold a space for healing for those I love. Each day
becomes a firing, a further refinement of the potter’s process.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 168
> see also 173
We are far too conciliatory. If we as Mormon women believe in God the Father and
in his son, Jesus Christ, it is only logical that a Mother-in-Heaven balances the sacred
triangle. I believe the Holy Ghost is female, although she has remained hidden, invisible,
deprived of a body, she is the spirit that seeps into our hearts and directs us to the well. The
‘still, small voice’ I was taught to listen to as a child was ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost.’
Today I choose to recognize this presence as holy intuition, the gift of the Mother. My
prayers no longer bear the ‘proper’ masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother
in Heaven. If we could introduce the Motherbody as a spiritual counterpoint to the
Godhead, perhaps our inspiration and devotion would no longer be directed to the stars,
but our worship could return to the Earth.
My physical mother is gone. My spiritual mother remains. I am a woman rewriting
my genealogy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 241
Unspoken Hunger
“I find myself being mentored by the land once again, as two great blue herons fly over
me. Their wingbeats are slow, so slow they remind me that, all around, energy is being
conserved. I too can bring my breath down to dwell in a deeper place where my blood-soul
restores to my body what society has drained and dredged away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 62
“There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness.
Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty,
raw and sensual. Through an eroitcs of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
Open Space of Democracy
I have always believed democracy is best practiced through its construction, not its
completion -- a never-ending project where the windows and doors remain open, a
reminder to never close ourselves off to the sensory impulses of eyes and ears alert
toward justice. Walls are torn down instead of erected in a counter-intuitive process where
a monument is not built but a home, in a constant state of renovation.
49
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20a
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
Interviews
TL: When I heard about the theme of this year's Border Book Festival, Our Bodies / Our
Earth, I immediately thought of your work, Terry. As much as anyone's, your writing
seems to connect the human body with the more-than-human natural world. Why is this
connection so important to you?
TTW: How can we not align our bodies with the Earth? We are made of the same stuff, so
to speak: water, minerals, our blood like a river flowing inside our veins. To imagine
ourselves as something outside of the Earth, foreign, removed, separate, strikes me as one
of the reasons our collective relationship to the natural world and other creatures has been
severed. I believe our health and the health of the land are intrinsically tied. I've witnessed
this as "hibakusha" (the Japanese word for 'explosion-affected people'), downwinders, and
the predominance of cancer in our family due in large part, I believe, to the fallout in Utah
from nuclear testing of the 1950's and 60's. To see ourselves as part of the Earth and its
community, not apart from it as Robinson Jeffers writes, to me can be an act of humility
and awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 1
TL: I recall hearing you read from a manuscript version of Desert Quartet: An Erotic
Landscape at a conference in Salt Lake City a few years back. At the time, you seemed
nervous about writing frankly about the erotics of landscape. It seems a risky thing to write
about. Has the reaction to the book justified your nervousness, or has it been favorably
received? Why did you choose to write about this topic?
TTW: You ask about Desert Quartet and why I wrote that book. I think every writer
struggles with various questions and tries to make peace with those questions, those
longings through their art, their craft. I am interested in the notion of love and why we are
so fearful of intimacy, with each other and with the land. I wanted to explore the idea of
the erotic, not as it is defined by my culture as pornographic and exploitive, but rather what
it might mean to engage in a relationship of reciprocity. I wanted to try and write out of the
body, not out of the head. I wanted to create a circular text, not a linear one. I wanted to
play with the elemental movements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, and bow to the desert, a
landscape I love. I wanted to see if I could create on the page a dialogue with the heartopen wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
50
If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys, to the
beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from our hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable in our emotional response to the world.
And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being "broken open." To
engage. To participate. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a
personal transformation that bears collective gifts.
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
Our lack of intimacy with the natural world is in direct correspondence with our lack of
intimacy with each other. Our bodies, the body of the Earth -- there is no separation. When
we cause harm to the natural world, we also cause harm to ourselves. The health of the
planet is our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and
earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but
rather the culture of modernity."
TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was
speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I
think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in
correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of
the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying
that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're
retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very
positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered.
That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but
on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all
know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
(On Unspoken Hunger) “Intimacy makes us uncomfortable, so there is another issue here;
I really believe our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each
other. So how do we cross these borders? How do we keep things fluid, not fixed, so we
can begin to explore both our body and the body of the earth? No separation. Eros: nature
even our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 4
Jenson: What does erotic mean to you?
51
Terry Tempest Williams: It means ‘in relation.” Erotic is what those deep relations are and
can be that engage the whole body—our heart, our mind, our spirit, our flesh. It is that
moment of being exquisitely present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 310
“I believe our most poignant lessons come through the body, the skin, the cells, our DNA. .
. . It is through the body we feel the world, both its pain and its beauty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 313
52
BONES
“Suddenly, O’Keefe stopped. She saw bones. She also saw Coyote and hid behind a
pinon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 17
53
BUDDHISM
“The two herons who flew over me have now landed downriver. I do not believe they are
fearful of love. I do not believe their decisions are based on a terror of loss. They are not
docile, loyal, or obedient. They are engaged in a rich, biological context, completely
present. They are feathered Buddhas casting blue shadows on the snow, fishing on the
shortest day of the year.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
When I returned home to Castle Valley I went for a long walk on the sage flats. “One does
not walk for peace,” I recalled Thich Nhat Hanh saying, “One walks in peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
Thich Nhat Hanh: In Congress, in city halls, in statehouses, and schools, we need people
capable of practicing deep listening and loving speech. Unfortunately, many of us have
lost this capacity. To have peace, we must first have understanding, and understanding is
not possible without gentle, loving communication. Therefore, restoring communication is
an essential practice for peace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 28-29
October 2004,
BUDDHISM
54
BUILDING A POSITIVE ALTERNATIVE
Red
“The Colorado Plateau is wild. There is still wilderness here, big wilderness. Wilderness
holds an original presence giving expression to that which we lack, the losses we long to
recover, the absences we seek to fill. Wilderness revises the memory of unity. Through its
protection, we can find faith in our humanity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 69
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112-113
Refuge
Others
Neighbors. Shared concerns. A respect for our differences and strength in what we
share. This is happening throughout America. I honestly believe this. I look to the people
who are standing their ground in the Bolsa Chica and Ballona Wetlands in the Los Angeles
Basin against tremendous opposition, billion-dollar developments, movie moguls like
Steven Spielberg, oil interests, and freeways. Look to a small group of neighbors in Yaak,
Montana, the North Woods in New England, restoration work in the prairies of the
Midwest, urban gardens, the incredible work of local land trusts to preserve and protect
what they see as critical habitat for wildlife and the human spirit—all these examples
provide models of compassion and savvy, at once.
Faith and stamina.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
55
CAPITALISM
We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken
political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time
to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity
in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own
sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the
social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the
wealth and health of the corporate few.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
CAPITALISM
56
CHANGE, TRANSFORMATION, MOTION
Red
Coyote Clan: “They understand the earth re-creates itself day after day.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 26
“Movement surrounded her. The wind, clouds, grasses, and birds—all reminded her that
nothing stands still.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, “A Woman’s Dance,”
Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 53
“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both
create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by
water, through time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“I love sitting by the river. A deep calm washes over me in the face of this fluid continuity
where it always appears the same, yet I know each moment of the Rio Colorado is new.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 148
“In this country, wind is the architect of beauty, movement in the midst of peace. This is
what I seek as a writer. Art is created through the collision of ideas, forces that shape,
sculpt, and define thought. There is a physicality to beauty, to any creative process.
Perhaps an index to misery is when we no longer perceive beauty—that which stirs the
heart—or have lost a willingness to embrace change. Does the wind harass sandstone or
caress it? . . . There is a peculiar patience to both wind and rock, alongside a flashpoint of
the fleeting and the eternal.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 153
“The wind reminds me of endurance. The wind will always return to stir things up, keep
things fresh, where nothing can be taken for granted. Life is not static, comfortable, or
predictable. An Episcopal prayer readers, ‘Come like the wind . . . and cleanse.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 153
Refuge
“Add the enormous volume of stream inflow . . . and one begins to see a portrait of
change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 6
“The Bird Refuge has remained a constant.”
57
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
“I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries.
The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had
always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
“It is strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 24
“I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries.
The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had
always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 40
“Each trip [to the lake] is unique. The lake is different. I am different. But the gulls are
always here, ordinary—black, white, and gray.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 75
“How do you find refuge in change?” I asked quietly.
Mimi put her broad hand on mine. “I don’t know. . .” she whispered. “You just go
with it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 119
“I thought the marsh would be here forever,” I said to Mimi standing on the edge of
the flooded Bird Refuge.
Her eyes scanned Great Salt Lake.
“Things change,” she said.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 132
“There is no one to blame, nothing to fight. . . . Only a simple natural phenomenon: the rise
of Great Salt Lake.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 140
“Maybe it is not the darkness we fear most, but the silences contained within the darkness.
Maybe it is not the absence of the moon that frightens us, but the absence of what we
expect to be there. A wedge of long-billed curlews flying in the night punctuates the
silences and their unexpected calls remind us the only thing we can expect is change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 146
“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my
grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I
can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 178
The Fremont oscillated with the lake levels. As Great Salt Lake rose, they retreated.
As the lake retreated, they were drawn back. Theirs was not a fixed society like ours. They
followed the expanding and receding shorelines. It was the ebb and flow of their lives
58
In many ways, the Fremont had more options than we have. What do we do when
faced with a rising Great Salt Lake? Pump it west. What did the Fremont do? Move. They
accommodated change were, so often, we are immobilized by it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 183
David Madsen: “During the fifteen hundred years that the Fremont can be distinguished,
they produced an archaeological record as rich, yet as enigmatic, as any in the world. The
record of how they lived, reacted, and responded to the changing world around them is a
mirror of ourselves—of all peoples at all times in all places.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 185
… A meteor flashed and as quickly disappeared. The waves continued to hiss and
retreat, hiss and retreat.
In the West Desert of the Great Basin, I was not alone.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 190
Mimi: “Many native cultures participate in scarification rituals. It’s a sign that denotes
change. The person who is scarred has undergone some kind of transformation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
“Refuge is not a place outside myself. Like the lone heron who walks the shores of Great
Salt Lake, I am adapting as the world is adapting.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
“One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert.
They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its
phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that
they would never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as sparks
broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“My family has grown through this process. Each of us has found a new configuration
born out of change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 306
Looking back, perhaps, these are the very ideas at the heart of Refuge and I didn’t
even know it; I only knew what I saw in the rising Great Salt Lake, the displacement of
birds, the displacement of our own family, the disorder and randomness of cancer, the
healing grace of Earth.
Transformation.
The spiral.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“I do not believe life exists in a state of equilibrium. The only truth I trust is change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“The spiral. The spiral becomes this expansion and contraction of energy, another paradox
for us to ponder alongside ‘water in the desert that no one can drink.’ It is an outward
59
motion in its evolutionary reach and an inward motion in its emotional drain. A spiral
moves in both directions—clockwise and counterclockwise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313-314
“The world is in motion. We are in motion. We have all lost loved ones. We have all
danced with grief and we will one day dance with death. We embody the spiral, moving
inward and outward with the loss of fear, a love transcendent, and the courage to create
new maps.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
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CHOICE, DECISION
…
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“What do we choose to act on and what do we chose to ignore?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Police Report,” Red, 164
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CIRCLE, CYCLE, SPIRAL
Red
“Perfect Kiva—round like Earth. Hidden in the earth, the six sat.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Perfect Kiva,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 49
“A green serpent of the same pigment moved on the north wall, west to east, connecting
the circles.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Perfect Kiva,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 49
“In time, each one circled the sipapu with his fingers and raised himself on the slings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Perfect Kiva,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 50
“She held up the hem of her skirt in both hands and began walking briskly around the
circle. . . . Her long, spirited stride broke into short leaps with extended arms as she entered
the circle dancing, without guile, without notice, without any thought of herself. She
danced from the joy of all that she was part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, “A Woman’s Dance,”
Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 53
“Her turns widened with each rotation until she stopped, perfectly balanced. The woman
stepped outside the circle and kissed the palms of her hands and placed them on the earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 54
The story “The Stone Spiral.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Stone Spiral,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 55ff
“After the spiral was complete, they walked around it. . . . The black center stone became
Black Widow’s domain. They imagined her underneath, spinning the web, binding them
together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Stone Spiral,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red,
Refuge
“I have been in retreat. This story is my return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
“Great Salt Lake is cyclic.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 6
“The marsh reflected health as concentric circles rippled outward from a mallard feeing
‘bottoms up.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 20
“Up ahead, two dozen white pelicans were creating a spiral staircase as they flew. It looked
like a feathered DNA molecule. Their wings reflected the sun. The light shifted, and they
disappeared. It shifted again and I found form. Escher’s inspiration. The pelicans rose
higher and higher on black-tipped wings until they straightened themselves into an arrow
pointing west to Gunnison Island.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 40
62
The pulse of the Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island’s shores, becomes
the force wearing against my mother’s body And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing
their way toward quiet bays on the island, I recall watching Mother sleep, imagining the
dreams that were encircling her, wondering what she knows that I must learn for myself.
The light changes, Antelope Island is blue. Mother awakened and I looked away.
Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is my mother’s body floating in
uncertainty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 64
“Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect
so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to
operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent
phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
“I am not adjusting. I keep dreaming the Refuge back to what I have known: rich, green
bulrushes that border the wetlands, herons hidden behind cattails, concentric circles of
ducks on ponds. I blow on these images like the last burning embers on a winter’s night.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 140
“Alongside the biological facts, could migration be an ancestral memory, an archetype that
dreams birds thousands of miles to their homeland? A highly refined intelligence that
emerges as intuition, the only true guide in life? Could it be that a family of Canada geese
journey south not out of a genetic predisposition, but out of a desire for a shared vision of a
species? They travel in flocks as they position themselves in an inverted V formation, the
white feathers that separate their black rumps from their tails appear as a crescent moon,
reminding them once again that they are participating in another cycle.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 193
Mother: “Do you know how rich you have made my life? I am seeing circles, circles of
love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 221
Looking back, perhaps, these are the very ideas at the heart of Refuge and I didn’t
even know it; I only knew what I saw in the rising Great Salt Lake, the displacement of
birds, the displacement of our own family, the disorder and randomness of cancer, the
healing grace of Earth.
Transformation.
The spiral.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“The spiral. The spiral becomes this expansion and contraction of energy, another paradox
for us to ponder alongside ‘water in the desert that no one can drink.’ It is an outward
motion in its evolutionary reach and an inward motion in its emotional drain. A spiral
moves in both directions—clockwise and counterclockwise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313-314
63
“This is the image I hold, dear reader, on the tenth anniversary of the writing of Refuge: a
spiral covered and uncovered and covered again.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“The world is in motion. We are in motion. We have all lost loved ones. We have all
danced with grief and we will one day dance with death. We embody the spiral, moving
inward and outward with the loss of fear, a love transcendent, and the courage to create
new maps.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
Unspoken Hunger
O’Keefe: “It is as though O’Keefe is standing with all her passion inside a red-hot circle
with everything around her in motion.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 22
When James Watt was asked what he feared most about environmentalists, his
response was simple: ‘I fear they are pagans.’
He is right to be fearful.
I would like to suggest Pan is not dead, that Echo lives in her repetitive world, in
the cycles and circles of nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 83
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COLLABORATION
What does the open space of democracy look like?
In the open space of democracy there is room for dissent.
In the open space of democracy there is room for differences.
In the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the
wealth of our communities. We remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it.
Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of
poverty. The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be
human.
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our
survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but
developed out of a reverence for life.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
What are we willing to give our lives to if not the perpetuation of the sacred? Can we
continue to stand together in our collective wisdom and say, these particular lands are
inviolable, deserving protection by law and the inalienable right of safe passage for all
beings that dwell here? Wilderness designation is the promise of this hope held in trust.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
"We can only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble," writes Walt Whitman.
This is my definition of community, and community interaction is the white-hot center of
a democracy that burns bright.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
A crisis woke us up. A shared love of place opened a dialogue with neighbors. We
asked for help. We found partners. We used our collective intelligence to formulate a plan.
And then we had to search within ourselves to find what each of us had to give.
In my private moments of despair, I am aware of the limits of my own imagination.
I am learning in Castle Valley that imaginations shared invite collaboration and
collaboration creates community. A life in association, not a life independent, is the
democratic ideal. We participate in the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken
political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time
to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity
in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own
sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the
social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the
wealth and health of the corporate few.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," said
Edward Abbey. To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do
the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism
65
that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression
believing there is nothing we can do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
Are we ready for the next evolutionary leap—to recognize the restoration of democracy
as the restoration of liberty and justice for all species, not just our own? To be in the
service of something beyond ourselves—to be in the presence of something other than
ourselves, together—this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal
isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
We are vulnerable, and we are vulnerable together.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 24 October
2004,
COLLABORATION
66
COMMUNITY
Red
We are not separate.
We belong to a much larger community than we know.
We are here because of love.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 71
“I write in a solitude born out of community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 113
“My ancestors moved and settled as a result of spiritual beliefs. They gathered in the belief
of an integrated life where nature, culture, religion, and civic responsibility were woven in
the context of family and community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both
create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by
water, through time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
“Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I
believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between
revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to
sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk
parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of
southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work,
work that matters to the soul of the community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 140
As a woman of forty-four years, I will not bear children. My husband and I will not
be parents. We have chosen to define family in another way.
I look across the sweep of slickrock stretching in all directions, the rise and fall of
such arid terrain. A jackrabbit blots down the wash. Pinon jays flock and bank behind
cluster of junipers. The tracks of coyote are everywhere.
Would you believe me when I tell you this is family, kinship with the desert, the
breadth of my relations coursing through a wider community, the shock of recognition
which each scarlet gilia, the smell of rain.
And this is enough for me, more than enough. I trace my genealogy back to the
land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and
place. . . . Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 157
There are those within the academy who have recently criticized ‘the wilderness
idea’ as a holdover from our colonial past, a remnant of Calvinist tradition that separates
human beings from the natural world and ignores concerns of indigenous people. They
suggest that wilderness advocates are deceiving themselves, that they are merely holding
on to a piece of America’s past, that they are devoted to an illusory and ‘static past,’ that
they are apt to ‘adopt too high a standard for what counts as ‘natural.”’ These scholars see
67
themselves as one who ‘have inherited the wilderness idea’ and are responding as ‘EuroAmerican men’ within a ‘cultural legacy . . . patriarchal Western civilization in its current
postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.’
I hardly know what that means.
If wilderness is a ‘human construct,’ how do we take it out of the abstract, and into
the real? How do we begin to extend our notion of community to include all life-forms so
that these political boundaries will no longer be necessary? How can that which nurtures
evolution, synonymous with adaptation and change, be considered static? Whom do we
trust in matters of compassion and reverence for life?
I believe that consideration of wilderness as an idea and wilderness as a place must
begin with conscience.
I come back to Leopold’s notion of ‘intellectual humility,’ We are not alone on this
planet, even though our behavior at times suggests otherwise. Our minds are meaningless
in the face of one perfect avalanche or flash flood or forest fire. Our desires are put to rest
when we surrender to a grizzly bear, a rattlesnake, or goshawk defending its nest. To step
aside is an act of submission, to turn back an act of admission, that other beings can and
will take precedence when we meet them on their own wild terms. The manic pace of our
modern lives can be brought into balance by simply giving in to the silence of the desert,
the pounding of a Pacific surf, the darkness and brilliance of a night sky far away from a
city.
Wilderness is a place of humility.
Humility is a place of wilderness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
179-181
Refuge
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried
it. He called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“History has shown us that exclusivity in the name of empire building eventually fails.
Fear of discord undermines creativity. And creativity lies at the heart of adaptive
evolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
68
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
“I don’t know if Brigham Young ever ventured to Gunnison Island or observed the finely
tuned society of pelicans. But had his attention been focused more on Earth than ‘heaven
on earth’ his vision for managing the Saints in the Great Basin might have been altered.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 107
“What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family.
Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a
matter of living the circle.
“Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship
with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We
choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is
money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 137
John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The
experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community.”
I think of my family stories—Mother’s in particular—how much I need them now,
how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds
die with them.
The same could be said of each passing whale.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 175
“I love the challenge of living in a small community where the politics of place is no
longer an abstraction but something very real, as you face your neighbor honestly over
land-use issues not hundreds of miles away, but in your backyard.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 306
Unspoken Hunger
“As a writer and a woman with obligations to both family and community, I have tried to
adopt this ritual in the balancing of a public and private life. We are at home in the deserts
and mountains, as well as in our dens. Above ground in the abundance of spring and
summer, I am available. Below ground in the deepening of autumn and winter, I am not. I
need hibernation in order to create.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
“We stood strong and resolute as neighbors, friends, and family witnessed the release of a
red-tailed hawk. Wounded, now healed, we caught a glimpse of our own wild nature
soaring above willows.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“We are here to honor Ed, to honor Clarke, Becky . . .; to acknowledge family, tribe, and
clan. And it has everything to do with love: loving each other, loving the land. This is a
rededication of purpose and place.”
69
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 77
“I believe that out of an erotics of place, a politics of place is emerging. Not radical, but
conservative, a politics rooted in empathy in which we extend our notion of community, as
Aldo Leopold has urged, to include all life forms—plants, animals, rivers, and soils. The
enterprise of conservation is a revolution, and evolution of the spirit.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
> all three types of engagement
Open Space of Democracy
Before the speech, I had had the great pleasure of meeting with a group of graduating
seniors. When I asked them what they felt we were most in need of as a society and nation,
the answer was a unified one: building community. . . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20b
We can ask ourselves within the context and specificity of our own lives, how fear can be
transformed into courage, silence transformed into honest expression, and spiritual
isolation quelled through a sense of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
"We can only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble," writes Walt Whitman.
This is my definition of community, and community interaction is the white-hot center of
a democracy that burns bright.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
A crisis woke us up. A shared love of place opened a dialogue with neighbors. We
asked for help. We found partners. We used our collective intelligence to formulate a plan.
And then we had to search within ourselves to find what each of us had to give.
In my private moments of despair, I am aware of the limits of my own imagination.
I am learning in Castle Valley that imaginations shared invite collaboration and
collaboration creates community. A life in association, not a life independent, is the
democratic ideal. We participate in the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
Castle Valley is one example in thousands of local narratives being written around
America. Enlivened citizenship is activated each time we knock on our neighbors' doors,
each time we sit down together and share a meal.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b-57a
It is time to ask, when will our national culture of self-interest stop cutting the bonds of
community to shore up individual gain and instead begin to nourish communal life
through acts of giving, not taking? It is time to acknowledge the violence rendered to our
souls each time a mountaintop is removed to expose a coal vein in Appalachia or when a
wetland is drained, dredged, and filled for a strip mall. And the time has come to demand
an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life in all its variety and forms, as
we witness the repeated breaking of laws, and the relaxing of laws, in the sole name of
growth and greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
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This is what our community is in need of now. Fire. Fire that wakes us up. Fire that
transforms where we are. Fire to see our way through the dark. Fire as illumination. We
witness from the front porches of our homes the exhilaration of pushing an idea over the
edge until it ignites a community, and we can never look at Parriott Mesa again without
remembering the way it was sold, the way a sign disappeared and reappeared in Arches
National Park, the way the community bought the land back through the gift of
anonymity, and the breathing space it now holds as the red rock cornerstone of Castle
Valley.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
"We can only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble," writes Walt
Whitman. This is my definition of community, and community interaction is the whitehot center of a democracy that burns bright.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” letter to
Brandon Hollingshead
Others
Our commitment to revisioning and rebuilding community is not a game. It is not us versus
them; it is not power over, or for, or against; it is a loving embrace. We must be willing to
listen in the same manner we are asking others to listen to us. As we approach the twentyfirst century as an environmental community, I hope we hold close to that, realizing the
environmental movement is a collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
As a writer I am interested in relations, deep relations, the patterns that emerge through a
conscious life, through a committed life. I am interested in collaboration, the alchemical
marriage that exists when seemingly disparate elements merge. Call it friction by fire. One
plus one equals three. Something new is created much more than the isolation of the
separated two. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer, my
life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our communities.
Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience, shared lives in a
shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one plus one equals
three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
To become biologically literate, to engage with our neighbors and communities, to focus
on small-scale agriculture and commerce and support them, to realize we are deeply
aligned with the life around us—to recognize this movement of the heart and mind and
soul as a movement of love that can never be corralled.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting it Right”
There is the same hope and promise here inside the Mayberry Preserve. With the
Colorado River on its northern boundary, Fisher Towers and the Negro Bill Wilderness
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Study Areas east and west of the orchard and the town of Castle Valley directly to the
south, it is a place where human history and natural history converge.
I believe we are capable of creating a world that can accommodate the tamed and
untamed life, that we can in fact see ourselves as part of a larger biological community,
that it is not at odds with a sense of deep democracy but compatible with it. Call it a new
patriotism: red rocks, white clouds, blue sky. Is not the wild imagination of open spaces
simply an expansion of our pledge of allegiance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
Interviews
LEAP is an exploration through Paradise and Hell into the Garden of Delights where the
middle path becomes a path of joyful discovery, where intellectual humility can be found
in relationship toward all living things. Curiosity replaces guilt. We find ourselves in
dialogue with community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 2
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, How do we find
refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with
my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a
sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in
community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place
translate into a politics of place? And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning
inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1-2
Community is extremely intimate. When we talk about humor, I love that you know when
you're home because there is laughter in the room, there is humor, there is shorthand. That
is about community. I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not
always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with
something -- to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's
more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the
strands are interconnected and so various.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
TTW: Water in the desert is like prayer in our lives, that contact with some force that is
both beyond us and a part of us. I go down to the banks of the Colorado River weekly -and in the summer daily -- and, as I watch that powerful body of water, watch the
muscularity held in the currents, I'm always mindful of what it is carrying downriver. We,
too, can be carried away.
It could be said that we have taken our love inside. We go into our houses, we shut
the door, and we have very isolated, lonely lives. When we take our love outside, we not
only take it outside with the Earth, with nature, with birds, with animals -- the ravens,
vultures and coyotes where I live -- but we take it into community. It is in community that
we find another component of our spiritual life. And that has everything to do with service.
How do we serve? What are we in the service of? And, again, that's not about heaven, it is
about right here, right now.
In the community where we live, which is very small, the needs are great. And they
can only be met through service and love and compassion and sacrifice. To me, these are
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powerful components of a religious life, of a spiritual life. I find the older I get, I'm less in
need of an organization as much as a community. I don't need the organization of a
religion. I do need the community where we can share a spiritual life. And I think there's a
subtle difference.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
“It seems so internal—you’re asking questions that genuinely interest you and so often
you’re collaborating so that it’s not just your own internal question, but something of a
community question or a question you’re asking with somebody else.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 14
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
“This is not to say that writing about landscape is an epiphany around every corner. That
kind of writing drives me crazy. But to see landscape as a complex set of principles,
metaphors, and social considerations that are germane to this point in time. I think about
Octavio Paz when he says that if we’re interested in revolution, an evolution of the spirit, it
requires both love and criticism, that it is a writer’s obligation to critique his or her own
society or community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 16
“Story is the umbilical cord between the past, present, and future; it keeps things known.
Story becomes the conscience of the community, it belongs to everyone.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 21
“the essential element of legacy is story, the umbilical cord that connects the past, present,
and future. When you tell a story it’s as though a third person has entered the room, and
you become accountable for that sacred knowledge. Story binds us to community. Part of
the reason I could write Refuge, which is so intensely personal, is my belief that inside
story the personal is transformed into the general, the universal. Story becomes the
conscience of our communities.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122-123
“There has been a positive response from the Mormon hierarchy of women because they
see in this book the values of family and community and prayer and faith that are all
honored within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 124-125
“What I found in sharing Refuge and in giving readings was the yearning we have to
belong to a community, the yearning we have to share our stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 129
“Our culture of consumerism tells us what we need, what we want, and what we deserve. It
is the economics of entitlement. And I believe it is an illusion. I believe our needs are more
basic: home; family; community; health; the health of the land which includes all life
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forms, plants, animals, and human beings. We need open country, open spaces, a wildness
that offers us deliverance from inauthentic lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
This is my place. It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay
home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community?
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because
you’re not going to go away. It also means making a commitment to bear witness, and
engaging in ‘casserole diplomacy’ by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the
children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitments are real.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322-323
“Isn’t that a way to extend our notion of community to include all plants, animals, rocks,
soils, rivers, and human beings?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 323
“I write about what I know, and I am inspired by what I don’t know – which is enormous. I
believe in the longing for unity, that we may in fact be asking for a new way to think about
science in reality are asking for a new way to think about ourselves, that this yearning to
heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that separate us from
ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for unity has
everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
For me, it is all about relationships.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
COMMUNITY
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COMMUNITY WITH/OF THE EARTH
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
COMMUNITY WITH/OF THE EARTH
75
COMPASSION
…
Red
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“For all of Austin’s friends and critics who found her personally arrogant, erratic, and too
bold in her behavior, an abiding and enduring compassion and humility comes through the
rigors of a disciplined eye toward nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mary Austin’s Ghost,” Red, 170-171
There are those within the academy who have recently criticized ‘the wilderness
idea’ as a holdover from our colonial past, a remnant of Calvinist tradition that separates
human beings from the natural world and ignores concerns of indigenous people. They
suggest that wilderness advocates are deceiving themselves, that they are merely holding
on to a piece of America’s past, that they are devoted to an illusory and ‘static past,’ that
they are apt to ‘adopt too high a standard for what counts as ‘natural.”’ These scholars see
themselves as one who ‘have inherited the wilderness idea’ and are responding as ‘EuroAmerican men’ within a ‘cultural legacy . . . patriarchal Western civilization in its current
postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.’
I hardly know what that means.
If wilderness is a ‘human construct,’ how do we take it out of the abstract, and into
the real? How do we begin to extend our notion of community to include all life-forms so
that these political boundaries will no longer be necessary? How can that which nurtures
evolution, synonymous with adaptation and change, be considered static? Whom do we
trust in matters of compassion and reverence for life?
I believe that consideration of wilderness as an idea and wilderness as a place must
begin with conscience.
I come back to Leopold’s notion of ‘intellectual humility,’ We are not alone on this
planet, even though our behavior at times suggests otherwise. Our minds are meaningless
in the face of one perfect avalanche or flash flood or forest fire. Our desires are put to rest
when we surrender to a grizzly bear, a rattlesnake, or goshawk defending its nest. To step
aside is an act of submission, to turn back an act of admission, that other beings can and
will take precedence when we meet them on their own wild terms. The manic pace of our
modern lives can be brought into balance by simply giving in to the silence of the desert,
the pounding of a Pacific surf, the darkness and brilliance of a night sky far away from a
city.
Wilderness is a place of humility.
Humility is a place of wilderness.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
179-181
Unspoken Hunger
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“One Patriot”
“In 2002, Rachel Carson’s spirit is among us. Like her, we can be both fierce and
compassionate at once. We can remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America’s landscape and it is precisely that character that will protect it. We
can carry a healthy sense of indignation within us that will shatter the complacency that
has seeped into our society in the name of all we have lost, knowing there is still so much
to be saved.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 57
Others
Neighbors. Shared concerns. A respect for our differences and strength in what we
share. This is happening throughout America. I honestly believe this. I look to the people
who are standing their ground in the Bolsa Chica and Ballona Wetlands in the Los Angeles
Basin against tremendous opposition, billion-dollar developments, movie moguls like
Steven Spielberg, oil interests, and freeways. Look to a small group of neighbors in Yaak,
Montana, the North Woods in New England, restoration work in the prairies of the
Midwest, urban gardens, the incredible work of local land trusts to preserve and protect
what they see as critical habitat for wildlife and the human spirit—all these examples
provide models of compassion and savvy, at once.
Faith and stamina.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of
others. This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love
and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding
this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in
the presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
We are in need of a reflective activism born out of humility, not arrogance. Reflection,
with deep time spent in the consideration of others, opens the door to becoming a
compassionate participant in the world.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
77
"To care is neither conservative nor radical," writes John Ralston Saul. "It is a form of
consciousness." To be in the service of something beyond ourselves -- to be in the
presence of something other than ourselves, together -- this is where we can begin to craft
a meaningful life where personal isolation and despair disappear through the shared
engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59a
Interviews
Indy: Do you feel hopeful that we might learn something at this terrible time?
TTW: It is no longer the survival of the fittest but the survival of compassion -- to extend
our humanity to include honor and respect for plants, animals, rocks, rivers and air.
It feels like we're awake as a nation for the first time in a long time. We haven't been
awake, not conscious of our connection to the world. There's an exquisite tenderness right
now, and that is a gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
“I think that comes back to our obsession with our own species. That we aren’t willing to
extend our compassion outwardly . . . we are deeply, deeply solipsistic.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 20
“Our needs as human beings are really very simple—to love and be loved, a sense of
connection and compassion, a desire to be heard. Health. Family. Home. Once again the
dance, that sharing of breath, that merging with something larger than ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 317
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CONNECTION
…
“But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate
nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose
mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect
more isolation and greater ecological disease. Our lack of intimacy with each other is in
direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and
abandoned the wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“Personal ritual or shared ceremony rooted in landscape provides connections, continuity.
It reminds us that we do not stand alone. Rather, we become initiated into something much
larger than ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 70
“When we tamper with the balance of things the scales rarely meet equilibrium again. This
story is written over and over in our history, be it with Native Peoples, economics, or
bears. We are grossly insensitive to the connectedness of life. Eric Hoffer makes the point:
‘Lack of sensitivity is basically an unawareness of ourselves.’ In terms of culture which is
intrinsically linked with landscape, is it possible to meet another with empathetic eyes?
Perhaps. If we can begin to focus beyond ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 113-114
“Landscape shapes culture. . . . Perhaps we can begin to find the origins of our cultural
inheritance in the land – not to move backwards, but forward to understanding the
profound interconnectedness of all living things. As Gregory Bateson says, ‘If the world be
connected . . . then thinking in terms of stories must be share by all mind or minds,
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 135
CONNECTION
79
COURAGE
We can ask ourselves within the context and specificity of our own lives, how fear can be
transformed into courage, silence transformed into honest expression, and spiritual
isolation quelled through a sense of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
At the end of Camus’s essay, he states, “He who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool,
he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only
honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more
powerful than munitions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others.
This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be
loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is
all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the
presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
We have a history of bravery in this nation and we must call it forward now. Our future is
guaranteed only by the degree of our personal involvement and commitment to an
inclusive justice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
COURAGE
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CREATION
Red
Coyote Clan: “They understand the earth re-creates itself day after day.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 26
“Wilderness is both the bedrock lands of southern Utah and a metaphor of ‘unlimited
possibility.’ The question must be asked, ‘How can we cut ourselves off from the very
source of our creation?’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 75
Open Space of Democracy
Beauty is presence and it resides in the Brooks Range. . . . These are not mountains but
ramparts of raw creation. The retreat of gods. Crags, cirques, and glaciers sing hymns to
ice. Talus slopes in grays and taupes become the marbled papers, creased and folded,
inside prayer books.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 38a
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CREATIVITY
Refuge
“The cancer process is not unlike the creative process. Ideas emerge slowly, quietly,
invisibly at first. They are most often abnormal thoughts, thoughts that disrupt the
quotidian, the accustomed. They divide and multiply, become invasive. With time, they
congeal, consolidate, and make themselves conscious. An idea surfaces and demands total
attention. I take it from my body and give it away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 44
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CRITIQUE OF SOCIETY, CRITICISM
Leap
Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the
bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I cam to Spain to get away from my
torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for
development.
There are too many of us, six billion and rising, our collective impact on fragile
communities is deadly.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 115
Red
“It’s not just the loss of a ‘playground’ or a place of recreation, as many opponents argue;
it’s the fundamental loss of natural systems, free-flowing rivers, rock art pecked and
painted into stone by the hands of the Ancient Ones a thousand years ago. It is the
drowning of a way of life, the death of natural communities that are much older, and
perhaps wiser, than those of our own species.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 6-7
“The region of the American West shares common ground with the South: each has found
its voice in loss. The South was forever shaped by the Civil War, and today we in the West
are in the midst of our own. It is not a battle over issues of slavery. It is a battle over public
and private uses of land, what will be developed and what will remain sovereign. Guns are
replaced by metaphorical monkey wrenches and shovels.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 7
“Meanwhile, the great beast of progress continues to make its tracks upon the wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 15
“And then after having made enough pilgrimages to the slickrock to warrant sufficient
separation from society’s oughts and shoulds, look again for the novice you were, who
asked if the standstone bleeds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
“We must ask ourselves as Americans, ‘Can we really survive the worship of our own
destructiveness?’ We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate
intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human
beings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 76
“Without a philosophy of wildness and the recognition of its inherent spiritual values, we
will, as E. O. Wilson reminds us, ‘descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how
much the natural world means to us.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“For those of us who so love these lands in Utah, who recognize America’s Redrock
Wilderness as a sanctuary for the preservation of our souls, Senate Bill 884, the Utah
Public Lands Management Act of 1995, is the beginning of this forgetting, a forgetting we
may never reclaim.”
83
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“We have forgotten the option of restraint.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 97
“As locals tied to the exploitive susceptibility of the land we live on, we wind up thanking
our federal government for saving us from ourselves. A nation’s appetite for beauty
transcends a state’s hunger for greed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Wild Act,” Red, 101
“But there is something deeper at stake here in Utah and for that matter in North America.
It has to do with knitting the wild back together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Wild Act,” Red, 101
“Without feeling. Perhaps these two words are the key, the only way we can begin to
understand our abuse of each other and our abuse of the land. Could it be that what we fear
most is our capacity to feel, so that we annihilate symbolically and physically that which is
beautiful and tender, anything that dares us to consider our creative selves? The erotic
world is silenced, reduced to a collection of objects we curate and control, be it a vase, a
woman, or wilderness. Our lives become a piece in the puzzle of pornography as we go
through the motions of daily intercourse without any engagement of the soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 108
“Wherever I walk on the streets of Salt Lake City, I am seeing changes I can no longer
bear. . . . Never mind the depression that follows, that we fail to make the connection
between a lack of sunlight and a lack of joy. As urban dwellers, we simply get up every
morning and go to work.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 116
“I am aware that my own house, the home we live in and love, devoured this land. . . . My
rational self understands the inevitability of growth and my own role inside it. But what I
find harder and harder to abide is not growth, but the growth of greed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 117
Land of little rain: “Not much has changed regarding the aridity and austerity of the region.
What has changed is the number of needs and desires that we ask the earth to support.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
“These remnants of the wild, biologically intact, are precious few. We are losing ground.
No matter how much we choose to preserve the pristine through our passion, photography,
or politics, we cannot forget the simple truth: There are too many of us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
“We are on fire, even in water, after tumbling and mumbling inside a society where wealth
determines if we are heard, what options we have, what power we hold.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 161
Refuge
84
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried
it. He called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“History has shown us that exclusivity in the name of empire building eventually fails.
Fear of discord undermines creativity. And creativity lies at the heart of adaptive
evolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
“I don’t know if Brigham Young ever ventured to Gunnison Island or observed the finely
tuned society of pelicans. But had his attention been focused more on Earth than ‘heaven
on earth’ his vision for managing the Saints in the Great Basin might have been altered.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 107
The Fremont oscillated with the lake levels. As Great Salt Lake rose, they retreated.
As the lake retreated, they were drawn back. Theirs was not a fixed society like ours. They
followed the expanding and receding shorelines. It was the ebb and flow of their lives
In many ways, the Fremont had more options than we have. What do we do when
faced with a rising Great Salt Lake? Pump it west. What did the Fremont do? Move. They
accommodated change were, so often, we are immobilized by it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 183
“Conservation laws are only as strong as the people who support them. We look away and
they are in danger of being overturned, compromised, and weakened.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 264-265
The Appeals Court overturned the earlier ruling on the ground that the U.S. “was protected
from suit by the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 285
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“I must question everything, even it if means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a
member of a border tribe among my own people.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 286
“When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the Nevada Test
Site as ‘virtually uninhabited desert terrain,’ my family and the birds at Great Salt Lake
were some of the ‘virtual uninhabitants.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
Robert Smithson’s “notion of the ‘entropic wasteland’ we have created from our industrial
society.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 312
Unspoken Hunger
“There is no such thing as waste except in the world of man.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 9
“When in the presence of natural order, we remember the potentiality of life, which has
been overgrown by civilization.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 9
Mention of Japanese internment camps
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 50
“It is Artemis . . . who denounces the world of patriarchy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 53
“Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the
impulses we arouse and the forces we represent.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
“I find myself being mentored by the land once again, as two great blue herons fly over
me. Their wingbeats are slow, so slow they remind me that, all around, energy is being
conserved. I too can bring my breath down to dwell in a deeper place where my blood-soul
restores to my body what society has drained and dredged away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 62
“But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate
nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose
mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect
more isolation and greater ecological disease. Our lack of intimacy with each other is in
direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and
abandoned the wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“Audre Lorde tells us, ‘We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves . . . our
deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile
and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many aspects of our own
oppression.”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“Eight hundred acres of wetlands. It is nothing. It is everything. We are a tribe of fractured
individuals who can now only celebrate remnants or wildness. One red-tailed hawk. Two
great blue herons.
Wildlands and wildlives’ oppression lies in our desire to control and our desire to
control has robbed us of feeling. Our rib cages have been broken and our hearts cut out.
The knives of our priests are bloody. We, the people. Our own hands are bloody.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“’Blood knowledge,’ says D. H. Lawrence. ‘Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut
himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh,
what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal
feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what
is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots. . . .’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own
oppression. I stand on the edge of these wetlands, a place of renewal, an oasis in the desert,
as an act of faith, believing the sun has completed the southern end of its journey and is
now contemplating its return toward light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
On Stone Creek Woman: “But in the solitude of that side canyon where I swam at her feet,
she reminds me we must stand vigilant.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 72
Peter Matthiessen said “the American psyche that wants war is the same psyche that
doesn’t want wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Patriot’s Journal,” Unspoken Hunger, 108
“I allow myself to struggle with the obligations of a public life and the spiritual
necessity for a private one.”
Am I an activist or an artist?
Do I stay home or do I speak out?
When Edward Abbey calls for the artist to be a critic of his or her society, do we
live on the page or do we live in the world?
It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. Otherwise,
who will be there to chart the changes?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 133-134
Open Space of Democracy
We have heard our president, our vice-president, our secretary of defense, and our attorney
general cultivate fear and command with lies, suggesting our homeland security and safety
must reside in their hands, not ours. Force has trumped debate and diplomacy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20a
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Our language has been taken hostage. Words like patriotism, freedom, and democracy
have been bound and gagged, forced to perform indecent acts through the abuse of slogans.
Freedom will prevail. We are liberating Iraq. God bless America.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20a
For many of us, the war on terror is not something that has been initiated outside our
country, but inside our country as well. We wonder who to trust and what to believe.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20a
How do we engage in conversation at a time when the definition of what it means to be
a patriot is being narrowly construed? You are either with us or against us.
Discussion is waged in absolutes not ambiguities. Corporations have more access to
power than people. We, the people. Fear has replaced discussion. Business practices
have taken precedence over public process. It doesn't matter what the United Nations
advises or what world opinion may be. America in the early years of the twenty-first
century has become a force unto itself. The laws it chooses to abide by are its own.
What role does this leave us as individuals within a republic?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
Abraham Lincoln warns: "What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and
independence? It is not our crowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army
and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of these may be turned
against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the spirit
which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this
spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize
yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.
Accustom to trample on the rights of others and you have lost the genius of your own
independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises
among you."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
How do we engage in responsive citizenship in times of terror? Do we have the
imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and
reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in; silence overtakes
speech. Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we
are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to
carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are
forgotten and the images of television replace history.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
An open democracy inspires wisdom and the dignity of choice. A closed society
inspires terror and the tyranny of belief. We are no longer citizens. We are mediaengineered clones wondering who we are and why we feel alone. Lethargy trumps
participation. We fall prey to the cynicism of our own resignation.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
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When democracy disappears, we are asked to accept the way things are. I beg you: Do
not accept the way things are.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Since George W. Bush took the office of President of the United States I have been sick at
heart, unable to stomach or abide this administration’s aggressive policies directed against
the environment, education, social services, healthcare, and our civil liberties—basically,
the wholesale destruction of seemingly everything that contributes to a free society, except
the special interests of big business.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 24
In my darkest moments, I rant and write polemics as I watch a war of exploitation being
waged against our public lands in the American West and Alaska. . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 24
The erosion of speech is the build-up of war.
Silence no longer supports prayers, but lives inside
the open mouths of the dead.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
After much thought, what I would be willing to die for, and give my life to, is the freedom
of speech. It is the open door to all other freedoms. We are a nation at war with ourselves.
Until we can turn to one another and offer our sincere words as to why we feel the way we
do with an honest commitment to hear what others have to say, we will continue to project
our anger on the world in true, unconscious acts of terror.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
How we choose to support a living democracy will determine whether it will survive as the
beating heart of a republic or merely be preserved as a withered artifact of a cold and
ruthless empire.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
How we choose to support a living democracy will determine whether it will survive as
the beating heart of a republic or merely be preserved as a withered artifact of a cold and
ruthless empire.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
We can ask ourselves within the context and specificity of our own lives, how fear can be
transformed into courage, silence transformed into honest expression, and spiritual
isolation quelled through a sense of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Subhankar Banerjee has become, unwittingly, a celebrity photographer who bears the
distinction of being censored by the United States government. For what? The threat of
beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 41b
As the Brooks Range recedes behind us, I am mindful that Mardy is approaching 101 years
of age. She has never shed her optimism for wild Alaska. I am half her age and my niece,
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Abby, is half of mine. We share her passion for this order of quiet freedom. America's
wildlands are vulnerable and they will always be assailable as long as what we value in
this nation is measured in monetary terms, not spiritual ones.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
Looking over my shoulder from the rise on the bridge, all I could see was an endless river
of people walking, many hand in hand, all side by side, peacefully, united in place with a
will for social change. Michelangelo was among them, as art students from Florence
raised replicas of his Prigioni above their heads, the unfinished sculptures of prisoners
trying to break free from the confines of stone. Machiavelli was among them, as
philosophy students from Rome carried his words: "There is nothing more difficult to take
in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of things." Leonardo da Vinci was among them, his
words carrying a particularly contemporary sting: "And by reason of their boundless
pride... there shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth or in the
waters that shall not be pursued and molested or destroyed."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
 Obviously the reference to Machiavelli calling for a new order suggests that all
radical change may not be progressive
The hundreds of thousands of individuals who walked together in the name of social
change could be seen as the dignified, radical center walking boldly toward the future. As
an American in Florence, I wondered, how do we walk with the rest of the world when our
foreign policies seem to run counter to the rising global awareness of a world hungry for
honest diplomacy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
Here in the redrock desert, which now carries the weight of more leases for oil and gas
than its fragile red skin can support, due to the aggressive energy policy of the Bush
administration, the open space of democracy appears to be closing. The Rocky
Mountain states are feeling this same press of energy extraction with scant thought being
given to energy alternatives. A domestic imperialism has crept into our country with the
same assured arrogance and ideology-of-might that seem evident in Iraq.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
It is easy to believe we the people have no say; that the powers in Washington will
roll over our local concerns with their corporate energy ties and thumper trucks. It is easy
to believe that the American will is only focused on how to get rich, how to be
entertained, and how to distract itself from the hard choices we have before us as a nation.
I refuse to believe this. The only space I see truly capable of being closed is not the
land or our civil liberties but our own hearts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
It is time to ask, when will our national culture of self-interest stop cutting the bonds of
community to shore up individual gain and instead begin to nourish communal life
through acts of giving, not taking? It is time to acknowledge the violence rendered to our
souls each time a mountaintop is removed to expose a coal vein in Appalachia or when a
wetland is drained, dredged, and filled for a strip mall. And the time has come to demand
an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life in all its variety and forms, as
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we witness the repeated breaking of laws, and the relaxing of laws, in the sole name of
growth and greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
A wild salmon is not the same as a salmon raised in a hatchery. And a prairie dog colony is
not a shooting gallery for rifle recreationists, but a culture that has evolved with the prairie
since the Pleistocene. At what point do we finally lay our bodies down to say this is no
longer acceptable?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken
political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time
to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity
in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own
sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the
social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the
wealth and health of the corporate few.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," said
Edward Abbey. To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do
the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism
that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression
believing there is nothing we can do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
If we cannot begin to embrace democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to
think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways . . . .
if we fail to see the necessity of each of us to participate in the formation of an ethical life .
. . if we cannot bring a sense of equity and respect into our homes, our marriages, our
schools, and our churches, alongside our local, state, and federal governments, then
democracy simply becomes, as Dewey suggests, “a form of idolatry,” as we descend into
the basement of nationalism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on
moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth
and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it
as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an
acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true
source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of
personal engagement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
Derrick Jensen is in his own words, "a possessed writer." His books are manifestos of how
to live more consciously on the planet. He writes, "We are members of the most
destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and
other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear
suicide and other means -- all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
Teddy Roosevelt disagreed with President Woodrow Wilson's thoughts on World War I.
Roosevelt said, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we
are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is
morally treasonable to the American public."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
Others
I was invited by the literature department of the University of Hiroshima and the Japanese
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment to give a reading. The
newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun was sponsoring my visit. I read "The Clan of One-breasted
Women," which is the epilogue from my book Refuge, about our family's struggles and
adjustment with my mother's death from cancer and its ultimate relationship with nuclear
testing. I spoke of what it meant to grow up in a traditional Mormon home, our adherence
to strict moral principles and the subtle constraints placed on women in the name of
patriarchy. I shared how the price of obedience became too high as I watched the women
in my family die common heroic deaths. I spoke about committing civil disobedience with
other women from Utah at the Nevada Test Site, of my arrest and release as I sought to
both confront and reconcile my government's irresponsible actions. Blind obedience in the
name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Hiroshima Journey,” 3
The way in which we treat the world is a measure of our sensitivity. Can we really survive
the worship of our own destructiveness?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Letter of Solidarity”
“Rachel Carson presents her discoveries of destruction in the form of storytelling. In
example after example, grounded in the natural world, she weaves together facts and
fictions into an environmental tale of life, love, and loss. Her voice is forceful and
dignified, but sentence after sentence she delivers right hand blows and counter punches to
the status quo rules by chemical companies within the Kingdom of Agriculture.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 43
“Rachel Carson has called us to action. Silent Spring is a social critique of our modern way
of life, as essential to the evolving American ideals of freedom and democracy as anything
ever written by our founding fathers.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 59
We cannot afford to take anything for granted in the name of wildness. Surely there is a
line that cannot be crossed and that line is drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. Conservation is a generational stance where vows to preserve an ecological
integrity in the interest of community must be renewed over and over again.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Do we have it in us to rise up against the current political winds that say unabashedly,
"the only thing we are interested in conserving is this blessed American way of life."
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
The Bush Administration is both arrogant and ignorant. Arrogant enough to say they can
and will drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge without any adverse impact to
the land, and ignorant enough to believe it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Other brief essays
“Bearing Witness”
Interviews
If we only see the West as a place where there's money to be made, a place to subdivide, to
drill for oil and gas, we will lose the very thing that makes us westerners and Americans.
We have forgotten the option of restraint, whether we're talking about our response to
terrorism, or about growth and development.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: What priority do we assign conservation of wild lands given the current emphasis on
international affairs and national defense?
TTW: I think wild lands have never been more important than they are now. They are also
more threatened as a result of the events of Sept. 11. Just today, a senator from Arkansas
was trying to tie the President's energy bill to the bill for the war effort. America's Red
Rock Wilderness is threatened by the urgency to dig for gas and oil. Right now, right on
the boundary of Canyonlands, there are huge machines, trucks with massive tires,
thumping the land to test it for gas preserves. There are assumptions that we are now at
war and environmental and ecological integrity no longer matters. We're going to have to
be very strong, very smart, very certain in our cause.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: Just how serious is the threat to designated wilderness posed by the Bush
administration?
TTW: I think it's an enormous threat. When you look at the oil and gas interests that
fueled Bush's campaign, it's a whole different orientation to what we saw in the Clinton
administration. They have a viewpoint about how the land should be used, and that
translates to exploitation of natural resources to fuel the economy. The agenda of the Bush
administration, set prior to Sept. 11, has just been accentuated in the name of patriotism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: What can we do to raise the issue to a level of national importance?
TTW: We need to remember that there are other definitions of natural resources, like
courage and beauty. Those of us who believe in the value of wilderness are going to have
to get stronger and stronger. There will be a time when speaking out about the environment
is going to be seen as anti-patriotic. Maybe we will have to create a new vocabulary. It's
not them and us, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals; it's all of us
trying to survive and live together on Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: What's the current status of the Redrock Wilderness Act?
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TTW: The Redrock Wilderness Bill currently before Congress, in some ways has never
had more support. But it also has never had such strong opposition. The Bush and Cheney
agenda is an energy agenda, and they'll take the wild lands for that purpose unless we are a
vigilant, responsible citizenry. All I'm asking for is a healthy, conscious discussion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Our lack of intimacy with the natural world is in direct correspondence with our lack of
intimacy with each other. Our bodies, the body of the Earth -- there is no separation. When
we cause harm to the natural world, we also cause harm to ourselves. The health of the
planet is our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
Traditionally, Christianity has made a distinction, a spiritual separation between
human beings and other creatures, be they plants or animals. We have dominion over the
Earth. This philosophy within the Judeo-Christian mind has wreaked havoc on the planet.
We have abused our natural resources and given little thought to the notion of
sustainability.
I believe this is changing as we witness what the devastating effects of our
irresponsible actions have created in terms of environmental degradation, be it global
warming or deforestation or quite simply, the loss of open space within our cities and
towns. We are slowly learning what it means to be good stewards, to enter into a dialogue
with the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
How do we marry our joy with our sorrow in a world as delicate and strong as spider's
silk? How do we continue to find faith in a world that seems to have abandoned the
sacred?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
London: You've said that your connection to the natural world is also your connection to
yourself. Do you think that's true for everybody?
Williams: We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal
memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what
binds us as human beings. I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so
urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that
roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this
continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think,
"Ah, yes, evolution." [laughs] You know, it's there, we just forget.
I worry, Scott, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are
forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference. Pelicans pass
by and we hardly know who they are, we don't know their stories. Again, at what price? I
think it's leading us to a place of inconsolable loneliness. That's what I mean by "An
Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger
that cannot be quelled by the constant denial. I think that the only thing that can bring us
into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the
source of our power lies.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
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JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
As Harold Bloom has said, Mormonism is an "American religion." We have become very
successful. What was once community-based has now become more corporate-based. So I
think what we're seeing is not something unique to Mormonism, but something that we're
seeing in the evolution of American culture.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and
earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but
rather the culture of modernity."
TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was
speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I
think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in
correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of
the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying
that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're
retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very
positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered.
That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but
on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all
know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
“the Navajo culture sent me back home to my own. There are similarities, a strong family
structure reinforced through generational storytelling, a keen belief in the power of healing,
but there are also marked differences. I had to come to terms with the fact that in Mormon
culture, or any Christian religion for that matter, we are taught that human beings as having
dominion over the land. This is one of the things that has led to my own estrangement from
orthodoxy. Most Indigenous People do not view their relationship toward the earth this
way. They see themselves as a part of nature with a sense of kinship extended to all forms
of life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
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“This is not to say that writing about landscape is an epiphany around every corner. That
kind of writing drives me crazy. But to see landscape as a complex set of principles,
metaphors, and social considerations that are germane to this point in time. I think about
Octavio Paz when he says that if we’re interested in revolution, an evolution of the spirit, it
requires both love and criticism, that it is a writer’s obligation to critique his or her own
society or community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 16
“Our culture of consumerism tells us what we need, what we want, and what we deserve. It
is the economics of entitlement. And I believe it is an illusion. I believe our needs are more
basic: home; family; community; health; the health of the land which includes all life
forms, plants, animals, and human beings. We need open country, open spaces, a wildness
that offers us deliverance from inauthentic lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
“What we are doing as a species is an incredible mass abuse of our own spirit and of the
spirit of life around us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320
“We’re creating desperate, isolated, fast-paced lives that give us enormous excuse not to be
engaged. We are lonely.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322
CRITIQUE, CRITICISM
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CRITIQUE - THEMES
Necessity of criticism
“This is not to say that writing about landscape is an epiphany around every corner. That
kind of writing drives me crazy. But to see landscape as a complex set of principles,
metaphors, and social considerations that are germane to this point in time. I think about
Octavio Paz when he says that if we’re interested in revolution, an evolution of the spirit, it
requires both love and criticism, that it is a writer’s obligation to critique his or her own
society or community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 16
“I must question everything, even it if means losing my faith, even if it means becoming a
member of a border tribe among my own people.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 286
“Rachel Carson has called us to action. Silent Spring is a social critique of our modern way
of life, as essential to the evolving American ideals of freedom and democracy as anything
ever written by our founding fathers.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 59
“I allow myself to struggle with the obligations of a public life and the spiritual
necessity for a private one.”
Am I an activist or an artist?
Do I stay home or do I speak out?
When Edward Abbey calls for the artist to be a critic of his or her society, do we
live on the page or do we live in the world?
It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home. Otherwise,
who will be there to chart the changes?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 133-134
On Stone Creek Woman: “But in the solitude of that side canyon where I swam at her feet,
she reminds me we must stand vigilant.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 72
IN THE FORM OF STORY-TELLING
“Rachel Carson presents her discoveries of destruction in the form of storytelling. In
example after example, grounded in the natural world, she weaves together facts and
fictions into an environmental tale of life, love, and loss. Her voice is forceful and
dignified, but sentence after sentence she delivers right hand blows and counter punches to
the status quo rules by chemical companies within the Kingdom of Agriculture.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 43
Ravaged landscapes & loss of natural communities
Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the
bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I came to Spain to get away from my
torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for
development.
There are too many of us, six billion and rising, our collective impact on fragile
communities is deadly.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 115
“It’s not just the loss of a ‘playground’ or a place of recreation, as many opponents argue;
it’s the fundamental loss of natural systems, free-flowing rivers, rock art pecked and
painted into stone by the hands of the Ancient Ones a thousand years ago. It is the
drowning of a way of life, the death of natural communities that are much older, and
perhaps wiser, than those of our own species.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 6-7
“The region of the American West shares common ground with the South: each has found
its voice in loss. The South was forever shaped by the Civil War, and today we in the West
are in the midst of our own. It is not a battle over issues of slavery. It is a battle over public
and private uses of land, what will be developed and what will remain sovereign. Guns are
replaced by metaphorical monkey wrenches and shovels.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 7
“Meanwhile, the great beast of progress continues to make its tracks upon the wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 15
“We must ask ourselves as Americans, ‘Can we really survive the worship of our own
destructiveness?’ We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate
intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human
beings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 76
“Wherever I walk on the streets of Salt Lake City, I am seeing changes I can no longer
bear. . . . Never mind the depression that follows, that we fail to make the connection
between a lack of sunlight and a lack of joy. As urban dwellers, we simply get up every
morning and go to work.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 116
“I am aware that my own house, the home we live in and love, devoured this land. . . . My
rational self understands the inevitability of growth and my own role inside it. But what I
find harder and harder to abide is not growth, but the growth of greed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 117
“What we are doing as a species is an incredible mass abuse of our own spirit and of the
spirit of life around us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320
Robert Smithson’s “notion of the ‘entropic wasteland’ we have created from our industrial
society.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 312
“There is no such thing as waste except in the world of man.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 9
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Nature fragmented
“But there is something deeper at stake here in Utah and for that matter in North America.
It has to do with knitting the wild back together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Wild Act,” Red, 101
“Eight hundred acres of wetlands. It is nothing. It is everything. We are a tribe of fractured
individuals who can now only celebrate remnants or wildness. One red-tailed hawk. Two
great blue herons.
Sense of dominion, anthropocentrism
“the Navajo culture sent me back home to my own. There are similarities, a strong family
structure reinforced through generational storytelling, a keen belief in the power of healing,
but there are also marked differences. I had to come to terms with the fact that in Mormon
culture, or any Christian religion for that matter, we are taught that human beings as having
dominion over the land. This is one of the things that has led to my own estrangement from
orthodoxy. Most Indigenous People do not view their relationship toward the earth this
way. They see themselves as a part of nature with a sense of kinship extended to all forms
of life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and
earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but
rather the culture of modernity."
TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was
speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I
think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in
correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of
the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying
that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're
retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very
positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered.
That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but
on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all
know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
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bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
Traditionally, Christianity has made a distinction, a spiritual separation between
human beings and other creatures, be they plants or animals. We have dominion over the
Earth. This philosophy within the Judeo-Christian mind has wreaked havoc on the planet.
We have abused our natural resources and given little thought to the notion of
sustainability.
I believe this is changing as we witness what the devastating effects of our
irresponsible actions have created in terms of environmental degradation, be it global
warming or deforestation or quite simply, the loss of open space within our cities and
towns. We are slowly learning what it means to be good stewards, to enter into a dialogue
with the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
Wildlands and wildlives’ oppression lies in our desire to control and our desire to
control has robbed us of feeling. Our rib cages have been broken and our hearts cut out.
The knives of our priests are bloody. We, the people. Our own hands are bloody.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
Patriarchy
I was invited by the literature department of the University of Hiroshima and the Japanese
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment to give a reading. The
newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun was sponsoring my visit. I read "The Clan of One-breasted
Women," which is the epilogue from my book Refuge, about our family's struggles and
adjustment with my mother's death from cancer and its ultimate relationship with nuclear
testing. I spoke of what it meant to grow up in a traditional Mormon home, our adherence
to strict moral principles and the subtle constraints placed on women in the name of
patriarchy. I shared how the price of obedience became too high as I watched the women
in my family die common heroic deaths. I spoke about committing civil disobedience with
other women from Utah at the Nevada Test Site, of my arrest and release as I sought to
both confront and reconcile my government's irresponsible actions. Blind obedience in the
name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Hiroshima Journey,” 3
“It is Artemis . . . who denounces the world of patriarchy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 53
Disconnected from nature
London: You've said that your connection to the natural world is also your connection to
yourself. Do you think that's true for everybody?
Williams: We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal
memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what
binds us as human beings. I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so
urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that
roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this
continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think,
"Ah, yes, evolution." [laughs] You know, it's there, we just forget.
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I worry, Scott, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are
forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference. Pelicans pass
by and we hardly know who they are, we don't know their stories. Again, at what price? I
think it's leading us to a place of inconsolable loneliness. That's what I mean by "An
Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger
that cannot be quelled by the constant denial. I think that the only thing that can bring us
into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the
source of our power lies.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
Our lack of intimacy with the natural world is in direct correspondence with our lack of
intimacy with each other. Our bodies, the body of the Earth -- there is no separation. When
we cause harm to the natural world, we also cause harm to ourselves. The health of the
planet is our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
“’Blood knowledge,’ says D. H. Lawrence. ‘Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut
himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh,
what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal
feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what
is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots. . . .’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
Lack of sense of spiritual values of nature
“Without a philosophy of wildness and the recognition of its inherent spiritual values, we
will, as E. O. Wilson reminds us, ‘descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how
much the natural world means to us.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“For those of us who so love these lands in Utah, who recognize America’s Redrock
Wilderness as a sanctuary for the preservation of our souls, Senate Bill 884, the Utah
Public Lands Management Act of 1995, is the beginning of this forgetting, a forgetting we
may never reclaim.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
How do we marry our joy with our sorrow in a world as delicate and strong as spider's
silk? How do we continue to find faith in a world that seems to have abandoned the
sacred?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
NEED FOR FEELING
“Without feeling. Perhaps these two words are the key, the only way we can begin to
understand our abuse of each other and our abuse of the land. Could it be that what we fear
most is our capacity to feel, so that we annihilate symbolically and physically that which is
beautiful and tender, anything that dares us to consider our creative selves? The erotic
world is silenced, reduced to a collection of objects we curate and control, be it a vase, a
woman, or wilderness. Our lives become a piece in the puzzle of pornography as we go
through the motions of daily intercourse without any engagement of the soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 108
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Wildlands and wildlives’ oppression lies in our desire to control and our desire to
control has robbed us of feeling. Our rib cages have been broken and our hearts cut out.
The knives of our priests are bloody. We, the people. Our own hands are bloody.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own
oppression. I stand on the edge of these wetlands, a place of renewal, an oasis in the desert,
as an act of faith, believing the sun has completed the southern end of its journey and is
now contemplating its return toward light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“’Blood knowledge,’ says D. H. Lawrence. ‘Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut
himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh,
what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal
feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what
is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots. . . .’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate
nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose
mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect
more isolation and greater ecological disease. Our lack of intimacy with each other is in
direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and
abandoned the wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
Fear
“Without feeling. Perhaps these two words are the key, the only way we can begin to
understand our abuse of each other and our abuse of the land. Could it be that what we fear
most is our capacity to feel, so that we annihilate symbolically and physically that which is
beautiful and tender, anything that dares us to consider our creative selves? The erotic
world is silenced, reduced to a collection of objects we curate and control, be it a vase, a
woman, or wilderness. Our lives become a piece in the puzzle of pornography as we go
through the motions of daily intercourse without any engagement of the soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 108
“The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own
oppression. I stand on the edge of these wetlands, a place of renewal, an oasis in the desert,
as an act of faith, believing the sun has completed the southern end of its journey and is
now contemplating its return toward light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the
impulses we arouse and the forces we represent.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
“Audre Lorde tells us, ‘We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves . . . our
deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile
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and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many aspects of our own
oppression.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate
nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose
mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect
more isolation and greater ecological disease. Our lack of intimacy with each other is in
direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and
abandoned the wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
Need to be interactive
“Without feeling. Perhaps these two words are the key, the only way we can begin to
understand our abuse of each other and our abuse of the land. Could it be that what we fear
most is our capacity to feel, so that we annihilate symbolically and physically that which is
beautiful and tender, anything that dares us to consider our creative selves? The erotic
world is silenced, reduced to a collection of objects we curate and control, be it a vase, a
woman, or wilderness. Our lives become a piece in the puzzle of pornography as we go
through the motions of daily intercourse without any engagement of the soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 108
Nature and political/social
Our lack of intimacy with the natural world is in direct correspondence with our lack of
intimacy with each other. Our bodies, the body of the Earth -- there is no separation. When
we cause harm to the natural world, we also cause harm to ourselves. The health of the
planet is our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
Peter Matthiessen said “the American psyche that wants war is the same psyche that
doesn’t want wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Patriot’s Journal,” Unspoken Hunger, 108
Political policies and structures
“Conservation laws are only as strong as the people who support them. We look away and
they are in danger of being overturned, compromised, and weakened.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 264-265
The Appeals Court overturned the earlier ruling on the ground that the U.S. “was protected
from suit by the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 285
“When the Atomic Energy Commission described the country north of the Nevada Test
Site as ‘virtually uninhabited desert terrain,’ my family and the birds at Great Salt Lake
were some of the ‘virtual uninhabitants.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
We cannot afford to take anything for granted in the name of wildness. Surely there is a
line that cannot be crossed and that line is drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife
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Refuge. Conservation is a generational stance where vows to preserve an ecological
integrity in the interest of community must be renewed over and over again.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Do we have it in us to rise up against the current political winds that say unabashedly,
"the only thing we are interested in conserving is this blessed American way of life."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
The Bush Administration is both arrogant and ignorant. Arrogant enough to say they can
and will drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge without any adverse impact to
the land, and ignorant enough to believe it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Indy: What's the current status of the Redrock Wilderness Act?
TTW: The Redrock Wilderness Bill currently before Congress, in some ways has never
had more support. But it also has never had such strong opposition. The Bush and Cheney
agenda is an energy agenda, and they'll take the wild lands for that purpose unless we are a
vigilant, responsible citizenry. All I'm asking for is a healthy, conscious discussion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
As Harold Bloom has said, Mormonism is an "American religion." We have become very
successful. What was once community-based has now become more corporate-based. So I
think what we're seeing is not something unique to Mormonism, but something that we're
seeing in the evolution of American culture.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
Indy: What can we do to raise the issue to a level of national importance?
TTW: We need to remember that there are other definitions of natural resources, like
courage and beauty. Those of us who believe in the value of wilderness are going to have
to get stronger and stronger. There will be a time when speaking out about the environment
is going to be seen as anti-patriotic. Maybe we will have to create a new vocabulary. It's
not them and us, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals; it's all of us
trying to survive and live together on Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: What priority do we assign conservation of wild lands given the current emphasis on
international affairs and national defense?
TTW: I think wild lands have never been more important than they are now. They are also
more threatened as a result of the events of Sept. 11. Just today, a senator from Arkansas
was trying to tie the President's energy bill to the bill for the war effort. America's Red
Rock Wilderness is threatened by the urgency to dig for gas and oil. Right now, right on
the boundary of Canyonlands, there are huge machines, trucks with massive tires,
thumping the land to test it for gas preserves. There are assumptions that we are now at
war and environmental and ecological integrity no longer matters. We're going to have to
be very strong, very smart, very certain in our cause.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: Just how serious is the threat to designated wilderness posed by the Bush
administration?
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TTW: I think it's an enormous threat. When you look at the oil and gas interests that
fueled Bush's campaign, it's a whole different orientation to what we saw in the Clinton
administration. They have a viewpoint about how the land should be used, and that
translates to exploitation of natural resources to fuel the economy. The agenda of the Bush
administration, set prior to Sept. 11, has just been accentuated in the name of patriotism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
For many Americans, the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan is an abstraction at best, and at worst,
a secret. For those of us living in the redrock desert of southern Utah, it is an earth-shaking
reality as seismic explorations are underway in sensitive wildlands adjacent to Arches
National Park and Canyonlands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Bearing Witness,” Orion
There is nothing we can do but watch and witness the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan in action.
Call it another form of terrorism played out in the theater of our public lands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Bearing Witness,” Orion
OVERPOPULATION
“These remnants of the wild, biologically intact, are precious few. We are losing ground.
No matter how much we choose to preserve the pristine through our passion, photography,
or politics, we cannot forget the simple truth: There are too many of us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
Lack of restraint
“We have forgotten the option of restraint.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 97
“As locals tied to the exploitive susceptibility of the land we live on, we wind up thanking
our federal government for saving us from ourselves. A nation’s appetite for beauty
transcends a state’s hunger for greed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Wild Act,” Red, 101
Land of little rain: “Not much has changed regarding the aridity and austerity of the region.
What has changed is the number of needs and desires that we ask the earth to support.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
“Our culture of consumerism tells us what we need, what we want, and what we deserve. It
is the economics of entitlement. And I believe it is an illusion. I believe our needs are more
basic: home; family; community; health; the health of the land which includes all life
forms, plants, animals, and human beings. We need open country, open spaces, a wildness
that offers us deliverance from inauthentic lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
If we only see the West as a place where there's money to be made, a place to subdivide, to
drill for oil and gas, we will lose the very thing that makes us westerners and Americans.
We have forgotten the option of restraint, whether we're talking about our response to
terrorism, or about growth and development.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
105
Quiet desperation
“We’re creating desperate, isolated, fast-paced lives that give us enormous excuse not to be
engaged. We are lonely.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322
“What we are doing as a species is an incredible mass abuse of our own spirit and of the
spirit of life around us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320
Drained by society
“I find myself being mentored by the land once again, as two great blue herons fly over
me. Their wingbeats are slow, so slow they remind me that, all around, energy is being
conserved. I too can bring my breath down to dwell in a deeper place where my blood-soul
restores to my body what society has drained and dredged away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 62
Social injustice
We are on fire, even in water, after tumbling and mumbling inside a society where wealth
determines if we are heard, what options we have, what power we hold.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 161
Need for adaptability
The Fremont oscillated with the lake levels. As Great Salt Lake rose, they retreated.
As the lake retreated, they were drawn back. Theirs was not a fixed society like ours. They
followed the expanding and receding shorelines. It was the ebb and flow of their lives
In many ways, the Fremont had more options than we have. What do we do when
faced with a rising Great Salt Lake? Pump it west. What did the Fremont do? Move. They
accommodated change were, so often, we are immobilized by it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 183
Need for diversity and creativity
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“History has shown us that exclusivity in the name of empire building eventually fails.
Fear of discord undermines creativity. And creativity lies at the heart of adaptive
evolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
“I don’t know if Brigham Young ever ventured to Gunnison Island or observed the finely
tuned society of pelicans. But had his attention been focused more on Earth than ‘heaven
on earth’ his vision for managing the Saints in the Great Basin might have been altered.”
106
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 107
Society’s oughts and shoulds
“And then after having made enough pilgrimages to the slickrock to warrant sufficient
separation from society’s oughts and shoulds, look again for the novice you were, who
asked if the standstone bleeds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
CRITIQUE - THEMES
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CULTURAL ECOLOGY
Red
The story “Lion’s Eyes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Lion’s Eyes,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 27-31
The story “Kokopelli’s Return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 43ff
“My ancestors moved and settled as a result of spiritual beliefs. They gathered in the belief
of an integrated life where nature, culture, religion, and civic responsibility were woven in
the context of family and community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
“Native people understand language as an articulation of kinship, all manner of relations.
To the Dine, hozho honors balance in the world, a kind of equilibriated grace, how human
beings stand in relation to everything else. If a native tongue is lost, the perceived
landscape is also lost Conversely, if the landscape is destroyed, the language that evolved
alongside is also destroyed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 137
Refuge
“What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family.
Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a
matter of living the circle.
“Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship
with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We
choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is
money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 137
The Fremont oscillated with the lake levels. As Great Salt Lake rose, they retreated.
As the lake retreated, they were drawn back. Theirs was not a fixed society like ours. They
followed the expanding and receding shorelines. It was the ebb and flow of their lives
In many ways, the Fremont had more options than we have. What do we do when
faced with a rising Great Salt Lake? Pump it west. What did the Fremont do? Move. They
accommodated change were, so often, we are immobilized by it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 183
David Madsen: “During the fifteen hundred years that the Fremont can be distinguished,
they produced an archaeological record as rich, yet as enigmatic, as any in the world. The
record of how they lived, reacted, and responded to the changing world around them is a
mirror of ourselves—of all peoples at all times in all places.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 185
Mimi: “Many native cultures participate in scarification rituals. It’s a sign that denotes
change. The person who is scarred has undergone some kind of transformation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
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“You Americans, why is death always such a surprise to you? Don’t you
understand the dance and the struggle are the same?”
The voice of a Zimbabwean woman comes back to me. We had met in Kenya a few
years back. I had walked out on a film on famine in Ethiopia. I could not bear the
suffering. She followed me out, grabbed my arm, and brought me back in.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 245
Pieces of White Shell
“Sometimes you have to disclaim your country and inhabit another before you can return
to you own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 2
“This book is a journey into one culture, Navajo, and back out again to my own, Mormon.
I am reminded by a Shoshone friend that I come to the Navajo as a migrating bird, lighting
for only brief periods of time. This is true. But it is also true that the lessons I learn come
from similar places. No one culture has dominion over birdsong. We all share the same
sky.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 2
“We are neighbors.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 2
Mormon & Navajo.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
“But there are major differences, primarily in the stories we tell and the way in which we
walk upon the earth. It is here that I am most aware of leaving my own culture and entering
another. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot. There are risks, I know. My feet have been
cut many times, but I am learning to pay attention.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
> symbol of engagement, or entering
“Navajo stories have been my guides across the desert. I have trusted them because I could
find no others. They are rooted in native soil. To these people they are sacred. Truth. To
me, they are beacons in a nation suspicious of nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
“A story grows from the inside out and the inside of Navajoland is something I know little
of. But I do know myself and if I begin traveling with an awareness of my own ignorance,
trusting my instincts, I can look for my own stories embedded in the landscapes I travel
through.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
> symbol of engagement, or entering
“I am not suggesting we emulate Native Peoples—in this case, the Navajo. We can’t. We
are not Navajo. Besides, their traditional stories don’t work for us. It’s like drinking
another man’s medicine. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can
teach us what is possible. We must create and find our own stories, our own myths, with
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symbols that will bind us to the world as we see it today. In so doing, we will better know
how to live our lives in the midst of change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 5
“I offer you a sampling of the Navajo voice, of my voice, and the voice of the land that
moves us. We are told a story and then we tell our own. Each us harbors a homeland. The
stories that are rooted there push themselves up like native grasses and crack the
sidewalks.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 8
“When we tamper with the balance of things the scales rarely meet equilibrium again. This
story is written over and over in our history, be it with Native Peoples, economics, or
bears. We are grossly insensitive to the connectedness of life. Eric Hoffer makes the point:
‘Lack of sensitivity is basically an unawareness of ourselves.’ In terms of culture which is
intrinsically linked with landscape, is it possible to meet another with empathetic eyes?
Perhaps. If we can begin to focus beyond ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 113-114
“For this brief moment, the boundaries of time and space dissolve. Anasazi drums return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 126
“Silence. I don’t want there to be: Silence. I want to talk, listen, share, spend entire
afternoons in womanly conversation about her life, mine. Somehow, I sense that a
thousand years do not separate us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 127
“Landscape shapes culture. . . . Perhaps we can begin to find the origins of our cultural
inheritance in the land – not to move backwards, but forward to understanding the
profound interconnectedness of all living things. As Gregory Bateson says, ‘If the world be
connected . . . then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds,
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 135
“We are not Navajo, however; we are not Inuit people or Sioux. We are contemporary
citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be
dangerous, and if you are honest you can’t stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to
look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 136
“For a brief moment, I entered sacred time. Perhaps this is the performance of an artifact.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 142
Interviews
TL: One of your early books, Pieces of Whiteshell, is set in the Navajo nation. What did
you learn from the Navajo? How did your experience with them influence your direction as
a writer?
TTW: One of the things I learned from the Dine when I taught on the Navajo Reservation
was the power of stories inherent in the land. It made me wonder as Anglos, what stories
we tell that evoke a sense of place, of landscape and community. Again, we have much to
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learn from Indian people and the long-time Hispanic families who have inhabited these
regions in the West for centuries about what it means to live in place.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
We are hungry for truth, for a life of greater intention. Perhaps that is why we travel to find
that lost piece of ourselves that we believe will make us whole. It is easy to romanticize
other cultures as having "the answers," a way of distancing ourselves from our own
accountability. But sooner or later, we must return home and find our own integrity within
the landscape of our own traditions.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 1
JW: Some would say that people like us -- people whose spirituality arises out of the earth
-- have become pagan. Do you think that's true?
TTW: I think so often our views of one another, of ourselves, shrink by the smallness of
our vocabulary. What's a Christian? What's a pagan? Recently I was in Costa Rica, where I
had the privilege of meeting a tribal medicine man. As we were walking in the rainforest
he was sweeping the narrow trail of snakes with his feathered staff. He turned and he said,
"I am a Christian, cosmologist, scientist, Earthist." And then he laughed. He said, "Does
that cover it all?" And I thought, that's what I am, too! You know, whether it's Christian,
whether it's pagan, whether it's an ecologist, whether it's a writer, a lover of language, a
lover of landscapes, can't we just say that our spirituality resides in our love? If that makes
us pagan, perhaps. If that makes us Christian, perhaps. But I love the notion that it's not
this or that, but this, that, and all of it. And, in a way, this is how I see spirituality emerging
on the planet. The constraints that we see within our religious traditions are not so
satisfying. The world has become so large. I almost feel like the doors are blowing off our
churches to let life come in and move freely.
What we're seeing is that we're taking the best of what we're being offered. There's
so much within my own tradition as a Mormon that I deeply cherish. The notion of
community, the notion of service, the notion of land, prayer -- things that aren't exclusive
to Mormonism, but that are certainly at the core of it. I can't separate my own sense of
family from my sense of community from my Mormon roots. But, alongside, I think there's
much to be gleaned from Buddhism, much to be gleaned from Catholicism, from that
which the Quakers practice, from much that I have been exposed to and learned from my
friends who are Indian people. And then there is so much to be gleaned from what we learn
from the Earth itself -- from simply walking the land, from the deer, the river, the wind.
And so, together, through our traditions, through that which we are exposed, we come to
some semblance of a spiritual life, bits and pieces. In my own tradition, I hear my mother
saying, "Call it a crazy quilt."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
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DANCE
“Coyote’s yellow eyes burned like flames as he danced around the cow carcass with a
femur in each hand. “
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 18
“Stone Creek Woman begins to dance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 71
“If you are going into that place of intent to preserve the Arctic NWR or the wildlands of
Utah, you have to know how to dance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mardy Murie,” Unspoken Hunger, 94
some quotes Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance—I’m not coming to your revolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Patriot’s Journey,” Unspoken Hunger, 105
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DARKNESS
“I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 113
“I am a writer in search of metaphors, and what I hear is that just as there is light in the
universe—starlight—there is also darkness, a dark matter that is denser and more
mysterious than anything we have yet encountered. This discovery, this knowledge, does
not scare me, it allows me to pursue and stand with my own dark matter and acknowledge
its weight. I believe it is our only way out of despair toward a faith in the future.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” 120
What I know is this: when one hungers for light it is only because one's knowledge of the
dark is so deep.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43a
DARK
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DEATH
Red
“’Good death,’ she said, as her hands sifted the wood dust of a decaying tree.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 52
Refuge
“The umbilical cord is cut—not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims
her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
Suffering shows us what we are attached to—perhaps the umbilical cord between Mother
and me has never been cut. Dying doesn’t cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 53
“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my
grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I
can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 178
“Mother’s voice still speaks with her spirited and inquisitive nature. These things don’t
change. Life in the face of death is merely compressed into grist.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 213
“Death is no longer what I imagined it to be. Death is earthy like birth, like sex, full of
smells and sounds and bodily fluids. It is a confluence of evanescence and flesh.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 219
“she has not only given me a reverence for life, but a reverence for death.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 226
“I have to let go—she has taught me there is no one moment of death. It is a process.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 228
“From one until four in the afternoon, we sat near her. A meditation. Her breaths could
now be heard as moans. Her eyes were haunting, open, and clear. Time was suspended like
watching a fire. Gradually, Mother’s breaths became a mantra and the death mask we
feared was removed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 229
“I felt as though I had been midwife to my mother’s birth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 231
“I stood at the side of my mother’s casket, enraged at our inability to let the dead be dead.
And I wept over the hollowness of our rituals.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 235
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“You Americans, why is death always such a surprise to you? Don’t you
understand the dance and the struggle are the same?”
The voice of a Zimbabwean woman comes back to me. We had met in Kenya a few
years back. I had walked out on a film on famine in Ethiopia. I could not bear the
suffering. She followed me out, grabbed my arm, and brought me back in.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 245
“Mother felt near. Death has become a familiar landscape. I can smell it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 261
“The past seven years are with me. Mother and Mimi are present. The relationships
continue – something I did not anticipate.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
In Mexico on the Day of the Dead. Strange experiences.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 276-8
“The world is in motion. We are in motion. We have all lost loved ones. We have all
danced with grief and we will one day dance with death. We embody the spiral, moving
inward and outward with the loss of fear, a love transcendent, and the courage to create
new maps.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“Ultimately, what I have discovered is that each death is individual. There are no rules.
And I still have no sense of what death really is except to say, I believe it is a process, akin
to birth, and that even now, after my mother and grandmothers are dead, the relationships
continue.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 128
“all you really have is the day at hand. I guess I don’t really believe death exists in the
conventional sense because when I was with my mother and grandmothers, it was like a
moment of birth—transformation—life as a continuous state of being—movement—
energy. What I have come to value and love most about the natural world is this same kind
of regenerative spirit.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 130
“That’s the premise of Refuge—that an intimacy with the natural world initiates an
intimacy with death, because life and death are engaged in an endless, inseparable dance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
“We turn our deaths over to someone else. In the process, our deaths have little privacy.
We lose the spiritual instruction a good death can offer. No death is easy. We are rarely
prepared. What I have learned through the deaths of the women of my family is that it’s
not only possible to live well, it is possible to die well. They wanted to face death as part of
life. There were no rules when my mother was dying, there was no precedent for us. So
we, my family, just walked into that unknown territory with as much trust as possible, our
mother our guide.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
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Dying mother: “The permeability of the body was present. I felt her spirit disengage from
the soles of her feet and move upward to leave out of the top of her head. It was asa though
she was climbing through her body on a ladder of light. The only analogue I had for that
feeling was in making love when you’re moving toward orgasm. Again, you are walking
up that ladder of light. It’s almost like being inside a piece of music, moving up the scale,
the pitch gets higher and higher and more intense, more intense. My mother’s death was
one of the sensual, sexual, erotic encounters I have ever had.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 311
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DEMOCRACY
Open Space of Democracy
I have always believed democracy is best practiced through its construction, not its
completion -- a never-ending project where the windows and doors remain open, a
reminder to never close ourselves off to the sensory impulses of eyes and ears alert
toward justice. Walls are torn down instead of erected in a counter-intuitive process where
a monument is not built but a home, in a constant state of renovation.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20a
I realized that in American Letters we celebrate both language and landscape,
that these words, stories, and poems can create an ethical stance toward life:
Melville's Great Whale; Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Thoreau's Walden Pond;
Emerson's "Oversoul" -- the natural world infused with divinity. I came to understand
through an education in the humanities that knowledge is another form of
democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy.
It begins with our questions...
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21a
I would submit that we can protect and preserve the open space of democracy by
carrying a healthy sense of indignation within us that will shatter the complacency that
has seeped into our society in the name of all we have lost -- knowing there is still so
much to be saved.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
What does the open space of democracy look like?
In the open space of democracy there is room for dissent.
In the open space of democracy there is room for differences.
In the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the
wealth of our communities. We remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it.
Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of
poverty. The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be
human.
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our
survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but
developed out of a reverence for life.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
The open space of democracy is a landscape that encourages diversity and discourages
conformity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Democracy can also be messy and chaotic. It requires patience and persistence.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in; silence overtakes
speech. Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we
are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to
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carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are
forgotten and the images of television replace history.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
An open democracy inspires wisdom and the dignity of choice. A closed society
inspires terror and the tyranny of belief. We are no longer citizens. We are mediaengineered clones wondering who we are and why we feel alone. Lethargy trumps
participation. We fall prey to the cynicism of our own resignation.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
When democracy disappears, we are asked to accept the way things are. I beg you: Do
not accept the way things are.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
This is the path of intellectual freedom and spiritual curiosity. Our insistence on
democracy is based on our resistance to complacency. To be engaged. To participate.
To create alternatives together. We may be wrong. We will make mistakes. But we can
engage in spirited conversation, cherishing the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Democracy is built upon the right to be insecure. We are vulnerable. And we are
vulnerable together.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
But I do believe we can come closer to understanding why each of us is committed to our
own points of view and perhaps even adjust our perspectives along the way to find creative
alternatives that we cannot only both live with, but feel comfortable in proposing together.
These are the exchanges necessary to maintaining the open space of democracy...
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 24
I have always held the image of our founding fathers close to my heart, how they dared to
disagree passionately with one another, yet remained open to what each had to say, some
even changing their minds, as they forged our Constitution. This is the bedrock of our
evolving republic…
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Democracy invites us to take risks. It asks that we vacate the comfortable seat of certitude,
remain pliable, and act, ultimately, on behalf of the common good.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Democracy's only agenda is that we participate and that the majority voice be honored. It
doesn't matter whether an answer is right or wrong, only that ideas be heard and discussed
openly.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
How we choose to support a living democracy will determine whether it will survive as
the beating heart of a republic or merely be preserved as a withered artifact of a cold and
ruthless empire.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
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Power may be a game of power and money to those who have it, but for those of us who
don’t, politics is the public vehicle by which we exercise our voices within a democratic
society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
To commit to the open space of democracy is to begin to make room for conversations
that can move us toward a personal diplomacy. By personal diplomacy, I mean a fleshand-blood encounter with public process that is not an abstraction but grounded in real
time and space with people we have to face in our own hometowns. It’s not altogether
pleasant and there is no guarantee as to the outcome. Boos and cheers come in equal
measure.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our survival as a
species.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 41b
What will we make of the life before us? How do we translate the gifts of solitary beauty
into the action required for true participatory citizenship?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 42a
The open space of democracy provides justice for all living things -- plants, animals,
rocks, and rivers, as well as human beings.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
The power of nature is the power of a life in association. Nothing stands alone. On my
haunches, I see a sunburst lichen attached to limestone; algae and fungi are working
together to break down rock into soil. I cannot help but recognize a radical form of
democracy at play. Each organism is rooted in its own biological niche, drawing its
power from its relationship to other organisms. An equality of being contributes to an
ecological state of health and succession.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
"We can only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble," writes Walt Whitman.
This is my definition of community, and community interaction is the white-hot center of
a democracy that burns bright.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
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What I wish I could ask Mardy now is, how do we engage in the open space of
democracy in times of terror?
I believe she would send me home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 52a
The Castle Rock Collaboration is an exercise in bedrock democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 53a
In the open space of democracy, we are listening -- ears alert -- we are watching -- eyes
open -- registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private;
some are public. Our oscillations between local, national, and global gestures map the full
range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to
what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
Lorenzo Becawtini, a businessman in Florence, joined us. "Antiglobalization is not a
slogan," he said, "it is a rigorous reconfiguration of democracy that places power and
creativity back into the hands of villagers and townspeople, providing them with as
many choices as possible."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55b
Here in the redrock desert, which now carries the weight of more leases for oil and gas
than its fragile red skin can support, due to the aggressive energy policy of the Bush
administration, the open space of democracy appears to be closing. The Rocky
Mountain states are feeling this same press of energy extraction with scant thought being
given to energy alternatives. A domestic imperialism has crept into our country with the
same assured arrogance and ideology-of-might that seem evident in Iraq.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
{On Whitman and Lincoln} Both men were purveyors of a spiritual democracy borne out
of love and loss. Both men articulated the wisdom of their hearts borne out of direct
engagement. . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
Democracy depends on engagement, a firsthand accounting of what one sees, what one
feels, and what one thinks, followed by the artful practice of expressing the truth of our
times through our own talents, gifts, and vocations.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
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In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as
we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power.
We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding
calm that will shatter fear and complacency.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken
political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time
to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity
in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own
sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the
social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the
wealth and health of the corporate few.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," said
Edward Abbey. To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do
the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism
that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression
believing there is nothing we can do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
If we cannot begin to embrace democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to
think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways . . . .
if we fail to see the necessity of each of us to participate in the formation of an ethical life .
. . if we cannot bring a sense of equity and respect into our homes, our marriages, our
schools, and our churches, alongside our local, state, and federal governments, then
democracy simply becomes, as Dewey suggests, “a form of idolatry,” as we descend into
the basement of nationalism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
Are we ready for the next evolutionary leap—to recognize the restoration of democracy
as the restoration of liberty and justice for all species, not just our own? To be in the
service of something beyond ourselves—to be in the presence of something other than
ourselves, together—this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal
isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59a
...It will take an enormous amount of time to really find out what habitation means in this
country. We're just beginning to get a taste of it. And patience. We don't need to have all
the answers right now. We may never have the answers, but as long as we keep driving the
questions, or keep finding pockets of humility, maybe it won't seem so overwhelming or so
difficult. Then maybe a rancher and an environmentalist can burn their labels and see
each other as neighbors. The environmental movement right now is not listening. We are
engaged in a rhetoric as strong and as aggressive as the so-called opposition. I would love
to see the whole notion of opposition dissolved, so there's no longer this shadow dance
between "us" and "them." I would love for us to listen to one another and try to say, "What
do we want as members of this community? How do we dream our future? How do we
begin to define home?" Then we would have something to build from, rather than
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constantly turning one another into abstractions and stereotypes engaged in military
combativeness. I believe we all desire similar things. The real poison of our society right
now is that everything is reduced to such a simplistic level. There is no tolerance or hunger
for complexity or ambiguity. Do you want this or that? Black or white? Yes or no? It strips
us to our lowest common denominator, creating a physics that is irreconcilable just by the
nature of the polarity. As a result, we miss the richness we can bring to one another in our
diverse points of view. It is not about agreement. It is about respect.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen Interview, Listening to the Land
Indy: What's the current status of the Redrock Wilderness Act?
TTW: The Redrock Wilderness Bill currently before Congress, in some ways has never
had more support. But it also has never had such strong opposition. The Bush and Cheney
agenda is an energy agenda, and they'll take the wild lands for that purpose unless we are a
vigilant, responsible citizenry. All I'm asking for is a healthy, conscious discussion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: How do we reconcile the need to conserve wilderness when government is clamoring
to divide and conquer the land?
TTW: We need to view conservation as an act of democracy. As locals tied to the
exploitive susceptibility of the land we live on, we wind up thanking our federal
government for saving us from ourselves when they act to preserve wilderness. I know this
sounds like a completely idealistic statement, but I believe that a nation's appetite for
beauty transcends a state's hunger for greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 5
Open Space of Democracy Tour
Democracy is an insecure landscape and today it feels more so. . . . I was looking
forward to addressing the students in the spirit of conversation and discussion what
engagement within a vibrant democracy means.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” opening
sentence in a letter to President Merwin
If our institutions of higher learning can no longer be counted on as champions and
respectors of freedom of speech, then I fear no voice is safe from being silenced in this
country.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
I believe that to deny the students their own Convocation at this point in time . . . is not
only a breach of contract, but more tragically, a breach of democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
“What I was asking myself [in Open Space of Democracy”] was a deeper consideration of
my own engagement in the democratic process, “. . . how might we face the polarity of
opinion in our country right now, how we might take opposing views and blend them into
some kind of civil dialogue.” Each of us has the opportunity to engage in reflective
questioning if we choose to move forward as a responsive citizen.
122
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
We have missed a rich opportunity for compassionate understanding and empathy.
Censorship betrays the students' intelligence, individual power of discernment, and their
own passionate exploration of ideas as they prepare to vote. I believe your action has
stopped the dialogue around Convocation at a time when we need it most. Consequently,
the student body of Florida Gulf Coast University is being robbed of the experience of
emancipatory education, the gift of being able to participate in critical thinking,
meaningful dialogue and debate, the very process inherent in an open society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
Democracy's only agenda is that we participate.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
[concerning Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations, spoke on September 19, 2004, celebrating 40th Anniversary of the 1964
Wilderness Act]
We like to think -- and politicians too often think -- that all leadership comes from
the top down. But the leadership and the passing of laws like civil rights (and the
Wilderness Act) came from the streets. It came from the people.
He said that what people of his generation knew within public service was that you
had to mindful of three things: 1) the capacity to grow; 2) the ability to change; and 3) the
importance of facing your adversary with mutual respect.
I realized in that moment how we have all been diminished by the nastiness of the
debates within public policy and politics, in general. We have lost our civility and respect.
Do we have the capacity to grow and heaven forbid, change?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Golden Colorado
It feels like we have been characters in a strange, and at times harrowing, shadow play of
democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
DEMOCRACY
123
DESERT
Red
the “searing simplicity of form. You cannot help but be undone by its sensibility and
light, nothing extra. Before the stillness of sandstone cliffs, you stand still, equally bare.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“I never forget I inhabit the desert, the harsh, brutal beauty of skin and bones.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 5
Desert as teacher.
Desert as mirage.
Desert as illusion, largely our own.
What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in
the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is
time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 5-6
“reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our
psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our
convictions when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the
harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the
rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is best
retrieved in solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
Coyote “knows that sunburned flesh is better than a tanned hide, that days spent in the
desert are days soaking up strength. . . . Coyote knows that it is the days spent in
wildness that counts in urbane savvy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25
“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of
mirages because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life
is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have
moved on.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
++ See Refuge 148
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember
the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.
There is no place to hide and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
++ See Refuge 148
124
“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both
create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by
water, through time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
“The redrock desert of southern Utah teaches me over and over again: red endures. Let it
not be my rage or anger that endures, but a passion for the bloodroot country of my
burning soul that survives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 138
“The flicker flies. A fire burns. Loves is as varied as the spectrum red. Break my heart
with the desert’s silence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
Refuge
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
Her inner retreat of the past few months has momentarily been replaced by
openness.
“It’s all inside,” she said. “I just needed to get away, to be reminded by the desert
of who I am and who I am not. The exposed geologic layers in the redrock mirror the
depths within myself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of
mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because
life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as testament of spirits that
have moved on.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
++ See Red 77
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the
sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.
There is no place to hide, and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
++ See Red 77
“In the severity of a salt desert, I am brought down to my knees by its beauty. My
imagination is fired. My heart opens and my skin burns in the passion of these moments. I
will have not other gods before me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
125
“I have never been aware of the creek’s path until now. It feels good to be someplace lush.
The salt desert is too stark for me now because my interior is bare.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 158
“There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near
the lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the
outside world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports
the curve of my spine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
Once out at the lake, I am free. Native. Wind and waves are like African drums
driving the rhythm home. I am spun, supported, and possessed by the spirit who dwells
here. Great Salt Lake is a spiritual magnet that will not let me go. Dogma doesn’t hold
me. Wildness does. A spiral of emotion. It is ecstasy without adrenaline. My hair is
tossed, curls are blown across my face and eyes, much like the whitecaps cresting over the
waves.
Wind and waves. Wind and waves. The smell of brine is burning my lungs. I can
taste it on my lips. I want more brine, more salt. Wet hands. I lick my fingers, until I am
sucking them dry. I close my eyes. The smell and taste combined reminds me of making
love in the Basin; flesh slippery with sweat in the heat of the desert. Wind and waves. A
sigh and a surge.
I pull away from the lake, pause, and rest easily in the sanctuary of sage.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 240
A woman from the Department of Energy, who had mapped the proposed nuclearwaste repository in Lavender Canyon . . . flew into Moab, Utah, from Washington, D.C., to
check her calculations and witness this ‘blank spot.’ She was greeted by a local, who drove
her directly to the site. Once there, she got out of the vehicle, stared into the vast, redrock
wilderness and shook her head slowly, delivering four words:
“I had no idea.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 242
Her fall and scar. “I have been marked by the desert. The scar meanders down the center
of my forehead like a red, clay river. A natural feature on a map. I see the land and myself
in context.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 243-244
“The unknown Utah that some see as a home for used razor blades, toxins, and biological
warfare, is a landscape of the imagination, a secret we tell to those who will keep it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
Mimi talking about Nancy Holt. “She camped at a site for tend days and, at that time,
wondered if she could stay in the desert that long. After a few days, she located a particular
sound within the land and began to chant. This song became her connection to the Great
Salt Lake desert. She told me she fluctuated from feeling very small to feeling very
expansive. I remember her words, ‘I became like the ebb and flow of light inside the
tunnels.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 268-269
126
“The women danced and drummed and sang for weeks, preparing themselves for what
was to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of their children, for the sake
of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
The women invade the town, despite being pregnant. They were arrested. When asked why
they came and who they were, they replied, “We are mothers and we have come to
reclaim the desert for our children.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
Unspoken Hunger
…
“Who were these artists, these scribes? When were they here? And what did they witness?
Time has so little meaning in the center of the desert. The land holds a collective
memory in the stillness of open spaces. Perhaps our only obligation is to listen and
remember.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 124
127
DETERMINATION
…
My eyes catch the illumined wings of a tern, an Arctic tern, fluttering, foraging
above the river -- the embodiment of grace, suspended. The tern animates the vast
indifference with its own vibrant intelligence. Black cap; blood-red beak pointed down;
white body with black-tipped wings. With my eyes laid bare, I witness a bright thought in
big country. While everyone is sleeping, the presence of this tern hovering above the river,
alive, alert, engaged, becomes a vision of what is possible.
On this night, I met the Arctic Angel and vowed the 22,000 miles of her migratory
path between the Arctic and Antarctica would not be in vain. I will remember her. No
creature on Earth has spent more time in daylight than this species. No creature on Earth
has shunned darkness in the same way as the Arctic tern. No creature carries the strength
and delicacy of determination on its back like this slight bird. If air is the medium of the
Spirit, then the Arctic tern is its messenger.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion,
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
DETERMINATION
128
DIALOGUE, DISCUSSION, FREE SPEECH
“There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness.
Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty,
raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
TL: I recall hearing you read from a manuscript version of Desert Quartet: An Erotic
Landscape at a conference in Salt Lake City a few years back. At the time, you seemed
nervous about writing frankly about the erotics of landscape. It seems a risky thing to write
about. Has the reaction to the book justified your nervousness, or has it been favorably
received? Why did you choose to write about this topic?
TTW: You ask about Desert Quartet and why I wrote that book. I think every writer
struggles with various questions and tries to make peace with those questions, those
longings through their art, their craft. I am interested in the notion of love and why we are
so fearful of intimacy, with each other and with the land. I wanted to explore the idea of
the erotic, not as it is defined by my culture as pornographic and exploitive, but rather what
it might mean to engage in a relationship of reciprocity. I wanted to try and write out of the
body, not out of the head. I wanted to create a circular text, not a linear one. I wanted to
play with the elemental movements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, and bow to the desert, a
landscape I love. I wanted to see if I could create on the page a dialogue with the heartopen wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
I wrote a letter home in the form of an op-ed piece for the Salt Lake Tribune. I wanted my
community to know about this calm manifestation of willful resolve demonstrating a
simple fact: Even if our political leaders cannot read the pulse of a changing world, the
people do. The European Social Forum had just held its meetings in Florence, where issues
ranging from health and the environment to international trade to the possibility of a war in
Iraq were discussed. It ended with this gesture of movement, much of it along the banks of
the Arno River, creating a river of another sort, a river of humans engaged in a diverse
dialogue of peace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55b
“What I was asking myself [in Open Space of Democracy”] was a deeper consideration of
my own engagement in the democratic process, “. . . how might we face the polarity of
opinion in our country right now, how we might take opposing views and blend them into
some kind of civil dialogue.” Each of us has the opportunity to engage in reflective
questioning if we choose to move forward as a responsive citizen.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
If we cannot engage in respectful listening there can be no civil dialogue and without civil
dialogue we the people will simply become bullies and brutes, deaf to the truth that we are
standing on the edge of a political chasm that is beginning to crumble. We all stand to lose
ground. Democracy is an insecure landscape.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
129
The Open Space of Democracy is a call for conscious dialogue in times of divisive
political rhetoric that has no heart.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
We have missed a rich opportunity for compassionate understanding and empathy.
Censorship betrays the students' intelligence, individual power of discernment, and their
own passionate exploration of ideas as they prepare to vote. I believe your action has
stopped the dialogue around Convocation at a time when we need it most. Consequently,
the student body of Florida Gulf Coast University is being robbed of the experience of
emancipatory education, the gift of being able to participate in critical thinking,
meaningful dialogue and debate, the very process inherent in an open society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
The dialogue [with the students] that followed was heartening. Never have I seen or felt
such engagement in this country. Citizens are informed, active. Of course, there are those
who are not. But that has always been the case. 62 million Americans watched the first
presidential debate on September 30. There is so much at stake. We are at war in Iraq. We
are fighting for public process on public lands. I am not one to use these kinds of words,
but it is true. These are contentious times, confusing times, all the more reason and need
for deep listening and the creation of open dialogue. . . . This is not about answers, but
inquiry, honest, soulful discussion. I remember my grandmother Mimi Saying that first you
must identify the question and then it begins to solve itself through your awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Golden Colorado
We [Terry Tempest Williams and the students] talked about the ironies of this situation,
how at the core of this little book is an inquiry and call for open dialogue and respectful
listening, to create conversation and bypass the political rhetoric that has diminished all of
us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 7 October
2004
We have missed a rich opportunity for compassionate understanding and empathy.
Censorship betrays the students' intelligence, individual power of discernment, and their
own passionate exploration of ideas as they prepare to vote. I believe your action has
stopped the dialogue around Convocation at a time when we need it most. Consequently,
the student body of Florida Gulf Coast University is being robbed of the experience of
emancipatory education, the gift of being able to participate in critical thinking,
meaningful dialogue and debate, the very process inherent in an open society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
We [Terry Tempest Williams and the students] talked about the ironies of this situation,
how at the core of this little book is an inquiry and call for open dialogue and respectful
listening, to create conversation and bypass the political rhetoric that has diminished all of
us.
130
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 7 October
2004
What is the disease we are facing in this nation of ours? The disease of fear. Fear creates
an atmosphere where craven acts occur, even in our institutions of higher education. When
we can no longer count on our colleges and universities to champion and protect free
speech, no voice in America is safe.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” letter to
Brandon Hollingshead
The dialogue [with the students] that followed was heartening. Never have I seen or felt
such engagement in this country. Citizens are informed, active. Of course, there are those
who are not. But that has always been the case. 62 million Americans watched the first
presidential debate on September 30. There is so much at stake. We are at war in Iraq. We
are fighting for public process on public lands. I am not one to use these kinds of words,
but it is true. These are contentious times, confusing times, all the more reason and need
for deep listening and the creation of open dialogue. . . . This is not about answers, but
inquiry, honest, soulful discussion. I remember my grandmother Mimi Saying that first you
must identify the question and then it begins to solve itself through your awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Golden Colorado
We want our students to be exposed to competing voices so that they can make up their
own minds. But if we insist on politically balanced perspectives, we'll never encounter
anything that is truly provocative. In a sense, we agree with Dr. Merwin. We want balance,
too. But that balance must come from hearing different voices, not from watering down
differences so that we are left with a political discourse that is guaranteed not to offend
anyone.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
One of the most insidious forms of oppression is self-censorship, created by the "oughts
and shoulds" of the collective. Fear. Fear permeating all aspects of our culture.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
Thich Nhat Hanh: In Congress, in city halls, in statehouses, and schools, we need people
capable of practicing deep listening and loving speech. Unfortunately, many of us have
lost this capacity. To have peace, we must first have understanding, and understanding is
not possible without gentle, loving communication. Therefore, restoring communication is
an essential practice for peace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 28-29
October 2004,
DIALOGUE, DISCUSSION, FREE SPEECH
131
DIVERSITY, DIFFERENCES
What does the open space of democracy look like?
In the open space of democracy there is room for dissent.
In the open space of democracy there is room for differences.
In the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the
wealth of our communities. We remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it.
Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of
poverty. The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be
human.
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our
survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but
developed out of a reverence for life.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
DIVERSITY, DIFFERENCES
132
DISAPPEAR, DISSOVLE
Refuge
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
133
DISSENT
What does the open space of democracy look like?
In the open space of democracy there is room for dissent.
In the open space of democracy there is room for differences.
In the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the
wealth of our communities. We remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it.
Cooperation is valued more than competition; prosperity becomes the caretaker of
poverty. The humanities are not peripheral, but the very art of what it means to be
human.
In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional, but essential to our
survival as a species. And technology is not rendered at the expense of life, but
developed out of a reverence for life.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
DISSENT
134
DREAM
Refuge
Long and complex dream in “Clan of the One-Breasted Women.”
Last night I dreamed I was walking along the shores of Great Salt Lake. I noticed a
purple bird floating in the waters, the waves rocking it gently. I entered the lake and, with
cupped hands, picked up the bird and returned it to shore. The purple bird turned gold,
dropped its tail, and began digging a burrow in the white sand, where it retreated and
sealed itself inside with salt. I walked away. It was dusk. The next day, I returned to the
lake shore. A wooden door frame, freestanding, became an arch I had to walk through.
Suddenly, it was transformed into Athene’s Temple. The bird was gone. I was left standing
with my own memory.
In the next segment of the dream I was in a doctor’s office. He said, “You have
cancer in your blood and you have nine months to heal yourself.’ I awoke puzzled and
frightened.
Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do
not know, to create a path for myself with the idea that “memory is the only way home.”
I have been in retreat. This story is my return.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
> dated July 4, 1990
“I dreamed of water and cattails and all that is hidden.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 20
The pulse of the Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island’s shores, becomes
the force wearing against my mother’s body And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing
their way toward quiet bays on the island, I recall watching Mother sleep, imagining the
dreams that were encircling her, wondering what she knows that I must learn for myself.
The light changes, Antelope Island is blue. Mother awakened and I looked away.
Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is my mother’s body floating in
uncertainty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 64
“Alongside the biological facts, could migration be an ancestral memory, an archetype that
dreams birds thousands of miles to their homeland? A highly refined intelligence that
emerges as intuition, the only true guide in life? Could it be that a family of Canada geese
journey south not out of a genetic predisposition, but out of a desire for a shared vision of a
species? They travel in flocks as they position themselves in an inverted V formation, the
white feathers that separate their black rumps from their tails appear as a crescent moon,
reminding them once again that they are participating in another cycle.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 193
“It was a dreamscape where the will of the land overtakes you. I felt as though we were
standing under the wing of a great blue heron.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 201
135
“Mimi and I shared a clandestine vision of things. I could afford to dream because she
could interpret the story. We spoke through the shorthand of symbols: an egg, an owl. And
most of what we shared was secret, much like the migration of birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 273
“Auden echoes from the open grave, “Our dreams of safety must disappear.”
“Mimi and I shared a clandestine vision of things. I could afford to dream because she
could interpret the story. We spoke through the shorthand of symbols: an egg, an owl. And
most of what we shared was secret, much like the migration of birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 273
Unspoken Hunger
“As we advance closer and closer, the anticipation of seeing rhinoceros is like crossing the
threshold of a dream.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 11
In “Undressing the Bear”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 52
“Night in the Cabeza restores silence to the desert, that holy, intuitive silence. . . . . I
wonder how it is that in the midst of wild serenity we as a species choose to shatter it again
and again. Silence is our national security, our civil defense. By destroying silence, the
legacy of our deserts, we leave no room for peace, the deep peace that elevates and stirs
our souls. It is silence that rocks and awakens us to the truth of our dreams.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 124
136
ECOFEMINISM
see Female
Oppression of both women and nature
“We spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth
have been mined.” (Refuge, 10)
Terry Tempest Williams to Mimi: “The hollow eggs translated into hollow wombs. The
Earth is not well and neither are we. I saw the health of the planet as our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 262-263
PATRIARCHY IN MORMONISM & CULTURE IN GENERAL
London: How central is your Mormon faith to your identity as a writer -- has it had a big
influence on your work and ideas?
Williams: It's hard to answer because, again, I don't think we can separate our upbringing
from what we are. I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which
I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep. There are other
things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's
not just peculiar to Mormonism -- it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies
our creativity. So the question that I'm constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of?
I think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of
growth. I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear -- of
women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
SOCIETY-MADE VALUES & BURDENING RESPONSIBILITY & CALL FOR OBEDIENCE
Burdening constraint and limitation of “society’s oughts and shoulds” (Unspoken Hunger,
57; Red, 23; Wortman interview, 6) as well as the “heaviness of guilt” imposed by
institutionalized religion. (Wortman Interview, 6)
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This is the healing that Williams imagined for her mother in “The Bowl.” (Red) She had
seen in her mother's face “the pallor that comes when everything is going out and nothing
is coming in,” the position she was placed in too often as a wife and mother. In the story,
the woman returns to the small desert canyon where in her childhood “she last remembered
her true nature.” Alone in this beautiful place, she sheds her clothing, her inhibitions, and
her overburdening sense of responsibility toward her family.
--Lorraine Anderson, “Terry Tempest Williams,” American Nature Writers
Patriarchy demands obedience of women – and men as well, as she related her shared
concern about nuclear weapons with people in Hiroshima: “I shared how the price of
obedience became too high as I watched the women in my family die common heroic
deaths. . . . Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our
lives.” (“Hiroshima Journey,” 3)
Masculine lack of intimacy
“’Many men have forgotten what they are connected to,’ My friend added. “Subjugation of
women and nature may be a loss of intimacy within themselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 10
EARTH AS FEMININE? ESSENTIALIST?
“What is it about a relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first
landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond—to move, to listen, to be nourished
and grow. . . . Our maternal environment is perfectly safe—dark, warm, and wet. It is a
residency inside the Feminine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of
Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it
won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.
Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you
see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me
experience is all we have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 92
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
“But after midnight, silence. The depth and stillness of Great Salt Lake comes over the
wetlands like a mother’s calming hand. Morning approaches slowly, until each voice in the
marsh awakens.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
138
“I laid my head on her lap and closed my eyes. I could not tell if it was my mother’s
fingers combing through my hair or the wind.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 156
“One night, a full moon watched over me like a mother.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 189
“Mothers. Daughters. Granddaughters. The myth of Demeter and Persephone lives
through us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 261
“A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new
contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their
own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
“One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert.
They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its
phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that
they would never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as sparks
broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
 is this essentialist, or is it an undercutting of the notion of Feminine: a complex,
multivalent, variant “Feminine.”
 not necessarily essentialist: by connecting with earth they gain power. Doesn’t
imply only women are connected?
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
 earth & female as procreators
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
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By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
as a woman
“At that point, I understood what I was really acknowledging—it wasn’t the scientific
mind or the poetic mind, but the feminine mind that I wanted to embrace. That was the
language that I wanted to liberate. I had a visual map I could now trust.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 9
She wrote Refuge “to remember my mother and grandmothers and what it was that we
shared, and as a way of recalling how women conduct their lives in the midst of family, in
the midst of illness, in the midst of death—in the midst of day-to-day living. I wrote
Refuge to celebrate the correspondence between the landscape of my childhood and the
landscape of my family, to explore the idea of how one finds refuge in change. And it is
Refuge that gave me my voice as a woman.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122
“The language that women speak when no one is there to correct hem is the language of
the heart, a kind to the land. Women’s language is like connective tissue, detailed and
circuitous; it goes in and out. When two women speak, they can keep five strands of
conversation going at once. . . . the language of women knows no time. A women’s
language is about meanderings, like a river. . . . It is a language without selfconsciousness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 123
“So I am interested, as a writer, in finding what the mother tongue is. I believe it has to do
with structure, form, and style. I think it has to do with identifying relationships that break
through the veneer of what is proper, what is expected. The language that women speak
when nobody is there to correct them oftentimes can make people uncomfortable because
it threatens to undermine the status quo. It’s what we know in our hearts that we don’t dare
speak, . . . the sense of women and secrets.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 123
FEMINIST THEOLOGY
We are far too conciliatory. If we as Mormon women believe in God the Father and
in his son, Jesus Christ, it is only logical that a Mother-in-Heaven balances the sacred
triangle. I believe the Holy Ghost is female, although she has remained hidden, invisible,
deprived of a body, she is the spirit that seeps into our hearts and directs us to the well. The
‘still, small voice’ I was taught to listen to as a child was ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost.’
Today I choose to recognize this presence as holy intuition, the gift of the Mother. My
prayers no longer bear the ‘proper’ masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother
in Heaven. If we could introduce the Motherbody as a spiritual counterpoint to the
Godhead, perhaps our inspiration and devotion would no longer be directed to the stars,
but our worship could return to the Earth.
My physical mother is gone. My spiritual mother remains. I am a woman rewriting
my genealogy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 241
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integrated
O’Keefe: “she was a woman painter among men. Although she resisted the call of gender
separation and in many ways embodied an androgynous soul, she was not without political
savvy and humor on the subject. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 20
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
FEMALE: FREEDOM, WILD, SELF-DEFINED, POWERFUL
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of
Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it
won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.
Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you
see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me
experience is all we have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 92
“Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the
impulses we arouse and the forces we represent.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
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fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
 her motherhood
deconstructing positionality
TL: Ann Zwinger has said she doesn't go out into nature as a woman. Yet your gender
seems to be a very important part of your work. Why?
TTW: Each of us writes out of our own biases. I am a Mormon woman who grew up in
the Great Basin and now lives in the Colorado Plateau. These are the lens of culture,
gender, and geography that I see out of. Of course, we are all human beings, but it seems to
me there is an honesty to state where it is we come from and how our perceptions have
been shaped. The fun part, the difficult part, is then to shatter them and see the world from
different points of view.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
 includes notion of Feminine. Complex & shifting (Ross-Bryant? Armbruster)
NEED TO BE SELFISH, WITHDRAWAL
Her mother: “By being selfish a woman ultimately has more to give in the long run,
because she has a self to give away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 51
 agency
“Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect
so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to
operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent
phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
 agency
THE IMPORTANCE OF FEELING
"I am testifying as an emotional woman," I can still remember her saying, "and I would
like to ask you, gentlemen, what's wrong with emotion?"
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
IMPORTANCE OF THE BODY…
SUBVERSIVE ACTION
In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood
of God. Women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have
always bestowed benisons upon our families.
Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we
pray.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 158
 agency
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“One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert.
They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its
phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that
they would never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as sparks
broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“The women danced and drummed and sang for weeks, preparing themselves for what was
to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of their children, for the sake of the
land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new
contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their
own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
The women invade the town, despite being pregnant. They were arrested. When asked why
they came and who they were, they replied, “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim
the desert for our children.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahns
for trespassing on military lands. They are still conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours
was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.
As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body.
She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
“And these?” she asked sternly.
“Weapons,” I replied.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
“The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to
get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong,
women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 290
ECOFEMINISM
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ECOPSYCHOLOGY
Red
“reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our
psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“Native people understand language as an articulation of kinship, all manner of relations.
To the Dine, hozho honors balance in the world, a kind of equilibriated grace, how human
beings stand in relation to everything else. If a native tongue is lost, the perceived
landscape is also lost Conversely, if the landscape is destroyed, the language that evolved
alongside is also destroyed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 137
“Boredom could catch up with me. But it never does, only the music, river music, the
continual improvisation of water. Perhaps the difference between repetition and boredom
lies in our willingness to believe in surprise, the subtle shifts of form that loom large in a
trained and patient eye.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
“Part of me wanted to leap, not out of despair, but joy. It is a difficult impulse to explain,
but I believe it has something to do with feeling very, very small and very, very large, at
once.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 186
Refuge
“We have lost track of time in a birdwatchers’ trance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 49
I love to watch gulls soar over the Great Basin. It is another trick of the lake to lure
gulls inland. On days such as this, when my would has been wrenched, the simplicity of
flight and form above the lake untangles my grief.
“Glide” the gulls write in the sky—and, for a few brief moments, I do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 75
“How do we emphasize with the Earth when so much is ravaging her?’
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 85
“Relief comes only through concentration, losing ourselves in the studied behavior of
birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“I turn. All at once, a thousand avocets take flight. More. Tens of thousands. The soft
whistling of wings fills both time and space. I can no longer see the sky—above me, before
me and behind me, avocets and stilts flock.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
“The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one’s genealogy with the earth
was to commit treason against one’s soul.”
144
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
Unspoken Hunger
“For a naturalist, traveling into unfamiliar territory is like turning a kaleidoscope ninety
degrees. Suddenly, the colors and pieces of glass find a fresh arrangement. The light shifts,
and you enter a new landscape in search of the order you know to be there.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 3
“Anticipation is another gift for travelers in unfamiliar territory. It quickens the spirit. The
contemplation of the unseen world; imagination piqued in consideration of animals.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 6
“A primal memory is struck like a match.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 8
“Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding
the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 12
She falls and hurts her head. “I had opened my third eye. Unknowingly, this is what I had
come for. It had been only a few months since the death of my mother. I had been unable
to cry. On this day, I did.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 54
“But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate
nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose
mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect
more isolation and greater ecological disease. Our lack of intimacy with each other is in
direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and
abandoned the wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“Audre Lorde tells us, ‘We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves . . . our
deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile
and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many aspects of our own
oppression.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
Peter Matthiessen said “the American psyche that wants war is the same psyche that
doesn’t want wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Patriot’s Journal,” Unspoken Hunger, 108
“The view will orient us and perhaps even inspire us to think like a ram.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 119
Others
I turn to my own small perspective, a perspective that focuses on the place where I live and
love, to the harvest moon casting blue light over the desert, where color still registers on
the red cliff face of sandstone. I can’t sleep. On my back on our porch, I watch the moon
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with my binoculars for hours, and think about the miracle of life, simply that. Earth is our
charismatic leader, the moon, the mountain lion who slips into the layers of sandstone like
a passing shadow.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
Interviews
Indy: Why the need for wilderness?
TTW: Wild country is so essential to our psychology. The context of our lives has shifted.
We're feeling things, seeing things differently. My first impulse when I got home from
Washington, when I saw the Wasatch mountains, I just burst into tears. My husband and I
got into the car and drove up to the Tetons. We went on this trail that we've hiked for 20
years. The sound of sirens that were screaming in my psyche were replaced by bugling elk.
It was so powerful to understand what sustains us in time of terror and times of calm as
well. Wild lands remind us what it means to be human, what it means to be connected to
something larger than ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: In the book you say: "When one us says [regarding wilderness], 'Look, there's
nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see.'" How do you teach people to
see, especially a generation of children raised blind to wilderness?
TTW: It requires exposure. And slowing down. There's a chapter in Red, "Ode to
Slowness," that talks about the pace of our lives. Our lives are so insane, in terms of the
pace with which we carry on, we can't see, taste, hear or smell beyond our own mania.
Education is critical. I'm heartened by our children. I look at my nieces, and they're more
environmentally savvy than I was at the same age. It's important for kids to get outside. We
need to be asking the question: Can we read the landscape alongside the pages of a book?
I've been working on a school project in Moab where 6th graders have been keeping
journals of weather studies. They've learned the names of 25 species of plants, animals and
birds. By writing this specific information down, I've noticed their writing in general
becomes more specific. Their lives, it seems, have taken on an added richness simply by
learning the names of things.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 4
Indy: How do we get schools to respond to this critical need?
TTW: Up until this point, we have viewed environmental issues and education about
ecological awareness as a luxury. It's necessary that we begin to see conservation as an
integral part of our communities, our society. My hope is that we can begin to weave
conservation into the conversation about who we are in the world. "Shall we now
exterminate this thing that made us Americans?" Aldo Leopold asked in the 1920s, on the
verge of the Great Depression, the dust bowl. Leopold was brave enough to stand up for
wilderness at a time when the nation was poised for postwar buildup. We need authentic
"home work." I hope to see us weave a land ethic into every aspect of our lives, even our
concept of patriotism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 4
How do we marry our joy with our sorrow in a world as delicate and strong as spider's
silk? How do we continue to find faith in a world that seems to have abandoned the
sacred?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
146
To be in correspondence with the world around us -- to learn the names of things, to
delight in all that is wild, even our own beating hearts, to embrace our sacred
responsibilities toward the sustenance of life, to remember what we seem to have
forgotten, that we are part of this beautiful, broken healing Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live
among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community,
to include all life forms -- plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings -- then I believe
a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our
neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not
home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put
... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't
know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living
a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of
true desolation. I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the
MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have
not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a
place. And she sounded the alarm.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
London: You've said that your connection to the natural world is also your connection to
yourself. Do you think that's true for everybody?
Williams: We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal
memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what
binds us as human beings. I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so
urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that
roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this
continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think,
"Ah, yes, evolution." [laughs] You know, it's there, we just forget.
I worry, Scott, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are
forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference. Pelicans pass
by and we hardly know who they are, we don't know their stories. Again, at what price? I
think it's leading us to a place of inconsolable loneliness. That's what I mean by "An
Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger
that cannot be quelled by the constant denial. I think that the only thing that can bring us
into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the
source of our power lies.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
Others
Slowly, we are coming to realize, one acre at a time, that the spirit of a place preserved
enters our own. We are transformed by wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
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EFFECT, IMPACT
also see “TRUST”
Albertina Pisano, a twenty-five-year-old student from the University of Milan, said, "My
generation in Europe doesn't know what it means to be at war. I came to the forum to listen
and participate." When I asked her if she thought this would make any difference, she
answered, "It is making a difference to me."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
 Martin Sheen
EFFECT, IMPACT
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EMPATHY, CARE
I realized that in American Letters we celebrate both language and landscape,
that these words, stories, and poems can create an ethical stance toward life:
Melville's Great Whale; Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Thoreau's Walden Pond;
Emerson's "Oversoul" -- the natural world infused with divinity. I came to understand
through an education in the humanities that knowledge is another form of
democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy.
It begins with our questions...
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21a
How do we engage in responsive citizenship in times of terror? Do we have the
imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and
reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
It is difficult to find peace. I am torn between my anger and my empathy. And then I go
for a walk. My balance returns. I calm down, breathe, and allow for deep listening to
occur.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 24
EMPATHY, CARE
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EMPTINESS
Red
Desert as teacher.
Desert as mirage.
Desert as illusion, largely our own.
What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in
the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is
time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 5-6
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ENERGY
Refuge
“Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect
so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to
operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent
phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
Her grandmother Mimi. “She was not only fascinated by energy, but obsessed by it—how
energy is used and expelled, conserved and stored, wasted, and recycled. Much of her
philosophy of life resided in her belief in an open system of energy, not closed, why she
saw the Earth as alive not dead, and why she believed the Universe was similarly
constructed. It is also why she believed ‘her energy’ would continue after she died.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 312-313
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer, my
life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our communities.
Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience, shared lives in a
shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one plus one equals
three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
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ENGAGE (generic)
To become biologically literate, to engage with our neighbors and communities, to focus
on small-scale agriculture and commerce and support them, to realize we are deeply
aligned with the life around us—to recognize this movement of the heart and mind and
soul as a movement of love that can never be corralled.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting it Right”
To make the abstract real, to be unafraid to speak of what we love in the language of story,
to remember we are engaged in bloodwork, one day at a time. The presence of personal
engagement, its own form of prayer.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting it Right”
She lists changes in the West. “all these lands are at risk . . . and that’s one of the things
that fuels my work as a writer. Not so much as a polemic, I hope, but writing out of a sense
of loss, a sense of grief and a sense of joy, because I think passion encompasses that full
spectrum of joy and sorrow. That passion creates engagement. And I think that all we can
ask as writers if for engagement in our life and on the page.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Siporin Interview, WAL, 101
“I climb the slickrock on all fours, my hands and feet throbbing with the heat. It feels good
to sweat, to be engaged, to inhabit my animal body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 195
“The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own
oppression. I stand on the edge of these wetlands, a place of renewal, an oasis in the desert,
as an act of faith, believing the sun has completed the southern end of its journey and is
now contemplating its return toward light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“We can confront the mysteries of life directly by involving ourselves, patiently and
quietly, in the day-to-day dramas of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 137
If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys, to the
beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from our hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable in our emotional response to the world.
And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being "broken open." To
engage. To participate. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a
personal transformation that bears collective gifts.
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer, my
life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our communities.
Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience, shared lives in a
shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one plus one equals
three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is
destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate
participation by those who saw what was coming.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
“It does not speak well for us as a people that we even have to make the distinction
between what is erotic and what is not, because an erotic connection is a life-engaged,
making love to the world that I think comes very naturally.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 310
“And of course, the erotic is about love, our deep hunger for communion, where issues of
restraint and yearning, engagement and desire enter us.
When I think about the moments in my life when I have felt engaged, it’s always
about love.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 312
“We are frightened of engagement, of being fully present, because then we risk feeling
pain and we feel grief, the grief inherent in life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 319
“We’re creating desperate, isolated, fast-paced lives that give us enormous excuse not to be
engaged. We are lonely.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322
ENGAGE GENERAL
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ENGAGEMENT IN POLITICS
also see Activism
How do we engage in responsive citizenship in times of terror? Do we have the
imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and
reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
To engage in responsive citizenship, we must become citizens who respond.
Passionately. This is how we can make a difference. This is how we can serve society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
This is the path of intellectual freedom and spiritual curiosity. Our insistence on
democracy is based on our resistance to complacency. To be engaged. To participate.
To create alternatives together. We may be wrong. We will make mistakes. But we can
engage in spirited conversation, cherishing the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Thoreau wrote in his essay, “Civil Disobedience,” “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of
paper merely, but your whole influence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
It occurred to me, over the many weeks that it took me to respond to Senator Bennett's
letter, that what mattered most to me was not what I was willing to die for, but what I was
willing to give my life to. In war, death by belief is centered on principles both activated
and extinguished in the drama of a random moment. Heroes are buried. A legacy of
freedom is maintained through pain. Life by belief is centered on the day-to-day
decisions we make that are largely unseen. One produces martyrs born out of violence. The
other produces quiet citizens born out of personal commitments toward social change.
Both dwell in the hallowed ground of sacrifice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 23
In the five years that we have been engaged in this process with SITLA, the Castle Rock
Collaboration and its partners have protected over three thousand acres and raised nearly
four million dollars. But perhaps the most important outcome has been the creation of an
atmosphere of engagement with other committed individuals who live along the
Colorado River Corridor. We are learning that a community engaged is a community
empowered.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
In the open space of democracy, we are listening -- ears alert -- we are watching -- eyes
open -- registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private;
some are public. Our oscillations between local, national, and global gestures map the full
range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to
what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
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seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
I wrote a letter home in the form of an op-ed piece for the Salt Lake Tribune. I wanted my
community to know about this calm manifestation of willful resolve demonstrating a
simple fact: Even if our political leaders cannot read the pulse of a changing world, the
people do. The European Social Forum had just held its meetings in Florence, where issues
ranging from health and the environment to international trade to the possibility of a war in
Iraq were discussed. It ended with this gesture of movement, much of it along the banks of
the Arno River, creating a river of another sort, a river of humans engaged in a diverse
dialogue of peace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55b
As I look back over the story we have been living in Castle Valley, it does not begin to
convey the power and empowering nature of the process. It is through the process of
defining what we want as a town that we are becoming a real community. It is through
the act of participation that we change.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
{On Whitman and Lincoln} Both men were purveyors of a spiritual democracy borne out
of love and loss. Both men articulated the wisdom of their hearts borne out of direct
engagement. . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
Democracy depends on engagement, a firsthand accounting of what one sees, what one
feels, and what one thinks, followed by the artful practice of expressing the truth of our
times through our own talents, gifts, and vocations.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
We have a history of bravery in this nation and we must call it forward now. Our future is
guaranteed only by the degree of our personal involvement and commitment to an
inclusive justice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," said
Edward Abbey. To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do
the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism
that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression
believing there is nothing we can do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
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We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on
moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth
and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it
as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an
acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true
source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of
personal engagement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
We are in need of a reflective activism born out of humility, not arrogance. Reflection,
with deep time spent in the consideration of others, opens the door to becoming a
compassionate participant in the world.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
My eyes catch the illumined wings of a tern, an Arctic tern, fluttering, foraging
above the river -- the embodiment of grace, suspended. The tern animates the vast
indifference with its own vibrant intelligence. Black cap; blood-red beak pointed down;
white body with black-tipped wings. With my eyes laid bare, I witness a bright thought in
big country. While everyone is sleeping, the presence of this tern hovering above the river,
alive, alert, engaged, becomes a vision of what is possible.
On this night, I met the Arctic Angel and vowed the 22,000 miles of her migratory
path between the Arctic and Antarctica would not be in vain. I will remember her. No
creature on Earth has spent more time in daylight than this species. No creature on Earth
has shunned darkness in the same way as the Arctic tern. No creature carries the strength
and delicacy of determination on its back like this slight bird. If air is the medium of the
Spirit, then the Arctic tern is its messenger.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion,
At dinner, I asked [Wangari Maathai] what she had learned in these twenty years.
She did not hesitate. "Patience. Patience." And then she talked about how often those
working on the margins to create the open space of justice and democracy are not the ones
who end up inhabiting that space.
"We have to step inside that space we have created for political engagement
and claim it for ourselves." she said.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Salt Lake City, UT
The dialogue [with the students] that followed was heartening. Never have I seen or felt
such engagement in this country. Citizens are informed, active. Of course, there are those
who are not. But that has always been the case. 62 million Americans watched the first
presidential debate on September 30. There is so much at stake. We are at war in Iraq. We
are fighting for public process on public lands. I am not one to use these kinds of words,
but it is true. These are contentious times, confusing times, all the more reason and need
for deep listening and the creation of open dialogue. . . . This is not about answers, but
inquiry, honest, soulful discussion. I remember my grandmother Mimi Saying that first you
must identify the question and then it begins to solve itself through your awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Golden Colorado
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ENGAGEMENT IN POLITICS
157
ENGAGE WITH NATURE
NOT DISENGAGE
“The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own
oppression. I stand on the edge of these wetlands, a place of renewal, an oasis in the desert,
as an act of faith, believing the sun has completed the southern end of its journey and is
now contemplating its return toward light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
REMAIN
“When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds were gone, I was drawn
further into its essence. In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose
to stay.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
ENTER
“When most people had given up on the Refuge, saying the birds were gone, I was drawn
further into its essence. In the same way that when someone is dying many retreat, I chose
to stay.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
“Taking hold of one another’s hands, with great joy, they entered the current and floated
like a wish downriver.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Stone Spiral,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 57
She enters a juniper tree. “Hours passed, who knows how long; the angle of light shifted.
Something had passed between us, evident by the change in my own countenance, the
slowing of my pulse, and the softness of my eyes as though I was awakening from a desert
trance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 107
This river has muscle when flexed against stone, carved stone, stones that appear as waves
of rock, secret knowledge known only through engagement. I am no longer content to sit,
but stand and walk, walk to the river, enter the river, surrender my body to water now red,
red is the Colorado, blood of my veins.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music, Red, 150
DWELL, INHABIT
“Lee Milner’s gaze through her apartment window out over the cattails was not unlike the
heron’s. It will be this stalwartness in the face of terror that offers wetlands their only
hope. When she motioned us down in the grasses to observe the black-crowned night heron
still fishing at dusk, she was showing us the implacable focus of those who dwell there.
This is our first clue to residency.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 44
“Political courage means caring enough to explain what is perceived at the time as
madness and staying with an idea long enough, being rooted in a place deep enough, and
telling the story widely enough to those who will listen, until it is recognized as wisdom—
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wisdom reflected back to society through the rejuvenation and well-being of the next
generation who can still find wild country to walk in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
181-182
NATURE AS RELATIVES, PART OF COMMUNITY
“With my arms out the window, I tried to touch the wings of avocets and stilts. I knew
these birds from our private trips to the Refuge. They had become relatives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 19
“I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries.
The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had
always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 40
“I realize months afterward that my grief is much larger than I could ever have imagined.
The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the
flooded desert, become extensions of my family. Grief dares us to love once more.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 252
MARRIAGE
“What is means to be married to the earth, to our dreams, to community? What it means to
be married to a politics of place that can both inform and inspire us?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 313
NATURE ACTING UPON US
“Through the weathering of our spirit, the erosion of our soul, we are vulnerable. Isn’t that
what passion is—bodies broken open through change? We are acted upon. We invite and
accept the life of another to take root inside.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“First stars appear. A crescent moon. I throw down my sleeping bag. The stillness of the
desert instructs me like a trail of light over water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
I lay out these ten sections on the flat granite rocks I am sitting on. The sun
threatens to dry them. But I wait for the birds. Within minutes, Clark’s nutcrackers and
gray jays join me. I suck on oranges as the mountains begin to work on me.
This is why I always return. This is why I can always go home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 160
Her fall and scar. “I have been marked by the desert. The scar meanders down the center of
my forehead like a red, clay river. A natural feature on a map. I see the land and myself in
context.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 243-244
“A blank spot on the map is an invitation to encounter the natural world, where one’s
character will be shaped by the landscape. To enter wilderness is to court risk, and risk
favors the senses, enabling one to live well.”
159
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
“Brooke and I slip our red canoe into Half-Moon Bay. Great Salt Lake accepts us like a
lover.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
Ed Abbey “was constantly confronting his own humanness, and that the nonhuman world
informed his existence so completely that ultimately his existence didn’t matter at all.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Petersen (Bloomsbury) interview
INTIMATE INTERACTION WITH NATURE
“Brooke and I slip our red canoe into Half-Moon Bay. Great Salt Lake accepts us like a
lover.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
The woman wallowing in the red clay mud in “The Bowl.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Bowl,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 35
What are we afraid of?
The world we frequently surrender to defies our participation in nature and seduces
us into believing that our only place in the wild is as spectator, onlooker. A society of
individuals who only observe a landscape from behind the lends of a camera or the
window of an automobile without entering in is perhaps no different from the person who
obtains sexual gratification from looking at the sexual play of others.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 106
“Without feeling. Perhaps these two words are the key, the only way we can begin to
understand our abuse of each other and our abuse of the land. Could it be that what we fear
most is our capacity to feel, so that we annihilate symbolically and physically that which is
beautiful and tender, anything that dares us to consider our creative selves? The erotic
world is silenced, reduced to a collection of objects we curate and control, be it a vase, a
woman, or wilderness. Our lives become a piece in the puzzle of pornography as we go
through the motions of daily intercourse without any engagement of the soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 108
A group of friends gather in the desert—call it a pilgrimage—at the confluence of
the Little Colorado and the Colorado Rivers in the Grand Canyon. . . . Nothing but deep
joy can be imagined. . . . They take off their clothes and sink to their waists, turn, roll over,
and wallow in pleasure. Their skins are slippery with clay. They rub each other’s bodies;
arms, shoulders, backs, torsos, even their faces are painted in mud, and they become the
animals they are. Blue eyes. Green eyes. Brown eyes behind masks. In the heat, lying on
ledges, they bake until they crack like terracotta. For hours, they dream the life of lizards.
In time, they submerge themselves in the Little Colorado, diving and surfacing
freshly human.
D. H. Lawrence writes: “There exist two great modes of life—the religious and the
sexual.” Eroticism is the bridge.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 109
160
We must take our love outdoors where reciprocity replaces voyeurism, respect replaces
indulgence. We can choose to photograph a tree or we can sit in its arms, where we are
participating in wild nature, even our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 111
This river has muscle when flexed against stone, carved stone, stones that appear as waves
of rock, secret knowledge known only through engagement. I am no longer content to sit,
but stand and walk, walk to the river, enter the river, surrender my body to water now red,
red is the Colorado, blood of my veins.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 150
“O’Keefe’s watercolor Canyon with Crows (1917) creates a heartfelt wash of ‘her spiritual
home,’ a country that elicits participation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 23
“Mr. Kurumada also had an uncanny gift for recognizing soils. It grew out of his intimacy
with the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 50
“The two herons who flew over me have now landed downriver. I do not believe they are
fearful of love. I do not believe their decisions are based on a terror of loss. They are not
docile, loyal, or obedient. They are engaged in a rich, biological context, completely
present. They are feathered Buddhas casting blue shadows on the snow, fishing on the
shortest day of the year.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“We call out—and the land calls back. It is our interaction with the ecosystem; the Echo
System.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 82
“A story allows us to envision the possibility of things. It draws on the powers of memory
and imagination. It awakens us to our surroundings. . . . It is here, by our own participation
in nature, that we pick up clues to an awareness of what a story is.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 4
BECOMING ACCEPTED BY NATURE
“The hostility of this landscape teaches me how to be quiet and unobtrusive, how to find
grace among spiders with a poisonous bite. I sat on a lone boulder I the midst of the
curlews. By now, they had grown accustomed to me. This too, I found encouraging—that
in the face of stressful intrusions, we can eventually settle in. One begins to almost trust
the intruder as a presence that demands greater intent toward life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 147
RITUALLY INITIATED INTO NATURE
“Personal ritual or shared ceremony rooted in landscape provides connections, continuity.
It reminds us that we do not stand alone. Rather, we become initiated into something much
larger than ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 70
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NATURE AS PART OF CONSCIOUSNESS; MIND AS PART OF NATURE
“The unknown Utah that some see as a home for used razor blades, toxins, and biological
warfare, is a landscape of the imagination, a secret we tell to those who will keep it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
OPENNESS
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
MISC
On Mary Austin: “I view her as a sister, soulmate, and a literary mentor, a woman who
inspires us toward direct engagement with the land in life as well as on the page.” She was
unafraid of political action embracing the rights of Indian people, women, and wildlands.
Mary Austin was a poet, a pioneer, and a patriot.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mary Austin’s Ghost,” Red, 166
TL: You have been a strong supporter of the preservation of wilderness in Utah. Can you
briefly explain why?
TTW: I have been a strong supporter of wilderness preservation in Utah because it feels
like these lands deserve protection from the continued rape of the West. That is not to say
that I do not have respect for the extractive industry in my state, I do. But I believe some
lands are truly special, say the word, "sacred," even--that because of their importance
biologically speaking to the migration corridors of animals, the habitat necessary for
threatened and delicate species of plants, and the spiritual values they hold for society and
inspire: silence, awe, beauty, majesty--that these lands have their own sovereignty that
deserves to be honored and defended by the law.
I know it is very popular these days in some parts of the Academy to say that
"wilderness" is simply a human construct, that wilderness has become irrelevant before it
has become resolved. We do not have language that adequately conveys what wildness
means, but I do not believe we can "deconstruct" nature. This notion strikes me as a form
of intellectual arrogance. Personally, I feel grateful to the national park ideal, places of
pilgrimage within North America that allow the public to engage with the natural world.
I am grateful to those who enacted the 1964 Wilderness Act and the other pieces of
legislation that try to maintain a possible integrity of clean air and water.
Wilderness reminds us of restraint, that is a difficult and contentious idea for our
society that defines itself on growth and consumption. There is no question this is "an
American idea" but until we can come to sustainable vision where we do not exploit
everything in sight, it's the best we can do-- Our challenge is how to create sustainable
lives and sustainable communities in a dance with wildness. I believe that is what we are
working toward in the American West and it is not easy. In fact, it is a long and arduous
and at times, difficult process, one that requires a good deal of listening and patience and
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compassion. I keep thinking of Stegner when he said, "We need a society to match the
scenery."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
JW: It is kind of like taking religion indoors into a climate-controlled sanctuary. In doing
that, there's a terrible negative result for a politics of place.
TTW: That's right, because we can abdicate our responsibilities. That was one of the
aspects of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that seized me. It
seems that, as Christians, it is very easy for us to contemplate heaven and to contemplate
hell. It's not so easy for us to be engaged on the Earth. I was so struck by the painting's
side panels of heaven and hell, and then the center panel, of Earth, where you see this wild
engagement -- even love-making -- with the Earth. With the birds on the same physical
scale as the human beings, there is this wonderful confluence of consciousness in that
center panel that we forget. We lose track of the central delights of a spiritual life -- hand
on rock, body in water, the sweet conversations that exist when we're completely present in
place, home, Earth. Again, not that separation of heaven and hell, past and future. The
present is the gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
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EQUALITY, JUSTICE
Open Space of Democracy
The open space of democracy provides justice for all living things -- plants, animals,
rocks, and rivers, as well as human beings.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
Here is my question: what might a different kind of power look like, feel like? And can
power be distributed equitably among ourselves, even beyond our own species?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
The power of nature is the power of a life in association. Nothing stands alone. On my
haunches, I see a sunburst lichen attached to limestone; algae and fungi are working
together to break down rock into soil. I cannot help but recognize a radical form of
democracy at play. Each organism is rooted in its own biological niche, drawing its
power from its relationship to other organisms. An equality of being contributes to an
ecological state of health and succession.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
I hear Walt Whitman’s voice once again. “The quality of Being . . . is the lesson of nature.”
Raw, wild beauty is a deeply held American value. It is its own declaration of
independence. Equality is experienced through humility. Liberty is expressed through the
simple act of wandering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a-b
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
We have a history of bravery in this nation and we must call it forward now. Our future is
guaranteed only by the degree of our personal involvement and commitment to an
inclusive justice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
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We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken
political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time
to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity
in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own
sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the
social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the
wealth and health of the corporate few.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
If we cannot begin to embrace democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to
think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways . . . .
if we fail to see the necessity of each of us to participate in the formation of an ethical life .
. . if we cannot bring a sense of equity and respect into our homes, our marriages, our
schools, and our churches, alongside our local, state, and federal governments, then
democracy simply becomes, as Dewey suggests, “a form of idolatry,” as we descend into
the basement of nationalism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
Are we ready for the next evolutionary leap—to recognize the restoration of democracy
as the restoration of liberty and justice for all species, not just our own? To be in the
service of something beyond ourselves—to be in the presence of something other than
ourselves, together—this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal
isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
EQUALITY, JUSTICE
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EROSION
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“Erosion. Perhaps this is what we need, an erosion of all we have held secure. A rupture of
all we believed sacred, sacrosanct. A psychic scouring of our extended ideals such as
individual property rights in the name of economic gain at the expense of ecological
health.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 160
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 162
“We can dance; even in this erosional landscape, we can dance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“These wildlands matter. Call them places of Original Mind where an authentic sensibility
can evolve. Wild country offers us perspective and gravity, even in an erosional landscape
like the Colorado Plateau.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185
“Through the weathering of our spirit, the erosion of our soul, we are vulnerable. Isn’t that
what passion is—bodies broken open through change? We are acted upon. We invite and
accepts the life of another to take root inside.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“What has been opened, removed, eroded away is as compelling to me as what remains.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 199
JW: I've read that the etymology of "ecology" is "ecos," which means home.
TTW: Yes. Again, we are most mindful of those relationships that we live with every
single day. I love the fact that I live in an erosional landscape. You watch the wind and you
realize as you see the sand swirling about you that arches are still being created, that this
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isn't something that belongs to the geologic past. Metaphorically, that is also very
powerful. To me, a spiritual life is also part of an erosional life. We are eroding the façade.
Wind -- spirit -- sculpts us, sculpts our character, our consciousness, in ways we can't even
know. I am shaped differently from others because of the spiritual processes that have
formed me. There is physical erosion that goes on in the desert and spiritual erosion that
goes on in our search for the truth, however we define that for ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
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EROTICS, SEXUALITY, SENSUALITY
(not Erotics of Place)
Quoting someone in Denmark: “For me, eroticism relates to all the highest and finest
things of life. Every couple on Earth participates in this confirmation of creation, the urge
we have to share ourselves, to make each other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 110
“Here lies our dilemma as human beings: Nothing exists in isolation. We need a context
for eros, not a pedestal, not a video screen. The lightning we witness crack and charge a
night sky in the desert is the same electricity we feel in ourselves whenever we dare to
touch flesh, rock, body, Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 111
“I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing
with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me
with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only
to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought.
Simply, here. . . . my body mixes with the body of the water like jazz, the currents like
jazz. I too am free to improvise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 201-202
“It is our nature to be aroused—not once, but again and again. Where do we find the
strength not to be pulled apart by our passions? How do we inhabit the canyons inside a
divided heart? One body. Two bodies. Three.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Fire,” Red, 208
“There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness.
Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty,
raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
“If we ignore our connection to the land and disregard and deny our relationship to the
Pansexual nature of earth, we will render ourselves impotent as a species. No passion – no
hope of survival.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
London: In this culture we tend to draw very distinct lines between the spiritual world and
the political world. And yet you don't seem to see any separation between them. You've
said that for you it's all one -- the spiritual and the political, your home life and your
landscape.
Williams: I think we learn that lesson well by observing the natural world. There is no
separation. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about -- the
patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.
Somewhere along the line we have become segregated in the way we think about things
and become compartmentalized. Again, I think that contributes to our sense of isolation
and our lack of a whole vision of the world -- seeing the world whole, even holy. I can't
imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would
be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
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So I love the interrelatedness of things. We were just observing out at Point Reyes
a whole colony of elephant seals and it was so deeply beautiful, and it was so deeply
spiritual. It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak
of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. How the males, the bulls, have this
capacity to dive a mile deep, can you imagine? And along the way they sleep while they
dive. And I kept thinking, "And what are their dreams?" And the fact that they can stay
under water for up to two hours. Think of the kind of ecological mind that an elephant seal
holds. Then looking at the females, these unbelievably luxurious creatures that were just
sunbathing on this crescent beach with the waves breaking out beyond them. Then they
would just ripple out into the water in these blue-black bodies, just merging with the water.
It was the most erotic experience I've ever seen. We were there for hours. No separation
between the spiritual and the physical. It was all one. I had the sense that we had the
privilege of witnessing other -- literally another culture, that extension of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
London: You've said that your connection to the natural world is also your connection to
yourself. Do you think that's true for everybody?
Williams: We're animals, I think we forget that. I think there is an ancient archetypal
memory that still exists within us. If we deny that, what is the cost? So I do think it's what
binds us as human beings. I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so
urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that
roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this
continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think,
"Ah, yes, evolution." [laughs] You know, it's there, we just forget.
I worry, Scott, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are
forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference. Pelicans pass
by and we hardly know who they are, we don't know their stories. Again, at what price? I
think it's leading us to a place of inconsolable loneliness. That's what I mean by "An
Unspoken Hunger." It's a hunger that cannot be quelled by material things. It's a hunger
that cannot be quelled by the constant denial. I think that the only thing that can bring us
into a place of fullness is being out in the land with other. Then we remember where the
source of our power lies.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
“Our culture has chosen to define erotic in very narrow terms, terms that largely describe
pornography or voyeurism, the opposite of a relationship that asks for reciprocity. One of
the things I was interested in with Desert Quartet was to explore the use of language in its
pure sense, to use the word ‘erotic’ to intensify, to expand our view of Eros, to literally be
in relationship on the page. When we’re in relation, whether it is with a human being, with
an animal, or with the desert, I think there is an exchange of the erotic impulse. We are
engaged, we are vulnerable, we are both giving and receiving, we are fully present in that
moment, and we are able to heighten our capacity for passion which I think is the full
range of emotion, both the joy and sorrow that one feels when in wild country. To speak
about Eros in a particular landscape is to acknowledge our capacity to love Other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 3-4
(On Unspoken Hunger) “Intimacy makes us uncomfortable, so there is another issue here;
I really believe our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each
other. So how do we cross these borders? How do we keep things fluid, not fixed, so we
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can begin to explore both our body and the body of the earth? No separation. Eros: nature
even our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 4
Jensen: What does erotic mean to you?
Terry Tempest Williams: It means ‘in relation.” Erotic is what those deep relations are and
can be that engage the whole body—our heart, our mind, our spirit, our flesh. It is that
moment of being exquisitely present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 310
“It does not speak well for us as a people that we even have to make the distinction
between what is erotic and what is not, because an erotic connection is a life-engaged,
making love to the world that I think comes very naturally.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 310
Dying mother: “The permeability of the body was present. I felt her spirit disengage from
the soles of her feet and move upward to leave out of the top of her head. It was asa though
she was climbing through her body on a ladder of light. The only analogue I had for that
feeling was in making love when you’re moving toward orgasm. Again, you are walking
up that ladder of light. It’s almost like being inside a piece of music, moving up the scale,
the pitch gets higher and higher and more intense, more intense. My mother’s death was
one of the sensual, sexual, erotic encounters I have ever had.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 311
It is for my mouth, forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
--Walt Whitman
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
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EROTICS OF PLACE
“If a sense of place can give rise to a politics of place, where might an erotics of place
lead?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 16
on Desert Quartet. “I wanted to create a narrative that experimented with the question of
what it might mean to make love to the land. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 16
There is an image of woman in the desert, her back arched as her hands lift her body up
from black rocks. Naked. She spreads her legs over a boulder etched by the Ancient Ones;
a line of white lightning zigzags from her mons pubis. She if perfectly in place, engaged,
ecstatic, and wild. This is Judy Dater’s photograph “Self-Portrait with Petroglyphs.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
“Another woman stands on her tiptoes, naked, holding draped fabric close to her body as it
cascades over her breasts, down her belly and legs, like water. A strand of pearls hangs
down her back; her eyes are closed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
“I wonder about our notion of the erotic—why it is so often aligned with the pornographic,
the limited view of the voyeur watching the act of intercourse without any interest in the
relationship itself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 105
What are we afraid of?
The world we frequently surrender to defies our participation in nature and seduces
us into believing that our only place in the wild is as spectator, onlooker. A society of
individuals who only observe a landscape from behind the lends of a camera or the
window of an automobile without entering in is perhaps no different from the person who
obtains sexual gratification from looking at the sexual play of others.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 106
“Eroticism, being in relation, calls the inner life into play. No longer numb, we feel the
magnetic pull in our bodies toward something stronger, more vital than simply ourselves.
Arousal become a dance with longing. We form a secret partnership with possibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 106
She enters a juniper tree. “Hours passed, who knows how long; the angle of light shifted.
Something had passed between us, evident by the change in my own countenance, the
slowing of my pulse, and the softness of my eyes as though I was awakening from a desert
trance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 107
“I finally inched my way down, wrapping my hands around the trunk. Feet on Earth. I took
out my water bottle and saturated the roots. Pink sand turned red. I left the desert in a state
of wetness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 107-108
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“Without feeling. Perhaps these two words are the key, the only way we can begin to
understand our abuse of each other and our abuse of the land. Could it be that what we fear
most is our capacity to feel, so that we annihilate symbolically and physically that which is
beautiful and tender, anything that dares us to consider our creative selves? The erotic
world is silenced, reduced to a collection of objects we curate and control, be it a vase, a
woman, or wilderness. Our lives become a piece in the puzzle of pornography as we go
through the motions of daily intercourse without any engagement of the soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 108
A group of friends gather in the desert—call it a pilgrimage—at the confluence of
the Little Colorado and the Colorado Rivers in the Grand Canyon. . . . Nothing but deep
joy can be imagined. . . . They take off their clothes and sink to their waists, turn, roll over,
and wallow in pleasure. Their skins are slippery with clay. They rub each other’s bodies;
arms, shoulders, backs, torsos, even their faces are painted in mud, and they become the
animals they are. Blue eyes. Green eyes. Brown eyes behind masks. In the heat, lying on
ledges, they bake until they crack like terracotta. For hours, they dream the life of lizards.
In time, they submerge themselves in the Little Colorado, diving and surfacing
freshly human.
D. H. Lawrence writes: “There exist two great modes of life—the religious and the
sexual.” Eroticism is the bridge.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 109
Unspoken Hunger
“My connection to the natural world is my connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and
whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“Marian Engle, in her novel Bear, portrays a woman and a bear in an erotics of place. It
doesn’t matter whether the bear is seen as male or female. The relationship between the
two is sensual, wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas –
whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers,
ranchers, and bureaucrats—and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving
the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place—there is
nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true.
That is why we are here. It is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual
about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 84
> cf Gary Snyder: “no one loves rock”
“Rituals. Ceremonies. Engaging with the land. Loving the land and dreaming it. An erotics
of place.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 85
172
“There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness.
Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty,
raw and sensual. Through an erotics of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
“I believe that out of an erotics of place, a politics of place is emerging. Not radical, but
conservative, a politics rooted in empathy in which we extend our notion of community, as
Aldo Leopold has urged, to include all life forms—plants, animals, rivers, and soils. The
enterprise of conservation is a revolution, and evolution of the spirit.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
> all three types of engagement
Interviews
TL: I recall hearing you read from a manuscript version of Desert Quartet: An Erotic
Landscape at a conference in Salt Lake City a few years back. At the time, you seemed
nervous about writing frankly about the erotics of landscape. It seems a risky thing to write
about. Has the reaction to the book justified your nervousness, or has it been favorably
received? Why did you choose to write about this topic?
TTW: You ask about Desert Quartet and why I wrote that book. I think every writer
struggles with various questions and tries to make peace with those questions, those
longings through their art, their craft. I am interested in the notion of love and why we are
so fearful of intimacy, with each other and with the land. I wanted to explore the idea of
the erotic, not as it is defined by my culture as pornographic and exploitive, but rather what
it might mean to engage in a relationship of reciprocity. I wanted to try and write out of the
body, not out of the head. I wanted to create a circular text, not a linear one. I wanted to
play with the elemental movements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, and bow to the desert, a
landscape I love. I wanted to see if I could create on the page a dialogue with the heartopen wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, How do we find
refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with
my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a
sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in
community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place
translate into a politics of place? And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning
inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1-2
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
173
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
“This was a curious juxtaposition in my own life. On one hand, I was completely
immersed in the idea of Eros and nature, writing out of the body, wanting in some way to
respond to the beauty of these sacred lands of the Colorado Plateau through language. And
then on the other hand, I was asking, What can we do to stop this legislation? As a writer
how can I be of use? . . . These are the kinds of confluences we experience as writers and
yet they were both the same thing—a love of land. A response to home.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 17-18
“I want to see how we might redefine the erotic, how an erotics of place might lead to a
politics of place. Ultimately, it’s about the love we fear. We are so afraid of loving the
Earth, loving each other, loving ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 131
“I think an erotics of place may be one of the reasons why environmentalists are seen as
subversive. . . Because if we really have to confront wildness, solitude, and serenity, both
the fierceness and compassionate nature of the land, then we ultimately have to confront it
in ourselves, and it’s easier to be numb, to be distracted, to be disengaged.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 131
“To engage in the erotics of place means to engage in time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 318
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ETHICS
…
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“Aldo Leopold was tutoring me sentence by sentence in how ecological principles are
intrinsically woven into an ethical framework of being.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
181-182
After defeat of dam on Green River: “The preservation and protection of wilderness
became part of our sacred responsibility, a responsibility that each generation will carry.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red, 182
One Patriot
“Rachel Carson did not turn her back on the ongoing chronicle of the natural history of the
dead. She bore witness. ‘It was time,’ Carson said, ‘that human beings admit their kinship
with other forms of life. If we cannot accept this moral ethic, then we too are complicit in
the killing.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 44
Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law,
person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?
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Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing
witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?
And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires
empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
“In Silent Spring we . . . witness how a confluence of poetry and politics with sound
science can create an ethical stance toward life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
I realized that in American Letters we celebrate both language and landscape,
that these words, stories, and poems can create an ethical stance toward life:
Melville's Great Whale; Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Thoreau's Walden Pond;
Emerson's "Oversoul" -- the natural world infused with divinity. I came to understand
through an education in the humanities that knowledge is another form of
democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy.
It begins with our questions...
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21a
Interviews
TL: Your work is part of what seems to be a renaissance in the genre of nature writing.
Why do you think this renaissance is occurring, if you think it is?
TTW: I think there has always been a strong tradition in American letters of place-based
literature, literature that sees landscape as character. Look at Melville, Thoreau, Emerson,
Dickinson, Whitman of the nineteenth century and in this century, Mary Austin writing
about the desert, Willa Cather writing about the prairies, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck
honoring the land in their novels and short stories. The list goes on and on, poets, too. W.S.
Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver. Is this to be called "Nature Writing?" If there is a
"renaissance" in the genre as you suggest with contemporary writers particularly in the
American West, perhaps it is because we are chronicling the losses of the exploitation we
are seeing, that we are trying to grapple with "an ethic of place" and what that means to our
communities in all their diversity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
To be in correspondence with the world around us -- to learn the names of things, to
delight in all that is wild, even our own beating hearts, to embrace our sacred
responsibilities toward the sustenance of life, to remember what we seem to have
forgotten, that we are part of this beautiful, broken healing Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
JW: One of the stories that's interesting to me, since you bring up your Mormon heritage,
is the story of the Mormon people coming in search of land, and then finding the land -"This is the place!" -- in the Salt Lake valley. Has that heritage of a people seeking a
sacred land influenced Utah's public policy in the direction of conservation?
TTW: It's a complicated question. I started thinking about the conservation ethic in Utah,
specifically inherent in the Mormon religion, when we were confronted with a crisis in our
state. And that was the crisis of wilderness. You'll remember in 1994 when the
Republicans took over the House and Senate with the Gingrich revolution, how everything
shifted. Our political delegation in Utah couldn't have been more thrilled, with Orrin Hatch
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and Representative Jim Hansen at the helm. It was decided that for once and for all they
would end the wilderness debate in Utah and because they had a majority they thought that
this would move through quickly. To Governor Mike Leavitt's credit, he said we needed to
have a public process. And so for six months there were hearings held in every county all
over the state of Utah that had wilderness under consideration in Bureau of Land
Management land. Over 70 percent of Utahns wanted more wilderness, not less. In June,
Hatch and Bennett, the Senators from our state, as well as Hanson in the House, came up
with what was called "The Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995." This said that
1.7 million acres out of 22 million acres of BLM land would be designated as wilderness.
Those of us within the conservation community were appalled. The citizens' proposal had
been for 5.7 million acres. So a nasty fight ensued in the halls of Congress. Bottom line,
people spoke out, not only in Utah, but all over the country, and the bill died. And, because
of the political climate judged by a very astute Bill Clinton, the Grand Staircase Esconde
National Monument was created with almost 2 million acres of wilderness in Utah.
Our Senators would have had us believe that if you were Mormon, you were
Republican, you were anti-wilderness; if you were non-Mormon you were a Democrat,
you were pro-wilderness. Those of us within the Mormon culture said: That cannot be true!
So we set out to find stories that would show otherwise. We created a book called New
Genesis -- A Mormon Reader on Land and Community that contains about 40 stories from
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who spoke about how nature
informed their spirituality as a Mormon or, conversely, about how Mormonism has
enhanced their view of nature. It was very, very moving to see the different discussions,
everything from the natural history of the quilt, to a treatise on air pollution, to a
conversion story of the former mayor of Salt Lake City, a world-class rock climber, who,
hand on stone, felt the spirit of God and joined the Mormon church. In each of these essays
they tied the theme to a Mormon scripture, or to something in the doctrine, so that we were
trying to pull our history of a land ethic through time to where we are now at the beginning
of this new millennium. We also took a deep look at our history to say: What was the ethic
of Brigham Young when he came across the plains during the Mormon exodus, came into
the Salt Lake Valley, and said, "This is the place!"? We found that there was a very strong
conservation ethic. That over the pulpit, at Temple Square, in the Tabernacle, there were
talks given by general authorities that warned the saints of overgrazing, warned about
using too much water and upheld the value of water conservation. Somewhere along the
line we have forgotten that. It's been an interesting exercise of retrieval.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 4
the Teton Science School “where those ideas in terms of the land ethic were really born in
me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Siporin Interview, WAL 100
Seeing Earth from space: “we recognize our home, our family, our community, and
therefore become fiercely accountable for the landscape that we are a part of. We can begin
to adopt an ethics of place.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 60-61
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FAITH, TRUST, OPTIMISM
….
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
“There has been a positive respond from the Mormon hierarchy of women because they
see in this book the values of family and community and prayer and faith that are all
honored within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 124-125
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
I am standing in the corner with my back to the wall. Never have I felt such dismay over
the leadership and public policies of our nation. Never have I felt such determination and
faith in our ability to change our country's current direction. How to reconcile these
seemingly contradictory emotions in an election year when we appear to be anything but
united states?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The heart embodies faith because it leads us to charity. It is the muscle behind hope that
brings confidence to those who despair.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
On this magical night, we watch in wonder and awe as young people climb, carrying wood
on their backs, and lay down their burdens, striking the match, blowing on embers, fanning
the flames with great faith and joy. Fire. Fire in freefall, over the cliff, reminding us all
what is primal and fleeting. We cannot know what lies ahead. We may be unsure how to
bring our prayers forward. But on this night in the desert, we celebrate this cascading river
of beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
FAITH, TRUST
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FAMILY, HUMAN
Red
“I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries.
The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had
always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 40
“What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family.
Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a
matter of living the circle.
“Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship
with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We
choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is
money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 137
Brooke’s toast:
We are guarding the moments given to each of us as members of a family, small
bits of time where the family becomes not just a mirror, but a clear, still pond, which each
of us can gaze into for glimpses of our real being.
We are guarding the very ideal of family, the bond, the web connecting us all,
which gives rise to an energy, a lust for life lost to those for whom family has lost
significance.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 207-208
The men in my family have migrated south for one year to lay pipe in southern
Utah.
My keening is for my family, fractured and displaced.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 238
> note she say the men have “migrated”
“Neighbors extend the notion of family. We were fed by them. Thank you.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 295
“My family has grown through this process. Each of us has found a new configuration
born out of change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 306
Unspoken Hunger
“As a writer and a woman with obligations to both family and community, I have tried to
adopt this ritual in the balancing of a public and private life. We are at home in the deserts
and mountains, as well as in our dens. Above ground in the abundance of spring and
summer, I am available. Below ground in the deepening of autumn and winter, I am not. I
need hibernation in order to create.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
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“We stood strong and resolute as neighbors, friends, and family witnessed the release of a
red-tailed hawk. Wounded, now healed, we caught a glimpse of our own wild nature
soaring above willows.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“We are here to honor Ed, to honor Clarke, Becky . . .; to acknowledge family, tribe, and
clan. And it has everything to do with love: loving each other, loving the land. This is a
rededication of purpose and place.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 77
Open Space of Democracy
In our increasingly fundamentalist country, we have to remember what is fundamental:
gravity -- what draws us to a place and keeps us there, like love, like kinship. When we
commit to a particular place, a certain element of choice is removed. We begin to see the
world whole instead of fractured. Long-term strategies replace short-term gains. We
inform one another and become an educated public that responds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
Interviews
London: You mentioned Pico Iyer. He has described home as the sense of a bleak
landscape -- something that inspires the sort of melancholy that only a truly familiar place
can evoke. That seems so very different from what you are saying.
Williams: Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell you that in many ways I know of
no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a
blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because
when you are so familiar, you know the shadow. My family lives all around me. We see
each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they
split us apart. I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it.
And that is the richness, the texture. So when Pico talks about home being a place of
isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt
Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" -- a body of water than
no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes
within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
“the Navajo culture sent me back home to my own. There are similarities, a strong family
structure reinforced through generational storytelling, a keen belief in the power of healing,
but there are also marked differences. I had to come to terms with the fact that in Mormon
culture, or any Christian religion for that matter, we are taught that human beings as having
dominion over the land. This is one of the things that has led to my own estrangement from
orthodoxy. Most Indigenous People do not view their relationship toward the earth this
way. They see themselves as a part of nature with a sense of kinship extended to all forms
of life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
She wrote Refuge “to remember my mother and grandmothers and what it was that we
shared, and as a way of recalling how women conduct their lives in the midst of family, in
the midst of illness, in the midst of death—in the midst of day-to-day living. I wrote
Refuge to celebrate the correspondence between the landscape of my childhood and the
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landscape of my family, to explore the idea of how one finds refuge in change. And it is
Refuge that gave me my voice as a woman.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122
Her mother “believed that the natural world was a third partner in her marriage.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 128
“Our culture of consumerism tells us what we need, what we want, and what we deserve. It
is the economics of entitlement. And I believe it is an illusion. I believe our needs are more
basic: home; family; community; health; the health of the land which includes all life
forms, plants, animals, and human beings. We need open country, open spaces, a wildness
that offers us deliverance from inauthentic lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
Speaking of family: “We knew that our relationship to the land was our relationship to
each other. We could hold Church in the middle of the Great Basin as well as in the
Monument Park Fourteenth Ward.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 125
“I write about what I know, and I am inspired by what I don’t know – which is enormous. I
believe in the longing for unity, that we may in fact be asking for a new way to think about
science in reality are asking for a new way to think about ourselves, that this yearning to
heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that separate us from
ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for unity has
everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
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FAMILY, NATURE AS
Red
As a woman of forty-four years, I will not bear children. My husband and I will not
be parents. We have chosen to define family in another way.
I look across the sweep of slickrock stretching in all directions, the rise and fall of
such arid terrain. A jackrabbit blots down the wash. Pinon jays flock and bank behind
cluster of junipers. The tracks of coyote are everywhere.
Would you believe me when I tell you this is family, kinship with the desert, the
breadth of my relations coursing through a wider community, the shock of recognition
which each scarlet gilia, the smell of rain.
And this is enough for me, more than enough. I trace my genealogy back to the
land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and
place. . . . Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 157
Let me tease another word from the heart of a nation: sacrifice. Not to bear children
may be its own form of sacrifice. How do I explain my love of children, yet our decision
not to give birth to a child? Perhaps it is about sharing. I recall watching my niece, Diane,
nine years old, on her stomach, eye to eye with a lizard; neither moved while
contemplating the other. In the sweetness of that moment, I felt the curvature of my heart
become the curvature of Earth, the circle of family complete. Diane bears the name of my
mother and wears my DNA as closely as my daughter would.
Must the act of birth be seen only as a replacement for ourselves? Can we not also
conceive of birth as an act of the imagination, giving body to a new way of seeing? Do
children need to be our own to be loved as our own?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158-159
Refuge
“With my arms out the window, I tried to touch the wings of avocets and stilts. I knew
these birds from our private trips to the Refuge. They had become relatives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 19
“I realize months afterward that my grief is much larger than I could ever have imagined.
The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the
flooded desert, become extensions of my family. Grief dares us to love once more.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 252
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FEAR
………
How do we engage in conversation at a time when the definition of what it means to be
a patriot is being narrowly construed? You are either with us or against us.
Discussion is waged in absolutes not ambiguities. Corporations have more access to
power than people. We, the people. Fear has replaced discussion. Business practices
have taken precedence over public process. It doesn't matter what the United Nations
advises or what world opinion may be. America in the early years of the twenty-first
century has become a force unto itself. The laws it chooses to abide by are its own.
What role does this leave us as individuals within a republic?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in; silence overtakes
speech. Rhetoric masquerades as thought. Dogma is dressed up like an idea. And we
are told what to do, not asked what we think. Security is guaranteed. The lie begins to
carry more power than the truth until the words of our own founding fathers are
forgotten and the images of television replace history.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
We can ask ourselves within the context and specificity of our own lives, how fear can be
transformed into courage, silence transformed into honest expression, and spiritual
isolation quelled through a sense of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Experience opens us, creates a chasm in our heart, an expansion in our lungs, allowing us
to pull in fresh air to all that was stagnant. We breathe deeply and remember fear for what
it is -- a resistance to the unknown.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 38B
What is the disease we are facing in this nation of ours? The disease of fear. Fear creates
an atmosphere where craven acts occur, even in our institutions of higher education. When
we can no longer count on our colleges and universities to champion and protect free
speech, no voice in America is safe.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” letter to
Brandon Hollingshead
“I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful
of the animals that we are . . . an animal who understands a sense of humility when
watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs . . . an animal
who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes . . . an animal who has not forgotten
what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the
source of all true visions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187
London: How central is your Mormon faith to your identity as a writer -- has it had a big
influence on your work and ideas?
Williams: It's hard to answer because, again, I don't think we can separate our upbringing
from what we are. I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which
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I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep. There are other
things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not
just peculiar to Mormonism -- it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our
creativity. So the question that I'm constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of? I
think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of
growth. I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear -- of
women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
London: Camus said that beauty can drive us to despair. Rilke also said something about
that; he spoke of beauty as the "beginning of terror." What is it that is so terrifying about
beauty -- especially the kind we find in nature?
Williams: Scott, that is such a powerful point. You know, that Rilke quote -- "Beauty is
the beginning of terror" -- I think about that a lot. I remember, Brooke and I were in Sagres
in Portugal. In your travels, if you look at Portugal and Spain and Spain is the hair and
Portugal is the face, Sagres is the chin. We were right there on this point and Brooke had
gone in another direction and I was literally perched with the fishermen on this
unbelievably steep precipice as they were throwing these lines of light down into the sea,
hundreds of feet, and pulling up these fish for their families. It was so beautiful. I stayed
there all day long. I had to fight to not leap off. It was not a suicidal response, it was not
out of despair. It was out of this sheer desire to merge. That was terrifying to me, because I
thought, "I am going to leap." I finally had to remove myself. And Brooke said, "Let's go
on a walk tonight," and I just said, "I'm too afraid, because I have no control over the
impulses I feel on the edge of that cliff."
It was at that moment that I realized what Rilke was talking about: beauty as the
beginning of terror. It's that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our
capacity to relate to the beauty of things. So, again, that paradox. My life meant so little at
that moment. It was just much more important to be part of the sea.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 7
“We are frightened of engagement, of being fully present, because then we risk feeling
pain and we feel grief, the grief inherent in life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 319
He is unafraid of his anger. His views can be militant and compassionate at once.
Author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, he unravels
hope, asks us to liberate ourselves from these expectations. The students are completely
riveted. Some are uncomfortable. "If you want to keep someone active, give them love,
not hope...."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
FEAR
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FEELING, PASSION, EMOTION, DESIRE
….
Red
“The redrock desert of southern Utah teaches me over and over again: red endures. Let it
not be my rage or anger that endures, but a passion for the bloodroot country of my
burning soul that survives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 138
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“The flicker flies. A fire burns. Loves is as varied as the spectrum red. Break my heart
with the desert’s silence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
“What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be
spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because
passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the
backside of the heart.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 140
“It is our nature to be aroused—not once, but again and again. Where do we find the
strength not to be pulled apart by our passions? How do we inhabit the canyons inside a
divided heart? One body. Two bodies. Three.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Fire,” Red, 208
Unspoken Hunger
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“D. H. Lawrence writes, ‘In every living thing there is a desire for love, for the
relationship of unison with the rest of things.’
I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love. It is a
vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections. Andre Breton
says, ‘Hardly anyone dares to face with open eyes the great delights of love.’”
185
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“If I choose not to become attached to nouns – a person, place, or thing – then when I
refuse an intimate’s love or hoard my spirit, when a known landscape is bought, sold, and
developed, chained or grazed to a stubble, or a hawk is shot and hung by its feet on a
barbed-wire fence, my heart cannot be broken because I never risked giving it away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63-64
“But what kind of impoverishment is this to withhold emotion, to restrain our passionate
nature in the face of a generous life just to appease our fears? A man or woman whose
mind reins in the heart when the body sings desperately for connection can only expect
more isolation and greater ecological disease. Our lack of intimacy with each other is in
direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land. We have taken our love inside and
abandoned the wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
“Eight hundred acres of wetlands. It is nothing. It is everything. We are a tribe of fractured
individuals who can now only celebrate remnants or wildness. One red-tailed hawk. Two
great blue herons.
Wildlands and wildlives’ oppression lies in our desire to control and our desire to
control has robbed us of feeling. Our rib cages have been broken and our hearts cut out.
The knives of our priests are bloody. We, the people. Our own hands are bloody.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
Open Space of Democracy
To engage in responsive citizenship, we must become citizens who respond.
Passionately. This is how we can make a difference. This is how we can serve society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
Make us uncomfortable.
Make us think.
Make us feel.
Keep us free.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 23
I have always held the image of our founding fathers close to my heart, how they dared to
disagree passionately with one another, yet remained open to what each had to say, some
even changing their minds, as they forged our Constitution. This is the bedrock of our
evolving republic…
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
"I am testifying as an emotional woman," I can still remember her saying, "and I would
like to ask you, gentlemen, what's wrong with emotion?"
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on
moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth
and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it
186
as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an
acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true
source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of
personal engagement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
We have missed a rich opportunity for compassionate understanding and empathy.
Censorship betrays the students' intelligence, individual power of discernment, and their
own passionate exploration of ideas as they prepare to vote. I believe your action has
stopped the dialogue around Convocation at a time when we need it most. Consequently,
the student body of Florida Gulf Coast University is being robbed of the experience of
emancipatory education, the gift of being able to participate in critical thinking,
meaningful dialogue and debate, the very process inherent in an open society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
Together, the women of the Green Belt Movement literally gathered seeds in the
folds of their skirts and planted them in their villages. They watered them, nurtured them,
and when they were tall enough to transplant, they took them to the elementary schools
where the children became the caretakers of trees. Thousands of schools have responded.
Millions of children have participated. Green Belt forests were planted, while educating the
next generation about the perils of deforestation.
She is a beacon of passionate engagement in the name of environmental justice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Salt Lake City, UT
Interviews
If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys, to the
beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from our hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable in our emotional response to the world.
And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being "broken open." To
engage. To participate. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a
personal transformation that bears collective gifts.
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
She lists changes in the West. “all these lands are at risk . . . and that’s one of the things
that fuels my work as a writer. Not so much as a polemic, I hope, but writing out of a sense
of loss, a sense of grief and a sense of joy, because I think passion encompasses that full
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spectrum of joy and sorrow. That passion creates engagement. And I think that all we can
ask as writers if for engagement in our life and on the page.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Siporin Interview, WAL, 101
“Our culture has chosen to define erotic in very narrow terms, terms that largely describe
pornography or voyeurism, the opposite of a relationship that asks for reciprocity. One of
the things I was interested in with Desert Quartet was to explore the use of language in its
pure sense, to use the word ‘erotic’ to intensify, to expand our view of Eros, to literally be
in relationship on the page. When we’re in relation, whether it is with a human being, with
an animal, or with the desert, I think there is an exchange of the erotic impulse. We are
engaged, we are vulnerable, we are both giving and receiving, we are fully present in that
moment, and we are able to heighten our capacity for passion which I think is the full
range of emotion, both the joy and sorrow that one feels when in wild country. To speak
about Eros in a particular landscape is to acknowledge our capacity to love Other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 3-4
“We are frightened of engagement, of being fully present, because then we risk feeling
pain and we feel grief, the grief inherent in life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 319
FEELING, PASSION, EMOTION
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FEMALE, WOMEN
Red
The story “The Bowl.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Bowl,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 32-36
The story “A Woman’s Dance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 52ff
“Slowly she raised her body like a lizard. . . . Her hands, like serpents, encouraged primal
sounds as she arched forward and back with the grasses. She was the wind that inspired
change. They were a tribe creating a landscape where lines between the real and imagined
were thinly drawn.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 53-54
“Her turns widened with each rotation until she stopped, perfectly balanced. The woman
stepped outside the circle and kissed the palms of her hands and placed them on the earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 54
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
Refuge
“We spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth
have been mined.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 10
“’Many men have forgotten what they are connected to,’ My friend added. “Subjugation of
women and nature may be a loss of intimacy within themselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 10
“What is it about a relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first
landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond—to move, to listen, to be nourished
and grow. . . . Our maternal environment is perfectly safe—dark, warm, and wet. It is a
residency inside the Feminine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
Her mother: “By being selfish a woman ultimately has more to give in the long run,
because she has a self to give away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 51
“The heartbeats I felt in the womb—two heartbeats, at once, my mother’s and my own—
are heartbeats of the land. All of life drums and beats, at once, sustaining a rhythm audible
only to the spirit. I can drum my heartbeat back into the Earth, beating, hearts beating my
hands on the Earth—like a ruffed grouse on a long, beating, hearts beating—like a bittern
189
in the marsh, beatinga, hearts beating. My hands on the Earth beating, heart beating. I
drum back my return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 85
I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of
Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it
won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.
Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you
see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me
experience is all we have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 92
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
“Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect
so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to
operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent
phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
“But after midnight, silence. The depth and stillness of Great Salt Lake comes over the
wetlands like a mother’s calming hand. Morning approaches slowly, until each voice in the
marsh awakens.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“I laid my head on her lap and closed my eyes. I could not tell if it was my mother’s
fingers combing through my hair or the wind.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 156
In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood
of God. women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have
always bestowed benisons upon our families.
Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we
pray.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 158
“One night, a full moon watched over me like a mother.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 189
We are far too conciliatory. If we as Mormon women believe in God the Father and
in his son, Jesus Christ, it is only logical that a Mother-in-Heaven balances the sacred
triangle. I believe the Holy Ghost is female, although she has remained hidden, invisible,
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deprived of a body, she is the spirit that seeps into our hearts and directs us to the well. The
‘still, small voice’ I was taught to listen to as a child was ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost.’
Today I choose to recognize this presence as holy intuition, the gift of the Mother. My
prayers no longer bear the ‘proper’ masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother
in Heaven. If we could introduce the Motherbody as a spiritual counterpoint to the
Godhead, perhaps our inspiration and devotion would no longer be directed to the stars,
but our worship could return to the Earth.
My physical mother is gone. My spiritual mother remains. I am a woman rewriting
my genealogy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 241
“Mothers. Daughters. Granddaughters. The myth of Demeter and Persephone lives through
us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 261
Terry Tempest Williams to Mimi: “The hollow eggs translated into hollow wombs. The
Earth is not well and neither are we. I saw the health of the planet as our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 262-263
“One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert.
They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its
phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that
they would never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as sparks
broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“The women danced and drummed and sang for weeks, preparing themselves for what was
to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of their children, for the sake of the
land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new
contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their
own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
The women invade the town, despite being pregnant. They were arrested. When asked why
they came and who they were, they replied, “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim
the desert for our children.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahns
for trespassing on military lands. They are still conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours
was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.
As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body.
She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
“And these?” she asked sternly.
“Weapons,” I replied.
191
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
“The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to
get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong,
women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 290
Unspoken Hunger
O’Keefe: “she was a woman painter among men. Although she resisted the call of gender
separation and in many ways embodied an androgynous soul, she was not without political
savvy and humor on the subject. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 20
“Undressing the Bear.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 51 ff
“Rain began – female rain falling gently, softly, as a fine mist over the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 55
“Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the
impulses we arouse and the forces we represent.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
> her motherhood
Story “Stone Creek Woman”: all
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 67
Essay “The Wild Card,” all
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 133-141
Interviews
TL: Ann Zwinger has said she doesn't go out into nature as a woman. Yet your gender
seems to be a very important part of your work. Why?
TTW: Each of us writes out of our own biases. I am a Mormon woman who grew up in
the Great Basin and now lives in the Colorado Plateau. These are the lens of culture,
gender, and geography that I see out of. Of course, we are all human beings, but it seems to
me there is an honesty to state where it is we come from and how our perceptions have
been shaped. The fun part, the difficult part, is then to shatter them and see the world from
different points of view.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
London: How central is your Mormon faith to your identity as a writer -- has it had a big
influence on your work and ideas?
Williams: It's hard to answer because, again, I don't think we can separate our upbringing
from what we are. I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which
I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep. There are other
things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not
just peculiar to Mormonism -- it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our
creativity. So the question that I'm constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of? I
think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of
growth. I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear -- of
women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
“At that point, I understood what I was really acknowledging—it wasn’t the scientific
mind or the poetic mind, but the feminine mind that I wanted to embrace. That was the
language that I wanted to liberate. I had a visual map I could now trust.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 9
She wrote Refuge “to remember my mother and grandmothers and what it was that we
shared, and as a way of recalling how women conduct their lives in the midst of family, in
the midst of illness, in the midst of death—in the midst of day-to-day living. I wrote
Refuge to celebrate the correspondence between the landscape of my childhood and the
landscape of my family, to explore the idea of how one finds refuge in change. And it is
Refuge that gave me my voice as a woman.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122
“The language that women speak when no one is there to correct hem is the language of
the heart, a kind to the land. Women’s language is like connective tissue, detailed and
circuitous; it goes in and out. When two women speak, they can keep five strands of
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conversation going at once. . . . the language of women knows no time. A women’s
language is about meanderings, like a river. . . . It is a language without selfconsciousness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 123
“So I am interested, as a writer, in finding what the mother tongue is. I believe it has to do
with structure, form, and style. I think it has to do with identifying relationships that break
through the veneer of what is proper, what is expected. The language that women speak
when nobody is there to correct them oftentimes can make people uncomfortable because
it threatens to undermine the status quo. It’s what we know in our hearts that we don’t dare
speak, . . . the sense of women and secrets.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 123
FEMALE, WOMEN
194
FIRE
This is what our community is in need of now. Fire. Fire that wakes us up. Fire that
transforms where we are. Fire to see our way through the dark. Fire as illumination. We
witness from the front porches of our homes the exhilaration of pushing an idea over the
edge until it ignites a community, and we can never look at Parriott Mesa again without
remembering the way it was sold, the way a sign disappeared and reappeared in Arches
National Park, the way the community bought the land back through the gift of
anonymity, and the breathing space it now holds as the red rock cornerstone of Castle
Valley.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
On this magical night, we watch in wonder and awe as young people climb, carrying wood
on their backs, and lay down their burdens, striking the match, blowing on embers, fanning
the flames with great faith and joy. Fire. Fire in freefall, over the cliff, reminding us all
what is primal and fleeting. We cannot know what lies ahead. We may be unsure how to
bring our prayers forward. But on this night in the desert, we celebrate this cascading river
of beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
FIRE
195
FREEDOM, LIBERTY
………
I realized that in American Letters we celebrate both language and landscape,
that these words, stories, and poems can create an ethical stance toward life:
Melville's Great Whale; Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Thoreau's Walden Pond;
Emerson's "Oversoul" -- the natural world infused with divinity. I came to understand
through an education in the humanities that knowledge is another form of
democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy.
It begins with our questions...
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21a
Abraham Lincoln warns: "What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and
independence? It is not our crowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army
and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of these may be turned
against us without making us weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the spirit
which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere. Destroy this
spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize
yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.
Accustom to trample on the rights of others and you have lost the genius of your own
independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises
among you."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
Thomas Jefferson said, "I believe in perilous liberty over quiet servitude."
May we commit ourselves to "perilous liberty."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
This is the path of intellectual freedom and spiritual curiosity. Our insistence on
democracy is based on our resistance to complacency. To be engaged. To participate.
To create alternatives together. We may be wrong. We will make mistakes. But we can
engage in spirited conversation, cherishing the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
Make us uncomfortable.
Make us think.
Make us feel.
Keep us free.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 23
It occurred to me, over the many weeks that it took me to respond to Senator Bennett's
letter, that what mattered most to me was not what I was willing to die for, but what I was
willing to give my life to. In war, death by belief is centered on principles both activated
and extinguished in the drama of a random moment. Heroes are buried. A legacy of
freedom is maintained through pain. Life by belief is centered on the day-to-day
decisions we make that are largely unseen. One produces martyrs born out of violence. The
other produces quiet citizens born out of personal commitments toward social change.
Both dwell in the hallowed ground of sacrifice.
196
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 23
After much thought, what I would be willing to die for, and give my life to, is the freedom
of speech. It is the open door to all other freedoms. We are a nation at war with ourselves.
Until we can turn to one another and offer our sincere words as to why we feel the way we
do with an honest commitment to hear what others have to say, we will continue to project
our anger on the world in true, unconscious acts of terror.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
As the Brooks Range recedes behind us, I am mindful that Mardy is approaching 101 years
of age. She has never shed her optimism for wild Alaska. I am half her age and my niece,
Abby, is half of mine. We share her passion for this order of quiet freedom. America's
wildlands are vulnerable and they will always be assailable as long as what we value in
this nation is measured in monetary terms, not spiritual ones.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
I hear Walt Whitman’s voice once again. “The quality of Being . . . is the lesson of nature.”
Raw, wild beauty is a deeply held American value. It is its own declaration of
independence. Equality is experienced through humility. Liberty is expressed through the
simple act of wandering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a-b
We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on
moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth
and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it
as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an
acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true
source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of
personal engagement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
Are we ready for the next evolutionary leap—to recognize the restoration of democracy
as the restoration of liberty and justice for all species, not just our own? To be in the
service of something beyond ourselves—to be in the presence of something other than
ourselves, together—this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal
isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59a
FREEDOM, LIBERTY
197
GENEROSITY, CHARITY
…………..
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
I am standing in the corner with my back to the wall. Never have I felt such dismay over
the leadership and public policies of our nation. Never have I felt such determination and
faith in our ability to change our country's current direction. How to reconcile these
seemingly contradictory emotions in an election year when we appear to be anything but
united states?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
It is time to ask, when will our national culture of self-interest stop cutting the bonds of
community to shore up individual gain and instead begin to nourish communal life
through acts of giving, not taking? It is time to acknowledge the violence rendered to our
souls each time a mountaintop is removed to expose a coal vein in Appalachia or when a
wetland is drained, dredged, and filled for a strip mall. And the time has come to demand
an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life in all its variety and forms, as
we witness the repeated breaking of laws, and the relaxing of laws, in the sole name of
growth and greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
We are a people addicted to speed and superficiality, and a nation that prides itself on
moral superiority. But our folly lies in not seeing what we base our superiority on. Wealth
and freedom? What is wealth if we cannot share it? What is freedom if we cannot offer it
as a vision of compassion and restraint, rather than force and aggression? Without an
acknowledgement of complexity in a society of sound bites, we will not find the true
source of our anger or an authentic passion that will propel us forward to the place of
personal engagement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
GENEROSITY, CHARITY
198
GRATITUDE
……
We walk for several hours along the tundra shelf, talking very little. Such joy. How do we
return home without breaking these threads that bind us to life? How do we return our
gratitude for all we have seen? We stop and lie on our backs, side by side, watching the
clouds. A deep and abiding stillness passes through us. Our hands clasp.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47b
GRATITUDE
199
HEALING, HEAL
Red
“In time, from the rear of the pickup, came a slow, deliberate chant. Navajo words—
gentle, deep meanderings of music born out of healing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Lion’s Eyes,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 30
“The Hopi Elders have told us, it is time for healing. A healing must begin within our
communities, within ourselves, regarding our relationship to the Earth, Wild Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 71
Refuge
Last night I dreamed I was walking along the shores of Great Salt Lake. I noticed a
purple bird floating in the waters, the waves rocking it gently. I entered the lake and, with
cupped hands, picked up the bird and returned it to shore. The purple bird turned gold,
dropped its tail, and began digging a burrow in the white sand, where it retreated and
sealed itself inside with salt. I walked away. It was dusk. The next day, I returned to the
lake shore. A wooden door frame, freestanding, became an arch I had to walk through.
Suddenly, it was transformed into Athene’s Temple. The bird was gone. I was left standing
with my own memory.
In the next segment of the dream I was in a doctor’s office. He said, “You have
cancer in your blood and you have nine months to heal yourself.’ I awoke puzzled and
frightened.
Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do
not know, to create a path for myself with the idea that “memory is the only way home.”
I have been in retreat. This story is my return.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
> dated July 4, 1990
“The marsh reflected health as concentric circles rippled outward from a mallard feeing
‘bottoms up.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 20
“Kneeling next to my grandmother, Mimi, I felt her strength and the generational history
of belief Mormon ritual holds. We can heal ourselves, I thought, and we can heal each
other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 35
“What is it about a relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first
landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond—to move, to listen, to be nourished
and grow. . . . Our maternal environment is perfectly safe—dark, warm, and wet. It is a
residency inside the Feminine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
“I want the walls down. Mother’s rage over our inability to face her illness has burned
away my defenses. I am left with guilt, guilt I cannot tolerate because it has no courage. I
hurt Mother though my own desire to be cured.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 76
200
In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood
of God. women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have
always bestowed benisons upon our families.
Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we
pray.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 158
“I feel like a potter trying to shape my life with the material at hand. But my creation is
internal. My vessel is my body, where I hold a space for healing for those I love. Each day
becomes a firing, a further refinement of the potter’s process.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 168
> see also 173
“The Brethren will be meeting in the holy chambers of the Temple, where we will enter
your wife’s name among those to be healed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 197
“I cannot escape these flashbacks. Some haunt. Some heal.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 236
This is the secret den of my healing, where I come to whittle down my losses. I
carve chevrons, the simple image of birds, on rabbit bones cleaned by eagles. And I sing
without the embarrassment of being heard.
The men in my family have migrated south for one year to lay pipe in southern
Utah.
My keening is for my family, fractured and displaced.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237-238
> note she say the men have “migrated”
Terry Tempest Williams to Mimi: “The hollow eggs translated into hollow wombs. The
Earth is not well and neither are we. I saw the health of the planet as our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 262-263
“The Mormon community we are part of also healed us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 295
Looking back, perhaps, these are the very ideas at the heart of Refuge and I didn’t
even know it; I only knew what I saw in the rising Great Salt Lake, the displacement of
birds, the displacement of our own family, the disorder and randomness of cancer, the
healing grace of Earth.
Transformation.
The spiral.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
Unspoken Hunger
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
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feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“We stood strong and resolute as neighbors, friends, and family witnessed the release of a
red-tailed hawk. Wounded, now healed, we caught a glimpse of our own wild nature
soaring above willows.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“It is a story about healing and how we might live with hope.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Testimony,” Unspoken Hunger, 130
Interviews
TL: When I heard about the theme of this year's Border Book Festival, Our Bodies / Our
Earth, I immediately thought of your work, Terry. As much as anyone's, your writing
seems to connect the human body with the more-than-human natural world. Why is this
connection so important to you?
TTW: How can we not align our bodies with the Earth? We are made of the same stuff, so
to speak: water, minerals, our blood like a river flowing inside our veins. To imagine
ourselves as something outside of the Earth, foreign, removed, separate, strikes me as one
of the reasons our collective relationship to the natural world and other creatures has been
severed. I believe our health and the health of the land are intrinsically tied. I've witnessed
this as "hibakusha" (the Japanese word for 'explosion-affected people'), downwinders, and
the predominance of cancer in our family due in large part, I believe, to the fallout in Utah
from nuclear testing of the 1950's and 60's. To see ourselves as part of the Earth and its
community, not apart from it as Robinson Jeffers writes, to me can be an act of humility
and awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 1
Our lack of intimacy with the natural world is in direct correspondence with our lack of
intimacy with each other. Our bodies, the body of the Earth -- there is no separation. When
we cause harm to the natural world, we also cause harm to ourselves. The health of the
planet is our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
To be in correspondence with the world around us -- to learn the names of things, to
delight in all that is wild, even our own beating hearts, to embrace our sacred
responsibilities toward the sustenance of life, to remember what we seem to have
forgotten, that we are part of this beautiful, broken healing Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
“the Navajo culture sent me back home to my own. There are similarities, a strong family
structure reinforced through generational storytelling, a keen belief in the power of
healing, but there are also marked differences. I had to come to terms with the fact that in
Mormon culture, or any Christian religion for that matter, we are taught that human beings
as having dominion over the land. This is one of the things that has led to my own
estrangement from orthodoxy. Most Indigenous People do not view their relationship
toward the earth this way. They see themselves as a part of nature with a sense of kinship
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extended to all forms of life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
LONDON: With all the talk about the ecological crisis we are facing now, environmental
policies seem to be losing ground. How is it that such a big gap has developed between
what we say we value on the one hand and what we legislate on the other?
WILLIAMS: I feel we have to begin standing our ground in the places we love. I think that
we have to demand that concern for the land, concern for the Earth, and this extension of
community that we've been speaking of, is not marginal -- in the same way that women's
rights are not marginal, in the same way that rights for children are not marginal. There is
no separation between the health of human beings and the health of the land. It is all part
of a compassionate view of the world. How we take that view and match it with what we
see in Congress with the decimations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act,
the Clean Water Act, child care... I think it's an outrage. You and I have spoken about what
we can do as citizens, what we can do as a responsive citizenry, and this is where we have
to shatter our complacency and become "active souls," as Thoreau puts it, and be prepared
to engage in aware -- that personal struggle between our grief and our sorrow. But I don't
think we have any choice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 10
“Our culture of consumerism tells us what we need, what we want, and what we deserve. It
is the economics of entitlement. And I believe it is an illusion. I believe our needs are more
basic: home; family; community; health; the health of the land which includes all life
forms, plants, animals, and human beings. We need open country, open spaces, a wildness
that offers us deliverance from inauthentic lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
“I am interested in taboos, because I believe that’s where the power of our culture lies. I
love taking off their masks so we can begin to face the world openly. I believe that will be
our healing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
“Our needs as human beings are really very simple—to love and be loved, a sense of
connection and compassion, a desire to be heard. Health. Family. Home. Once again the
dance, that sharing of breath, that merging with something larger than ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 317
“I’ve been thinking about what it means to bear witness. The past ten years I’ve been
bearing witness to death, bearing witness to women I love, and bearing witness to the
testing going on in the Nevada desert. . . . And I’ve been bearing witness to beauty, beauty
that strikes a chord so deep you can’t stop the tears flowing. . . . Bearing witness to both
the beauty and the pain of our world is a task I want to be part of. As a writer, this is my
work. By bearing witness, the story that is told can provide a healing ground. Through the
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art of language, the art of story, alchemy can occur. And if we choose to turn our backs,
we’ve walked away from what it means to be human.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320-321
“I write about what I know, and I am inspired by what I don’t know – which is enormous. I
believe in the longing for unity, that we may in fact be asking for a new way to think about
science in reality are asking for a new way to think about ourselves, that this yearning to
heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that separate us from
ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for unity has
everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
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HEART
….
Open Space of Democracy
How we choose to support a living democracy will determine whether it will survive as
the beating heart of a republic or merely be preserved as a withered artifact of a cold and
ruthless empire.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Experience opens us, creates a chasm in our heart, an expansion in our lungs, allowing us
to pull in fresh air to all that was stagnant. We breathe deeply and remember fear for what
it is -- a resistance to the unknown.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 38B
It is easy to believe we the people have no say; that the powers in Washington will
roll over our local concerns with their corporate energy ties and thumper trucks. It is easy
to believe that the American will is only focused on how to get rich, how to be
entertained, and how to distract itself from the hard choices we have before us as a nation.
I refuse to believe this. The only space I see truly capable of being closed is not the
land or our civil liberties but our own hearts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others.
This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be
loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is
all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the
presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
The heart embodies faith because it leads us to charity. It is the muscle behind hope that
brings confidence to those who despair.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
{On Whitman and Lincoln} Both men were purveyors of a spiritual democracy borne out
of love and loss. Both men articulated the wisdom of their hearts borne out of direct
engagement. . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
The Open Space of Democracy is a call for conscious dialogue in times of divisive
political rhetoric that has no heart.”
205
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” a letter to
President Merwin
HEART
206
HIDDEN, HIDE
Red
“Perfect Kiva—round like Earth. Hidden in the earth, the six sat.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Perfect Kiva,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 49
“Coyote is always nearby but remains hidden. He is an ally because he cares enough to
stay wary. He teaches us how to survive.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 24
Refuge
“I dreamed of water and cattails and all that is hidden.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 20
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
“Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect
so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to
operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent
phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
“It is one of those curious days when time and season are out of focus, when what you
know I hidden behind the weather.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 141
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the
sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There
is no place to hide, and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near the
lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the outside
world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports the curve
of my spine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
207
HOME
Red
“In Utah, there was a man with a vision. . . . . He loved the land he saw before him, a
landscape so vast, pristine, and virginal, that he recognized it as the kingdom of God, a
place for saints with a desire for home. The desert country of the Great Basin and Colorado
Plateau was an answer to prayers of spiritual sovereignty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 74
“I am aware that my own house, the home we live in and love, devoured this land. . . . My
rational self understands the inevitability of growth and my own role inside it. But what I
find harder and harder to abide is not growth, but the growth of greed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 117
When I think of movement and migration, how one finds and creates home, I think
of the promise of parrots, the small gestures of faith carried by those who choose to inhabit
the Desert West.
So little stays in place. When the soul does come to rest, it is usually through
devotion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 132
Refuge
Last night I dreamed I was walking along the shores of Great Salt Lake. I noticed a
purple bird floating in the waters, the waves rocking it gently. I entered the lake and, with
cupped hands, picked up the bird and returned it to shore. The purple bird turned gold,
dropped its tail, and began digging a burrow in the white sand, where it retreated and
sealed itself inside with salt. I walked away. It was dusk. The next day, I returned to the
lake shore. A wooden door frame, freestanding, became an arch I had to walk through.
Suddenly, it was transformed into Athene’s Temple. The bird was gone. I was left standing
with my own memory.
In the next segment of the dream I was in a doctor’s office. He said, “You have
cancer in your blood and you have nine months to heal yourself.’ I awoke puzzled and
frightened.
Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do
not know, to create a path for myself with the idea that “memory is the only way home.”
I have been in retreat. This story is my return.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
> dated July 4, 1990
I lay out these ten sections on the flat granite rocks I am sitting on. The sun
threatens to dry them. But I wait for the birds. Within minutes, Clark’s nutcrackers and
gray jays join me. I suck on oranges as the mountains begin to work on me.
This is why I always return. This is why I can always go home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 160
(Mother dies) “These days at home have been a meditation as I have scoured sinks and
tubs, picked up week-worn clothes, and vacuumed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 233
208
“The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to
get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong,
women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 290
Unspoken Hunger
“Home is the range of one’s instincts.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 9
“Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding
the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 12
“O’Keefe’s watercolor Canyon with Crows (1917) creates a heartfelt wash of ‘her spiritual
home,’ a country that elicits participation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 23
Interviews
I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings. What I can tell
you about my home is that I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration
Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. When Brigham Young came through with the early
Mormon pioneers in 1847 and said "This is the place," that's the view we see every
morning when we leave the Canyon and enter the Salt Lake Valley. So I feel deeply
connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but
because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual
sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
I think it's what we're used to. Home is where we have a history. So when I'm standing in
the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white
because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of
my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is
beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing
the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on
the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy
place to me.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live
among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community,
to include all life forms -- plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings -- then I believe
a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our
neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not
home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put
... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't
know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living
a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of
true desolation. I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the
MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have
209
not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a
place. And she sounded the alarm.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
I am deeply rooted in Utah's Salt Lake Valley. My family, Mormon, has been in the Great
Basin for six generations. My ancestors' bones are buried here, and mine will be too. I
grew up on the edge of Salt Lake, on the east bench of the Wasatch Mountains--they were
my backyard; there was no separation between my home and the foothills. The scrub oak
and sage influenced me most. Rattlesnakes were common, mountain lions and deer, too.
And the birds were sheer pleasure: black-capped chickadees, blue-gray gnatcatchers, scrub
jays, and California quail. My grandmother gave me a copy of Peterson's Field Guide to
Western Birds when I was five years old. I pored over those color plates and dreamed
about the birds long before I saw them. And always, to the west, there was the Great Salt
Lake, shimmering like a mirage.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Ives Interview, 1
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HOPE
……..
Open Space of Democracy
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
I am standing in the corner with my back to the wall. Never have I felt such dismay over
the leadership and public policies of our nation. Never have I felt such determination and
faith in our ability to change our country's current direction. How to reconcile these
seemingly contradictory emotions in an election year when we appear to be anything but
united states?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
The heart embodies faith because it leads us to charity. It is the muscle behind hope that
brings confidence to those who despair.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," said
Edward Abbey. To not be engaged in the democratic process, to sit back and let others do
the work for us, is to fall prey to bitterness and cynicism. It is the passivity of cynicism
that has broken the back of our collective outrage. We succumb to our own depression
believing there is nothing we can do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
Are we ready for the next evolutionary leap—to recognize the restoration of democracy
as the restoration of liberty and justice for all species, not just our own? To be in the
service of something beyond ourselves—to be in the presence of something other than
ourselves, together—this is where we can begin to craft a meaningful life where personal
isolation and despair disappear through the shared engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59a
There are miracles in the world. Dawn. Light cresting over the Rocky Mountains.
Convergances in our lives that we do not plan, could not have imagined. Synchronous
moments when we wonder what is real, what is true, what do we fight for and what do
we simply accept. Where is there room for hope and when does hope collapse into denial?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
Interviews
TL: In your line of work it is easy, I would think, to get depressed, to focus on all that has
been lost. What gives you hope?
TTW: You ask what gives me hope. Two words: forgiveness and restoration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 6
211
“I don’t think about hope much anymore. But I do think about imagination. That’s where
we have the capacity to shift.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320
He is unafraid of his anger. His views can be militant and compassionate at once.
Author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, he unravels
hope, asks us to liberate ourselves from these expectations. The students are completely
riveted. Some are uncomfortable. "If you want to keep someone active, give them love,
not hope...."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
"Hope is acknowledging you have no agency in the matter." He gives the example, "If we
hope the salmon survive" we acknowledge it is beyond our agency. He says instead of
"simply hoping," we can remove dams on rivers that salmon inhabit, work for better forest
policies, uphold the Endangered Species Act.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
HOPE
212
HUMILITY
…
“For all of Austin’s friends and critics who found her personally arrogant, erratic, and too
bold in her behavior, an abiding and enduring compassion and humility comes through the
rigors of a disciplined eye toward nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mary Austin’s Ghost,” Red, 170-171
Essay: “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 174ff
There are those within the academy who have recently criticized ‘the wilderness
idea’ as a holdover from our colonial past, a remnant of Calvinist tradition that separates
human beings from the natural world and ignores concerns of indigenous people. They
suggest that wilderness advocates are deceiving themselves, that they are merely holding
on to a piece of America’s past, that they are devoted to an illusory and ‘static past,’ that
they are apt to ‘adopt too high a standard for what counts as ‘natural.”’ These scholars see
themselves as one who ‘have inherited the wilderness idea’ and are responding as ‘EuroAmerican men’ within a ‘cultural legacy . . . patriarchal Western civilization in its current
postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.’
I hardly know what that means.
If wilderness is a ‘human construct,’ how do we take it out of the abstract, and into
the real? How do we begin to extend our notion of community to include all life-forms so
that these political boundaries will no longer be necessary? How can that which nurtures
evolution, synonymous with adaptation and change, be considered static? Whom do we
trust in matters of compassion and reverence for life?
I believe that consideration of wilderness as an idea and wilderness as a place must
begin with conscience.
I come back to Leopold’s notion of ‘intellectual humility,’ We are not alone on this
planet, even though our behavior at times suggests otherwise. Our minds are meaningless
in the face of one perfect avalanche or flash flood or forest fire. Our desires are put to rest
when we surrender to a grizzly bear, a rattlesnake, or goshawk defending its nest. To step
aside is an act of submission, to turn back an act of admission, that other beings can and
will take precedence when we meet them on their own wild terms. The manic pace of our
modern lives can be brought into balance by simply giving in to the silence of the desert,
the pounding of a Pacific surf, the darkness and brilliance of a night sky far away from a
city.
Wilderness is a place of humility.
Humility is a place of wilderness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
179-181
“I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful
of the animals that we are . . . an animal who understands a sense of humility when
watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs . . . an animal
who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes . . . an animal who has not forgotten
what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the
source of all true visions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187
213
Quote from another “When a boy is beaten for an inappropriate act, the boy falls to the
ground and clutches a handful of grass. His elder takes this gesture as a sign of humility.”
Then Terry Tempest Williams: “I kneel in the grasses and hold tight.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 12
Open Space of Democracy
Humility is the capacity to see.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
I hear Walt Whitman’s voice once again. “The quality of Being . . . is the lesson of nature.”
Raw, wild beauty is a deeply held American value. It is its own declaration of
independence. Equality is experienced through humility. Liberty is expressed through the
simple act of wandering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a-b
We are in need of a reflective activism born out of humility, not arrogance. Reflection,
with deep time spent in the consideration of others, opens the door to becoming a
compassionate participant in the world.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58b
If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys, to the
beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from our hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable in our emotional response to the world.
And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being "broken open." To
engage. To participate. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a
personal transformation that bears collective gifts.
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
London: You once said that one needs a sense of humor to live in Salt Lake City.
214
Williams: That's very true, and increasingly so given the political climate that we see in
this country, and especially in Utah. I also think that's true in the American West in
general. You can't take yourself seriously very long because you are immediately
confronted with big weather, big country, and there is a sense of humility that rises out of
the landscape.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
215
IDEAL
Partially analyzed into themes
Red
“Progress is being made within rural communities as watershed councils and local land
trusts are being formed, enlisting creative partnerships in the name of land stewardship.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 14
And there are those who are saying, very thoughtfully, that it will only be by
eliminating our desire to set land aside as ‘wilderness’ that we can begin to regard all
landscapes with respect an dignity.
I understand these points of discussion. In an ideal world, a world we might well
inhabit one day, we may not need to ‘designate’ wilderness, so evolved will be our
collective land ethic, our compassion for all manner of life, so responsive and whole. . . . I
pray there will indeed come a time, when our lives regarding the domestic and the wild
will be seamless.
But we are not there yet.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 18
“Almost 120 years later, these arid lands are still inspiring a revolution of thought. Public
lands within the Colorado Plateau possess spiritual values that cannot be measured in
economic terms. They dare us to think in geologic terms. . . . We are absorbed into a rich,
vibrant narrative of vertical time and horizontal space.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70
We are not separate.
We belong to a much larger community than we know.
We are here because of love.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 71
“We must ask ourselves as Americans, ‘Can we really survive the worship of our own
destructiveness?’ We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate
intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human
beings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 76
“Eroticism, being in relation, calls the inner life into play. No longer numb, we feel the
magnetic pull in our bodies toward something stronger, more vital than simply ourselves.
Arousal become a dance with longing. We form a secret partnership with possibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 106
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
216
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
There is the same hope and promise here inside the Mayberry Preserve. With the
Colorado River on its northern boundary, Fisher Towers and the Negro Bill Wilderness
Study Areas east and west of the orchard and the town of Castle Valley directly to the
south, it is a place where human history and natural history converge.
I believe we are capable of creating a world that can accommodate the tamed and
untamed life, that we can in fact see ourselves as part of a larger biological community,
that it is not at odds with a sense of deep democracy but compatible with it. Call it a new
patriotism: red rocks, white clouds, blue sky. Is not the wild imagination of open spaces
simply an expansion of our pledge of allegiance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
“Progress is being made within rural communities as watershed councils and local land
trusts are being formed, enlisting creative partnerships in the name of land stewardship.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 14
And there are those who are saying, very thoughtfully, that it will only be by
eliminating our desire to set land aside as ‘wilderness’ that we can begin to regard all
landscapes with respect an dignity.
I understand these points of discussion. In an ideal world, a world we might well
inhabit one day, we may not need to ‘designate’ wilderness, so evolved will be our
collective land ethic, our compassion for all manner of life, so responsive and whole. . . . I
pray there will indeed come a time, when our lives regarding the domestic and the wild
will be seamless.
But we are not there yet.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 18
> Wendell Berry ideal?
“We must ask ourselves as Americans, ‘Can we really survive the worship of our own
destructiveness?’ We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate
intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human
beings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 76
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
217
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried
it. He called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
For me, the most important value is independent thought, the freedom to choose a
creative path. That’s how I have been able to survive within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 126
Mormonism and the ideal
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried
it. He called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
218
their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“History has shown us that exclusivity in the name of empire building eventually fails.
Fear of discord undermines creativity. And creativity lies at the heart of adaptive
evolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
“The message was clear, we could choose how we wanted to live our lives, we were strong
family, and we could endure whatever came our way. We had the intellectual and spiritual
freedom to move within the structure. Although an orthodox Mormon may think free
agency is about honoring obedience and finding freedom within that obedience, spiritual
laws and principles, I’ve never honored that belief. For me, the most important value is
independent thought, the freedom to choose a creative path. That’s how I have been able to
survive within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 126
Healing
“We stood strong and resolute as neighbors, friends, and family witnessed the release of a
red-tailed hawk. Wounded, now healed, we caught a glimpse of our own wild nature
soaring above willows.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“I am interested in taboos, because I believe that’s where the power of our culture lies. I
love taking off their masks so we can begin to face the world openly. I believe that will be
our healing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
Naked
the “searing simplicity of form. You cannot help but be undone by its sensibility and light,
nothing extra. Before the stillness of sandstone cliffs, you stand still, equally bare.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“By undressing, exposing, and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our
authentic selves. Stripped free from society’s oughts and shoulds, we emerge as
emancipated beings. The bear is free to roam.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
219
“It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas –
whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers,
ranchers, and bureaucrats—and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving
the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place—there is
nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 84
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
Present
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
Wild
Feeling & body & erotics
Family & community
Ethic
220
IDEAL
221
IMAGINATION
Red
“This is Coyote’s country—a landscape of the imagination, where nothing is as it appears.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
“I understand the power of swirling gases as the power and potency of the imagination that
circles us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” 120
Let me tease another word from the heart of a nation: sacrifice. Not to bear children
may be its own form of sacrifice. How do I explain my love of children, yet our decision
not to give birth to a child? Perhaps it is about sharing. I recall watching my niece, Diane,
nine years old, on her stomach, eye to eye with a lizard; neither moved while
contemplating the other. In the sweetness of that moment, I felt the curvature of my heart
become the curvature of Earth, the circle of family complete. Diane bears the name of my
mother and wears my DNA as closely as my daughter would.
Must the act of birth be seen only as a replacement for ourselves? Can we not also
conceive of birth as an act of the imagination, giving body to a new way of seeing? Do
children need to be our own to be loved as our own?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158-159
Refuge
The Bird Refuge has remained a constant. It is a landscape so familiar to me, there
have been times I have felt a species long before I saw it. The long-billed curlews that
foraged the grasslands seven miles outside the Refuge were trustworthy. I can count on
them year after year. And when six whimbrels joined them—whimbrel entered my mind as
an idea. Before I ever saw them mingling with curlews, I recognized them as a new
thought in familiar country.
The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a
place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
The pulse of the Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island’s shores, becomes
the force wearing against my mother’s body And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing
their way toward quiet bays on the island, I recall watching Mother sleep, imagining the
dreams that were encircling her, wondering what she knows that I must learn for myself.
The light changes, Antelope Island is blue. Mother awakened and I looked away.
Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is my mother’s body floating in
uncertainty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 64
“In the severity of a salt desert, I am brought down to my knees by its beauty. My
imagination is fired. My heart opens and my skin burns in the passion of these moments. I
will have not other gods before me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
222
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ When I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
“Death is no longer what I imagined it to be. Death is earthy like birth, like sex, full of
smells and sounds and bodily fluids. It is a confluence of evanescence and flesh.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 219
“The unknown Utah that some see as a home for used razor blades, toxins, and biological
warfare, is a landscape of the imagination, a secret we tell to those who will keep it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
Open Space of Democracy
Imagination and ingenuity are our finest traits.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
In the open space of democracy, we are listening -- ears alert -- we are watching -- eyes
open -- registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private;
some are public. Our oscillations between local, national, and global gestures map the full
range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to
what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
Social change takes time. Communities are built on the practice of patience and
imagination -- the belief that we are here for the duration and will take care of our
relations in times of both drought and abundance. These are the blood and flesh
gestures of commitment.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
If we cannot begin to embrace democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to
think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways . . . .
if we fail to see the necessity of each of us to participate in the formation of an ethical life .
. . if we cannot bring a sense of equity and respect into our homes, our marriages, our
schools, and our churches, alongside our local, state, and federal governments, then
democracy simply becomes, as Dewey suggests, “a form of idolatry,” as we descend into
the basement of nationalism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
IMAGINATION
223
INTERNAL – EXTERNAL
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“I think about a night of lovemaking with the man I live with, how it is that a body so
known and familiar can still take my breath all the way down, then rise and fall, the river
that flows through me, through him, this river, the Colorado River keeps moving,
beckoning us to do the same, nothing stagnant, not today, not ever, as my mind moves as
the river moves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
“Wind. Say the word and a small breeze blows out of your mouth. Say the word again in
front of a lit match and the flame will disappear. Wind. Wind. Wind.”
---Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 151
“It is humbling living here, exposed to the elements of wind, water, and heat. There is no
protection in the desert. We are vulnerable. It is a landscape of extremes. I find myself
mirroring them: hot, cold, wet, dry. The challenge is to live in the midst of so much
beauty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 151
As a woman of forty-four years, I will not bear children. My husband and I will not
be parents. We have chosen to define family in another way.
I look across the sweep of slickrock stretching in all directions, the rise and fall of
such arid terrain. A jackrabbit blots down the wash. Pinon jays flock and bank behind
cluster of junipers. The tracks of coyote are everywhere.
Would you believe me when I tell you this is family, kinship with the desert, the
breadth of my relations coursing through a wider community, the shock of recognition
which each scarlet gilia, the smell of rain.
And this is enough for me, more than enough. I trace my genealogy back to the
land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and
place. . . . Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 157
“The wide-open vistas that sustain our souls, the depth of silence that pushes us toward
sanity, return us to a kind of equilibrium. We stand steady on Earth. The external space I
see is the internal space I feel.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
Let me tease another word from the heart of a nation: sacrifice. Not to bear children
may be its own form of sacrifice. How do I explain my love of children, yet our decision
not to give birth to a child? Perhaps it is about sharing. I recall watching my niece, Diane,
224
nine years old, on her stomach, eye to eye with a lizard; neither moved while
contemplating the other. In the sweetness of that moment, I felt the curvature of my heart
become the curvature of Earth, the circle of family complete. Diane bears the name of my
mother and wears my DNA as closely as my daughter would.
Must the act of birth be seen only as a replacement for ourselves? Can we not also
conceive of birth as an act of the imagination, giving body to a new way of seeing? Do
children need to be our own to be loved as our own?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158-159
225
INTERRELATEDNESS
“After the spiral was complete, they walked around it. . . . The black center stone became
Black Widow’s domain. They imagined her underneath, spinning the web, binding them
together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Stone Spiral,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red,
“To be in relation to everything around us, above us, below us, earth, sky, bones, blood,
flesh, is to see the world whole, even holy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
As a woman of forty-four years, I will not bear children. My husband and I will not
be parents. We have chosen to define family in another way.
I look across the sweep of slickrock stretching in all directions, the rise and fall of
such arid terrain. A jackrabbit blots down the wash. Pinon jays flock and bank behind
cluster of junipers. The tracks of coyote are everywhere.
Would you believe me when I tell you this is family, kinship with the desert, the
breadth of my relations coursing through a wider community, the shock of recognition
which each scarlet gilia, the smell of rain.
And this is enough for me, more than enough. I trace my genealogy back to the
land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and
place. . . . Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 157
The power of nature is the power of a life in association. Nothing stands alone. On my
haunches, I see a sunburst lichen attached to limestone; algae and fungi are working
together to break down rock into soil. I cannot help but recognize a radical form of
democracy at play. Each organism is rooted in its own biological niche, drawing its
power from its relationship to other organisms. An equality of being contributes to an
ecological state of health and succession.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
In my private moments of despair, I am aware of the limits of my own imagination. I am
learning in Castle Valley that imaginations shared invite collaboration and collaboration
creates community. A life in association, not a life independent, is the democratic ideal.
We participate in the vitality of the struggle.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
London: In this culture we tend to draw very distinct lines between the spiritual world and
the political world. And yet you don't seem to see any separation between them. You've
said that for you it's all one -- the spiritual and the political, your home life and your
landscape.
Williams: I think we learn that lesson well by observing the natural world. There is no
separation. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about -- the
patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.
Somewhere along the line we have become segregated in the way we think about things
and become compartmentalized. Again, I think that contributes to our sense of isolation
and our lack of a whole vision of the world -- seeing the world whole, even holy. I can't
226
imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would
be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
So I love the interrelatedness of things. We were just observing out at Point Reyes
a whole colony of elephant seals and it was so deeply beautiful, and it was so deeply
spiritual. It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak
of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. How the males, the bulls, have this
capacity to dive a mile deep, can you imagine? And along the way they sleep while they
dive. And I kept thinking, "And what are their dreams?" And the fact that they can stay
under water for up to two hours. Think of the kind of ecological mind that an elephant seal
holds. Then looking at the females, these unbelievably luxurious creatures that were just
sunbathing on this crescent beach with the waves breaking out beyond them. Then they
would just ripple out into the water in these blue-black bodies, just merging with the water.
It was the most erotic experience I've ever seen. We were there for hours. No separation
between the spiritual and the physical. It was all one. I had the sense that we had the
privilege of witnessing other -- literally another culture, that extension of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
“I find my spirituality in the connectedness of all life. Everything is endowed with its own
spirit. I was taught there was a spirit world that was created before this Earth and that it
exists now, and therefore all life is sacred.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 131
For me, it is all about relationships.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
INTERRELATEDNESS
227
INTIMACY
….
“The cairns I have followed have not secured my own path to intimacy as much as they
have given me the courage to proceed—one foot in front of the other in a landscape
mysterious, unpredictable, and vast. Nobody really knows the way, that is the myth of
convention.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 196
“Biologist Tim Clark says at the heart of good biology is a central core of imagination. It is
the basis for responsible science. And it has everything to do with intimacy, spending time
outside.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 86
“The spiritual nature assigned to these peaks [by the Navajo] rouses me to look again at
our own mountains. What I think is intimacy may not be intimacy at all.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 35
TL: I recall hearing you read from a manuscript version of Desert Quartet: An Erotic
Landscape at a conference in Salt Lake City a few years back. At the time, you seemed
nervous about writing frankly about the erotics of landscape. It seems a risky thing to write
about. Has the reaction to the book justified your nervousness, or has it been favorably
received? Why did you choose to write about this topic?
TTW: You ask about Desert Quartet and why I wrote that book. I think every writer
struggles with various questions and tries to make peace with those questions, those
longings through their art, their craft. I am interested in the notion of love and why we are
so fearful of intimacy, with each other and with the land. I wanted to explore the idea of
the erotic, not as it is defined by my culture as pornographic and exploitive, but rather what
it might mean to engage in a relationship of reciprocity. I wanted to try and write out of the
body, not out of the head. I wanted to create a circular text, not a linear one. I wanted to
play with the elemental movements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, and bow to the desert, a
landscape I love. I wanted to see if I could create on the page a dialogue with the heartopen wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
London: What do you think happens when we lose a sense of intimacy with the natural
world around us?
Williams: I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with
each other. What we perceive as non-human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship
with us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
(On Unspoken Hunger) “Intimacy makes us uncomfortable, so there is another issue here;
I really believe our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each
other. So how do we cross these borders? How do we keep things fluid, not fixed, so we
can begin to explore both our body and the body of the earth? No separation. Eros: nature
even our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 4
228
“That’s the premise of Refuge—that an intimacy with the natural world initiates an
intimacy with death, because life and death are engaged in an endless, inseparable dance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
229
INTUITION
In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as
we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power.
We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding
calm that will shatter fear and complacency.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
INTUITION
230
JAPAN
London: That terror is also related to a certain pain that we can experience -- which you
spoke of recently when you said that the pain that we feel when we confront the natural
world is a very different one from the mental anguish that many of us live with day in and
day out.
Williams: The Japanese have a word -- aware -- which, in my understanding is, again, that
full range -- both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other.
And I really feel that. It's the delicacy and the strength of our relations. And I feel it most
acutely in those intimate moments -- with another person, in a landscape that is beloved.
London: But what about this pain that comes from mental anguish? You write of the
"distracted and domesticated" life. Why is that so dangerous?
Williams: Because then I think we're skating on surfaces. I know it in my own life -- and I
think that is where this frustration comes in. It's not the place we want to be, but it's the
place our society requires that we be. There is no fulfillment there. So we become numbed,
we become drugged, we become less than we are. And I think that we know that. That is
the anguish I hear you talking about. Whereas the pain that one feels in the natural world
arises out of beauty. The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that
we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering. One, as we were
saying, cannot exist without the other. They mirror each other. They live in the same
house. And it moves us to tears.
I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese
accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page
looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there,
what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers
from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our
relations.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 7
I would love to just read this. This is a piece that I just wrote for The Nation in their 50th
anniversary issue of 1945 and World War II.
[Reading:] Kenzaburo Oe writes in Hiroshima Notes, "Hiroshima is like a nakedly exposed
wound inflicted on all mankind. Like all wounds, this one poses two potential outcomes:
the hope of human recovery, and the danger of fatal corruption." Shoko Itoh has just
completed translating a newly found manuscript of Henry David Thoreau, "The Dispersion
of Seeds." She tells me how moved she is by his words, the import of his ideas. "The one
thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man
contains within him, although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn." If, as
Shoko Itoh says, "all religions are born of light," then perhaps Hiroshima has given birth to
a religion of peace. Aware. The active soul.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 8
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JOY, HAPPINESS
We are meant to be joyful.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
On this magical night, we watch in wonder and awe as young people climb, carrying wood
on their backs, and lay down their burdens, striking the match, blowing on embers, fanning
the flames with great faith and joy. Fire. Fire in freefall, over the cliff, reminding us all
what is primal and fleeting. We cannot know what lies ahead. We may be unsure how to
bring our prayers forward. But on this night in the desert, we celebrate this cascading river
of beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
JOY, HAPPINESS
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JUSTICE
I have always believed democracy is best practiced through its construction, not its
completion -- a never-ending project where the windows and doors remain open, a
reminder to never close ourselves off to the sensory impulses of eyes and ears alert
toward justice. Walls are torn down instead of erected in a counter-intuitive process where
a monument is not built but a home, in a constant state of renovation.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20a
JUSTICE
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LANGUAGE
“I write because I believe in words. I write because I do not believe in words.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 113
“I write knowing I will always fail. I write knowing words always fall short. I write
knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by both
understanding and misunderstanding.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 114
“. . . and then I realize, it doesn’t matter, words are always a gamble, words are splinters of
cut glass. I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say
the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how
transient we are. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 114-115
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
Can we learn to speak the language of red?
The relationship between language and landscape is a marriage of sound and form,
an oral geography, a sensual topography, what draws us to a place and keeps us there.
Where we live is at the center of how we speak.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 136
“Native people understand language as an articulation of kinship, all manner of relations.
To the Dine, hozho honors balance in the world, a kind of equilibriated grace, how human
beings stand in relation to everything else. If a native tongue is lost, the perceived
landscape is also lost Conversely, if the landscape is destroyed, the language that evolved
alongside is also destroyed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 137
“Where am I to find my center of gravity linguistically? How do I learn to speak in a
language native to where I live?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 137
I want to learn the landscape of the desert, to be able to translate this landscape of
red into a landscape of heat that quickens the heart and gives courage to silence, a silence
that is heard.
I want to learn how to speak the language of red.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 138
“The organic nature of speech is the confluence of earth and sound.”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
“Standing in the midst of these native tongues, I stand inside my own diction of desire and
play.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
“Can we learn to speak a language indigenous to the heart?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
“The open expanse of sky makes me realize how necessary it is to live without words, to
be satisfied without answers, to simply be in a world where there is no wind, no drama. To
find a place of rest and safety, no matter how fleeting it may be, no matter how illusory, is
to regain composure and locate bearings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“In the beginning, there were no words.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Air,” Red, 209
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
“Through the glass I watched the passion that flowed between my father and brothers as
they spoke of deer. Their words went beyond the occasion.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 100
“I watched her eyes shift inward and sense the Word passing through her heart. Silence. A
prayer. She believes that ritual language is a part of her daily communion with the land,
language that no only describes where she lives, but creates it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 133
Others
To wonder. To contemplate that which is never lost but continues to move outward
forever, however faint, until it is overcome by something else.
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To wonder. To throw pebbles in pools and watch the concentric circles that reach the shore
in waves. Waves of water. Waves of electricity. Illumination. Imagination. To say "I love
you" one day and shout with rage on another. Our words are still moving, churning; this
sea of spoken languages oscillates, around us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
I write to migrating birds with the hubris of language. . . .I write because I believe in
words. I write because I do not believe words.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
I write knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by both
understanding and misunderstanding.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
words are always a gamble, words are splinters from cut glass. I write because it is
dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the
source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient. I write as though I
am whispering in the ear of the one I love.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
Interviews
“Our culture has chosen to define erotic in very narrow terms, terms that largely describe
pornography or voyeurism, the opposite of a relationship that asks for reciprocity. One of
the things I was interested in with Desert Quartet was to explore the use of language in its
pure sense, to use the word ‘erotic’ to intensify, to expand our view of Eros, to literally be
in relationship on the page. When we’re in relation, whether it is with a human being, with
an animal, or with the desert, I think there is an exchange of the erotic impulse. We are
engaged, we are vulnerable, we are both giving and receiving, we are fully present in that
moment, and we are able to heighten our capacity for passion which I think is the full
range of emotion, both the joy and sorrow that one feels when in wild country. To speak
about Eros in a particular landscape is to acknowledge our capacity to love Other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 3-4
“The language that women speak when no one is there to correct hem is the language of
the heart, a kind to the land. Women’s language is like connective tissue, detailed and
circuitous; it goes in and out. When two women speak, they can keep five strands of
conversation going at once. . . . the language of women knows no time. A women’s
language is about meanderings, like a river. . . . It is a language without selfconsciousness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 123
London: One of your great gifts as a writer is your ability to translate your experience of
nature into words. Yet nature seems to inspire in us not words but silence -- after all, that is
one of the most profound reasons for living close to nature, to get beyond words. Do you
find that sometimes the words get in the way?
Williams: That is so true, and I love what you just said about silence going beyond words.
And, who knows, hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can
honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world. I
think you are absolutely right. Isn't that intimacy? When you are with a landscape or a
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human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel. And
I worry... (I think I must be worried all the time -- maybe that is the other side of joy, you
know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.) But we are losing our sense of
silence in the world. …………
So, I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a
"conspiracy" against higher thoughts. If we can no longer see the stars, then where can our
thoughts travel to? So, I think there is much to preserve -- not just landscape, but the
qualities that are inherent in landscape, in wild places: silence, darkness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 6
“So I am interested, as a writer, in finding what the mother tongue is. I believe it has to do
with structure, form, and style. I think it has to do with identifying relationships that break
through the veneer of what is proper, what is expected. The language that women speak
when nobody is there to correct them oftentimes can make people uncomfortable because
it threatens to undermine the status quo. It’s what we know in our hearts that we don’t dare
speak, . . . the sense of women and secrets.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 123
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LET GO, YIELD, FLOW WITH
Refuge
Mother: “It feels good to finally be able to embrace my cancer. It’s almost like a friend,”
she said. “For the first time, I feel like moving with it and not resisting what is ahead.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 156
“You still don’t understand, do you?” Mother said to me. “It doesn’t matter how
much time I have left. All we have is now. I wish you could all accept that and let go of
your projects. Just let me live so I can die.”
Here words cut through me like broken glass. This afternoon, she said, “Terry, to
keep hoping for life in the midst of letting go is to rob me of the moment I am in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 161
“You learn to relinquish,” Mother said to me while I rubbed her back.
“You learn to be an open vessel and let life flow through you.”
I do not understand.
“It’s not that I am giving up,” she said. “I am just going with it. It’s as if I am
moving into another channel of life that lets everything in. Suddenly, there is nothing more
to fight.”
How can I advocate fighting for life when I am in the tutelage of a woman who is
teaching me how to let go?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 165
The Fremont oscillated with the lake levels. As Great Salt Lake rose, they retreated.
As the lake retreated, they were drawn back. Theirs was not a fixed society like ours. They
followed the expanding and receding shorelines. It was the ebb and flow of their lives
In many ways, the Fremont had more options than we have. What do we do when
faced with a rising Great Salt Lake? Pump it west. What did the Fremont do? Move. They
accommodated change were, so often, we are immobilized by it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 183
“She was letting go. So was I.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 192
Mother: “And now, it feels good to give in. I am ready to go.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 211
“I have to let go—she has taught me there is no one moment of death. It is a process.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 228
“In my heart I say, “Let go . . . let go . . . follow the light . . .” There is a crescendo of
movement, like walking up a pyramid of light. And it is sexual, the concentration of love,
of being fully present. Pure feeling. Pure color. I can feel her spirit rising through the top
of her head. Her eyes focus on mine with total joy—a fullness that transcends words.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 231
238
Mimi: “I let go of my conditioning. . . . But when I looked into the water closet and saw
what my body had expelled, the first thought that came into my mind was ‘Finally, I am rid
of the orthodoxy.’ My advice to you, dear, is do it consciously.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 246
Mimi: “Cancer at eighty is very different from cancer at forty. You must get on with your
life and I will get on with mine. We will just go with it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 247
“Refuge is not a place outside myself. Like the lone heron who walks the shores of Great
Salt Lake, I am adapting as the world is adapting.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
Pieces of White Shell
“Somehow we need to acquaint ourselves with the art of letting go, for to own a piece of
the past is to destroy it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 125
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LIGHT
…
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I
believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between
revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to
sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk
parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of
southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work,
work that matters to the soul of the community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 140
“On any given day, the river is light, liquid light, a traveling mirror in the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 148
“Present. Completely present. My eyes focus on one current in particular, a small eddy that
keeps circling back on itself. Around and around, a cottonwood leaf spins; a breeze gives it
a nudge, and it glides downriver, this river braided with light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
What I know is this: when one hungers for light it is only because one's knowledge of the
dark is so deep.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43a
LIGHT
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LISTEN, HEAR
Red
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
Refuge
“I pray to birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray
to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—
the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of
what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
Unspoken Hunger
“The umbilical cord between man and earth has not been severed here. The Maasai pasture
their cattle next to leopard and lion. They know the songs of grasses and the script of
snakes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 4
“I stood. I listened to her voice.” [Stone Creek Woman]
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 70
“Who were these artists, these scribes? When were they here? And what did they witness?
Time has so little meaning in the center of the desert. The land holds a collective memory
in the stillness of open spaces. Perhaps our only obligation is to listen and remember.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 124
Open Space of Democracy
It is difficult to find peace. I am torn between my anger and my empathy. And then I go
for a walk. My balance returns. I calm down, breathe, and allow for deep listening to
occur.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 24
We are nothing but whiners if we are not willing to put our concerns and convictions on
the line with a willingness to honestly listen and learn something beyond our own
assumptions. Something new might emerge through shared creativity. If we cannot do this,
I fear we will be left talking with only like-minded people, spending our days mumbling in
the circles of the mad. I recall the words of William Faulkner, "What do we stand to lose?
Everything."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
If we cannot engage in respectful listening there can be no civil dialogue and without civil
dialogue we the people will simply become bullies and brutes, deaf to the truth that we are
standing on the edge of a political chasm that is beginning to crumble. We all stand to lose
ground. Democracy is an insecure landscape.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
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Pay attention. Listen. We are most alive when discovering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
In the open space of democracy, we are listening -- ears alert -- we are watching -- eyes
open -- registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private;
some are public. Our oscillations between local, national, and global gestures map the full
range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to
what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
We [Terry Tempest Williams and the students] talked about the ironies of this situation,
how at the core of this little book is an inquiry and call for open dialogue and respectful
listening, to create conversation and bypass the political rhetoric that has diminished all of
us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 7 October
2004
Others
"Wondering about sound waves, how electronic waves keep moving outward until they
become fainter and fainter, wearing themselves out until they are overcome by something
else. Someday equipment will be able to pick these sound waves up. Nothing is ever lost.
The sound is still there. We just can't hear it."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
If we in fact have a "tonal memory," what do the voices of our ancestors, our elders have to
say to us now? What sounds do we hold in our bodies and retrieve when necessary? What
sounds disturb and what sounds heal? Where do we store the tension of traffic, honking
horns, or the hum of fluorescent lights? How do we receive birdsong, the leg rubbings of
crickets, the water music of trout?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
All sound requires patience; not just the ability to hear, but the capacity to listen, the
awareness of mind to discern a story. A magpie flies toward me and disappears in the oak
thicket. He is relentless in his cries. What does he know that I do not? What story is he
telling? I love these birds, their long iridescent tail feathers, their undulations in flight. Two
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more magpies join him. I sit on a flat boulder to rest, pick up two stones and begin striking
edges.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
I think about my grandfather, his desire for voices, to be held as he dies in the comfort of
conversation. Even if he rarely contributes to what is being said, his mind finds its own
calm. To him this is a form of music that allows him to remember he is not alone in the
world. Our evolution is the story of listening.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
I write from the stillness of night anticipating--always anticipating. I write to listen. I write
out of silence.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
Our commitment to revisioning and rebuilding community is not a game. It is not us versus
them; it is not power over, or for, or against; it is a loving embrace. We must be willing to
listen in the same manner we are asking others to listen to us. As we approach the twentyfirst century as an environmental community, I hope we hold close to that, realizing the
environmental movement is a collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer, my
life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our communities.
Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience, shared lives in a
shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one plus one equals
three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Epiphany”
...It will take an enormous amount of time to really find out what habitation means in this
country. We're just beginning to get a taste of it. And patience. We don't need to have all
the answers right now. We may never have the answers, but as long as we keep driving the
questions, or keep finding pockets of humility, maybe it won't seem so overwhelming or so
difficult. Then maybe a rancher and an environmentalist can burn their labels and see each
other as neighbors. The environmental movement right now is not listening. We are
engaged in a rhetoric as strong and as aggressive as the so-called opposition. I would love
to see the whole notion of opposition dissolved, so there's no longer this shadow dance
between "us" and "them." I would love for us to listen to one another and try to say, "What
do we want as members of this community? How do we dream our future? How do we
begin to define home?" Then we would have something to build from, rather than
constantly turning one another into abstractions and stereotypes engaged in military
combativeness. I believe we all desire similar things. The real poison of our society right
now is that everything is reduced to such a simplistic level. There is no tolerance or hunger
for complexity or ambiguity. Do you want this or that? Black or white? Yes or no? It strips
us to our lowest common denominator, creating a physics that is irreconcilable just by the
nature of the polarity. As a result, we miss the richness we can bring to one another in our
diverse points of view. It is not about agreement. It is about respect.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen Interview, Listening to the Land
The dialogue [with the students] that followed was heartening. Never have I seen or felt
such engagement in this country. Citizens are informed, active. Of course, there are those
who are not. But that has always been the case. 62 million Americans watched the first
presidential debate on September 30. There is so much at stake. We are at war in Iraq. We
are fighting for public process on public lands. I am not one to use these kinds of words,
but it is true. These are contentious times, confusing times, all the more reason and need
for deep listening and the creation of open dialogue. . . . This is not about answers, but
inquiry, honest, soulful discussion. I remember my grandmother Mimi Saying that first you
must identify the question and then it begins to solve itself through your awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Golden Colorado
Thich Nhat Hanh: In Congress, in city halls, in statehouses, and schools, we need people
capable of practicing deep listening and loving speech. Unfortunately, many of us have
lost this capacity. To have peace, we must first have understanding, and understanding is
not possible without gentle, loving communication. Therefore, restoring communication is
an essential practice for peace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 28-29
October 2004,
LISTEN, HEAR
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LITERATURE
I realized that in American Letters we celebrate both language and landscape,
that these words, stories, and poems can create an ethical stance toward life:
Melville's Great Whale; Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Thoreau's Walden Pond;
Emerson's "Oversoul" -- the natural world infused with divinity. I came to understand
through an education in the humanities that knowledge is another form of
democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy.
It begins with our questions...
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21a
LITERATURE
245
LOCATION – THEMES
ROOTED IN PLACE & HOME
“Political courage means caring enough to explain what is perceived at the time as
madness and staying with an idea long enough, being rooted in a place deep enough, and
telling the story widely enough to those who will listen, until it is recognized as wisdom—
wisdom reflected back to society through the rejuvenation and well-being of the next
generation who can still find wild country to walk in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
181-182
The Bird Refuge has remained a constant. It is a landscape so familiar to me, there
have been times I have felt a species long before I saw it. The long-billed curlews that
foraged the grasslands seven miles outside the Refuge were trustworthy. I can count on
them year after year. And when six whimbrels joined them—whimbrel entered my mind as
an idea. Before I ever saw them mingling with curlews, I recognized them as a new
thought in familiar country.
The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside
a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
“The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to
get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong,
women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 290
“Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding
the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 12
I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live
among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community,
to include all life forms -- plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings -- then I believe
a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our
neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not
home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put
... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't
know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living
a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of
true desolation. I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the
MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have
not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a
place. And she sounded the alarm.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
BIOREGIONAL LIVING
“Progress is being made within rural communities as watershed councils and local land
trusts are being formed, enlisting creative partnerships in the name of land stewardship.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 14
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LOCATED IN UTAH COMMUNITY
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a
writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a
community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing
is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of
my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing
about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse -- to try to make sense of the world, to try
to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries
of what is acceptable.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
Habitation
...It will take an enormous amount of time to really find out what habitation means in this
country. We're just beginning to get a taste of it. And patience. We don't need to have all
the answers right now. We may never have the answers, but as long as we keep driving the
questions, or keep finding pockets of humility, maybe it won't seem so overwhelming or so
difficult. Then maybe a rancher and an environmentalist can burn their labels and see each
other as neighbors. The environmental movement right now is not listening. We are
engaged in a rhetoric as strong and as aggressive as the so-called opposition. I would love
to see the whole notion of opposition dissolved, so there's no longer this shadow dance
between "us" and "them." I would love for us to listen to one another and try to say, "What
do we want as members of this community? How do we dream our future? How do we
begin to define home?" Then we would have something to build from, rather than
constantly turning one another into abstractions and stereotypes engaged in military
combativeness. I believe we all desire similar things. The real poison of our society right
now is that everything is reduced to such a simplistic level. There is no tolerance or hunger
for complexity or ambiguity. Do you want this or that? Black or white? Yes or no? It strips
us to our lowest common denominator, creating a physics that is irreconcilable just by the
nature of the polarity. As a result, we miss the richness we can bring to one another in our
diverse points of view. It is not about agreement. It is about respect.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen Interview, Listening to the Land
LOCATED IN SOLITUDE AND STILLNESS
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.
There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is best retrieved in
solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
LOCATED IN KINGDOM OF GOD
“In Utah, there was a man with a vision. . . . . He loved the land he saw before him, a
landscape so vast, pristine, and virginal, that he recognized it as the kingdom of God, a
place for saints with a desire for home. The desert country of the Great Basin and
Colorado Plateau was an answer to prayers of spiritual sovereignty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 74
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WE LIVE IN RELATION TO ALL BEINGS
“We must ask ourselves as Americans, ‘Can we really survive the worship of our own
destructiveness?’ We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate
intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human
beings.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 76
“Native people understand language as an articulation of kinship, all manner of relations.
To the Dine, hozho honors balance in the world, a kind of equilibriated grace, how human
beings stand in relation to everything else. If a native tongue is lost, the perceived
landscape is also lost Conversely, if the landscape is destroyed, the language that evolved
alongside is also destroyed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 137
LIVING ON EARTH IN PLACE OF INTEGRATION
As a woman of forty-four years, I will not bear children. My husband and I will not be
parents. We have chosen to define family in another way.
I look across the sweep of slickrock stretching in all directions, the rise and fall of
such arid terrain. A jackrabbit blots down the wash. Pinon jays flock and bank behind
cluster of junipers. The tracks of coyote are everywhere.
Would you believe me when I tell you this is family, kinship with the desert, the
breadth of my relations coursing through a wider community, the shock of recognition
which each scarlet gilia, the smell of rain.
And this is enough for me, more than enough. I trace my genealogy back to the
land. Human and wild, I can see myself whole, not isolated but integrated in time and
place. . . . Is not the tissue of family always a movement between harmony and distance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 157
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our
feet. It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our
fingers. We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered
but heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
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or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we
live in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in.
And that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what
it means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there
is a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
STANDING ON EARTH
“The wide-open vistas that sustain our souls, the depth of silence that pushes us toward
sanity, return us to a kind of equilibrium. We stand steady on Earth. The external space I
see is the internal space I feel.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
LIVING IN CENTER OF RED
TTW: How do we create that middle ground in a world that is so often defined as black
and white? It may require a new vocabulary.
Indy: Perhaps the language of red?
TTW: Yes. How do we find red in a world that is often defined in terms of black and
white? The subtleties of our own perceptions are being lost to time. There's no time to
enter the deep color of red. In a very real way, it's the color of the country that I live in, the
red rock desert of southern Utah with its red rocks, red rivers, red sand. Red is blood. It's
passion. It's the body broken open. It's love. There's danger in red. It's the color of rage, of
destruction. To see red over time is to see red as a way to transformation. I'm asking how
do we learn to live in the center of red. How do we act out of our own hearts? How do we
stand inside the integrity of our own souls? How do we speak the language of red? How
can we find and speak a language indigenous to the heart?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3-4
INHABIT DESERT
“I never forget I inhabit the desert, the harsh, brutal beauty of skin and bones.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 5
LOCATED IN DESERTS & MOUNTAINS AS WELL AS PUBLIC LIFE
“As a writer and a woman with obligations to both family and community, I have tried to
adopt this ritual in the balancing of a public and private life. We are at home in the
deserts and mountains, as well as in our dens. Above ground in the abundance of spring
and summer, I am available. Below ground in the deepening of autumn and winter, I am
not. I need hibernation in order to create.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
EROTICS OF PLACE
“Our culture has chosen to define erotic in very narrow terms, terms that largely describe
pornography or voyeurism, the opposite of a relationship that asks for reciprocity. One of
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the things I was interested in with Desert Quartet was to explore the use of language in its
pure sense, to use the word ‘erotic’ to intensify, to expand our view of Eros, to literally be
in relationship on the page. When we’re in relation, whether it is with a human being,
with an animal, or with the desert, I think there is an exchange of the erotic impulse. We
are engaged, we are vulnerable, we are both giving and receiving, we are fully present in
that moment, and we are able to heighten our capacity for passion which I think is the full
range of emotion, both the joy and sorrow that one feels when in wild country. To speak
about Eros in a particular landscape is to acknowledge our capacity to love Other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 3-4
DWELLING IN CITY
“Lee Milner’s gaze through her apartment window out over the cattails was not unlike the
heron’s. It will be this stalwartness in the face of terror that offers wetlands their only
hope. When she motioned us down in the grasses to observe the black-crowned night heron
still fishing at dusk, she was showing us the implacable focus of those who dwell there.
This is our first clue to residency.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 44
BEING PERFECTLY IN PLACE
There is an image of woman in the desert, her back arched as her hands lift her body up
from black rocks. Naked. She spreads her legs over a boulder etched by the Ancient Ones;
a line of white lightning zigzags from her mons pubis. She if perfectly in place, engaged,
ecstatic, and wild. This is Judy Dater’s photograph “Self-Portrait with Petroglyphs.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
LOCATED IN JUNIPER TREE
She enters a juniper tree. “Hours passed, who knows how long; the angle of light shifted.
Something had passed between us, evident by the change in my own countenance, the
slowing of my pulse, and the softness of my eyes as though I was awakening from a desert
trance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 107
Entering and walking in the river
This river has muscle when flexed against stone, carved stone, stones that appear as waves
of rock, secret knowledge known only through engagement. I am no longer content to sit,
but stand and walk, walk to the river, enter the river, surrender my body to water now red,
red is the Colorado, blood of my veins.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music, Red, 150
LOCATED IN REGION OF SOUL
In these moments at home, in this deep winter, I realized, as I have always known when I
am at center, that an artistic life is a passionate life, a life engaged. My life as a writer, my
life as an activist, is the same life. I respond out of my heart--mutable, intuitive, and
supple. Boundaries are fluid, not fixed. Imagination may be more necessary than facts. Our
task is to listen, to be able to enter that lightening region of the soul, of our
communities. Our thought and action are transformed into art, the art of experience,
shared lives in a shared landscape. In the simple and textured meanderings of the day, one
plus one equals three. Relations, deep relations, collaboration.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Epiphany
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SETTLED INTO AN INTEGRATED LIFE
“My ancestors moved and settled as a result of spiritual beliefs. They gathered in the belief
of an integrated life where nature, culture, religion, and civic responsibility were woven in
the context of family and community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
LIVING IN BEAUTY
“It is humbling living here, exposed to the elements of wind, water, and heat. There
is no protection in the desert. We are vulnerable. It is a landscape of extremes. I find
myself mirroring them: hot, cold, wet, dry. The challenge is to live in the midst of so
much beauty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 151
LOCATION AND LANGUAGE
Can we learn to speak the language of red?
The relationship between language and landscape is a marriage of sound and form,
an oral geography, a sensual topography, what draws us to a place and keeps us there.
Where we live is at the center of how we speak.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 136
LOCATED IN INTERNAL REFUGE
“Refuge is not a place outside myself. Like the lone heron who walks the shores of Great
Salt Lake, I am adapting as the world is adapting.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
LIVING IN SPIRITUAL HOME
“O’Keefe’s watercolor Canyon with Crows (1917) creates a heartfelt wash of ‘her spiritual
home,’ a country that elicits participation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 23
Entering wilderness
“A blank spot on the map is an invitation to encounter the natural world, where one’s
character will be shaped by the landscape. To enter wilderness is to court risk, and risk
favors the senses, enabling one to live well.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
A woman from the Department of Energy, who had mapped the proposed nuclearwaste repository in Lavender Canyon . . . flew into Moab, Utah, from Washington, D.C., to
check her calculations and witness this ‘blank spot.’ She was greeted by a local, who
drove her directly to the site. Once there, she got out of the vehicle, stared into the vast,
redrock wilderness and shook her head slowly, delivering four words:
“I had no idea.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 242
WOMB IS FIRST INHABITATION
“What is it about a relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first
landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond—to move, to listen, to be nourished
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and grow. . . . Our maternal environment is perfectly safe—dark, warm, and wet. It is a
residency inside the Feminine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
CAN’T LIVE IN ORTHODOX PLACE
Told of the nightmare. “Suddenly, my poetics of place evolved into a politics of place. It
was then that I made the decision to write Refuge. And once I crossed that line—
physically, at the Nevada test site, as well as psychologically in recognizing that the price
of obedience is too high—I could never go back . . . back to the same place in the
family, the same place within the Mormon culture.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
WE DO NOT INHABIT IDEAL WORLD
And there are those who are saying, very thoughtfully, that it will only be by
eliminating our desire to set land aside as ‘wilderness’ that we can begin to regard all
landscapes with respect and dignity.
I understand these points of discussion. In an ideal world, a world we might well
inhabit one day, we may not need to ‘designate’ wilderness, so evolved will be our
collective land ethic, our compassion for all manner of life, so responsive and whole. . . . I
pray there will indeed come a time, when our lives regarding the domestic and the wild
will be seamless.
But we are not there yet.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 18
DISPLACEMENT
Looking back, perhaps, these are the very ideas at the heart of Refuge and I didn’t
even know it; I only knew what I saw in the rising Great Salt Lake, the displacement of
birds, the displacement of our own family, the disorder and randomness of cancer, the
healing grace of Earth.
Transformation.
The spiral.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
LOCATION – THEMES
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LOVE
……
“The flicker flies. A fire burns. Loves is as varied as the spectrum red. Break my heart
with the desert’s silence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
“The world is in motion. We are in motion. We have all lost loved ones. We have all
danced with grief and we will one day dance with death. We embody the spiral, moving
inward and outward with the loss of fear, a love transcendent, and the courage to create
new maps.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“D. H. Lawrence writes, ‘In every living thing there is a desire for love, for the
relationship of unison with the rest of things.’
I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love. It is a
vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections. Andre Breton
says, ‘Hardly anyone dares to face with open eyes the great delights of love.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“’Blood knowledge,’ says D. H. Lawrence. ‘Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut
himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh,
what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal
feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what
is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots. . . .’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own
oppression. I stand on the edge of these wetlands, a place of renewal, an oasis in the desert,
as an act of faith, believing the sun has completed the southern end of its journey and is
now contemplating its return toward light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas –
whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers,
ranchers, and bureaucrats—and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving
the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place—there is
nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true.
That is why we are here. It is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual
about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 84
> cf Gary Snyder: “no one loves rock”
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
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Love is nurtured through time. Time is what we lack. On the Canning River, time is all we
have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44b
In our increasingly fundamentalist country, we have to remember what is fundamental:
gravity -- what draws us to a place and keeps us there, like love, like kinship. When we
commit to a particular place, a certain element of choice is removed. We begin to see the
world whole instead of fractured. Long-term strategies replace short-term gains. We
inform one another and become an educated public that responds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
Those who love each other shall become invincible.
--Walt Whitman, 1865
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
{On Whitman and Lincoln} Both men were purveyors of a spiritual democracy borne out
of love and loss. Both men articulated the wisdom of their hearts borne out of direct
engagement. . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
He is unafraid of his anger. His views can be militant and compassionate at once.
Author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, he unravels
hope, asks us to liberate ourselves from these expectations. The students are completely
riveted. Some are uncomfortable. "If you want to keep someone active, give them love,
not hope...."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
LOVE
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MEDITATION
Red
To move through wild country in the desert or in the woods is to engage in a
walking meditation, a clearing of the mind, where we remember what we have so easily
lost.
Time.
Time and space.
The shape of time and space are different in wilderness. Time is something
encountered through the senses not imposed upon the mind. We walk, we sit, we eat, we
sleep, we look, we smell, we touch, we hear, we taste our own feral nature. What we know
in a wild place is largely translated through the body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185-186
Refuge
The mother: “Those days on the river were a meditation, a renewal. I found my strength in
its solitude. It is with me now.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
“Relief comes only through concentration, losing ourselves in the studied behavior of
birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“I am talking her through a visualization, asking her to imagine what the pain looks like,
what color it is, to lean into the sensation rather than resisting it. We breathe through the
meditation together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 157
(Mother dies) “These days at home have been a meditation as I have scoured sinks and
tubs, picked up week-worn clothes, and vacuumed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 233
Heron: “I would like to believe she is reclusive at heart, in spite of the communal nesting
of her species. I would like to wade along the edges with her, this great blue heron. She
belongs to the meditation of water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 266
“My mind returns to the lake. Our paddling has become a meditation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 279
Open Space of Democracy
I enter a trance; the mantra of mountains rises, range after range of naked rock and peaks. I
have no sense of time or scale, simply note this dynamic world that is both still and
passing.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 39a
Each day, another layer of the self sloughs off, another layer of pretense erodes.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion,
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A long-tailed jaeger sits next to me. I try not to move. With my legs crossed and
my eyes barely open, I enter the space of meditation.
A wolf howls. My body leaps. The jaeger flies. Fear floods my heart. Presence
creates presence. I am now alert. To feel yourself prey is to be shocked back into the
reality of the Arctic's here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
You cannot afford to make careless mistakes, like meditating in the presence of wolves, or
topping your boots in the river, or losing a glove, or not securing your tent down properly.
Death is a daily occurrence in the wild, not noticed, not respected, not mourned. In the
Arctic, I've learned ego is as useless as money.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
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MEMORY
Red
“We didn’t sleep all night. A shooting star here, another one there, each meteor seeming to
burn a trail of memory into the night sky. My thoughts took on the density of waves, my
mind so open, so pliable, each idea swelling, rising, and breaking over the other. For the
first time in months, I began composing sentences.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” 122
Refuge
Last night I dreamed I was walking along the shores of Great Salt Lake. I noticed a
purple bird floating in the waters, the waves rocking it gently. I entered the lake and, with
cupped hands, picked up the bird and returned it to shore. The purple bird turned gold,
dropped its tail, and began digging a burrow in the white sand, where it retreated and
sealed itself inside with salt. I walked away. It was dusk. The next day, I returned to the
lake shore. A wooden door frame, freestanding, became an arch I had to walk through.
Suddenly, it was transformed into Athene’s Temple. The bird was gone. I was left standing
with my own memory.
In the next segment of the dream I was in a doctor’s office. He said, “You have
cancer in your blood and you have nine months to heal yourself.’ I awoke puzzled and
frightened.
Perhaps, I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself, to confront what I do
not know, to create a path for myself with the idea that “memory is the only way home.”
I have been in retreat. This story is my return.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 4
> dated July 4, 1990
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MORMON
Red
“In Utah, there was a man with a vision. . . . . He loved the land he saw before him, a
landscape so vast, pristine, and virginal, that he recognized it as the kingdom of God, a
place for saints with a desire for home. The desert country of the Great Basin and Colorado
Plateau was an answer to prayers of spiritual sovereignty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 74
Brigham Young: “Here are the stupendous works of the God of Nature, though all do not
appreciate His wisdom as manifested in his works. . . . I could sit here for a month and
reflect on the mercies of God.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 74
Mormon scripture:
The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun giveth his light by day, and the moon
giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light, as they roll upon their wings in
their glory, in the midst and power of God.
Unto what shall I liken these kingdoms that ye may understand?
Behold all these are kingdoms and any man who hath seen any or the least of these
hath seen God moving in his majesty and power.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“My ancestors moved and settled as a result of spiritual beliefs. They gathered in the belief
of an integrated life where nature, culture, religion, and civic responsibility were woven in
the context of family and community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
“I have inherited a belief in community, the promise that a gathering of the spirit can both
create and change culture. In the desert, change is nurtured even in stone by wind, by
water, through time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
Refuge
“Kneeling next to my grandmother, Mimi, I felt her strength and the generational history
of belief Mormon ritual holds. We can heal ourselves, I thought, and we can heal each
other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 35
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried
it. He called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
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their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“History has shown us that exclusivity in the name of empire building eventually fails.
Fear of discord undermines creativity. And creativity lies at the heart of adaptive
evolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood
of God. women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have
always bestowed benisons upon our families.
Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we
pray.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 158
“Mormon religion has roots firmly planted in a magical worldview.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 195
“I stood at the side of my mother’s casket, enraged at our inability to let the dead be dead.
And I wept over the hollowness of our rituals.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 235
We are far too conciliatory. If we as Mormon women believe in God the Father and
in his son, Jesus Christ, it is only logical that a Mother-in-Heaven balances the sacred
triangle. I believe the Holy Ghost is female, although she has remained hidden, invisible,
deprived of a body, she is the spirit that seeps into our hearts and directs us to the well. The
‘still, small voice’ I was taught to listen to as a child was ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost.’
Today I choose to recognize this presence as holy intuition, the gift of the Mother. My
prayers no longer bear the ‘proper’ masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother
in Heaven. If we could introduce the Motherbody as a spiritual counterpoint to the
Godhead, perhaps our inspiration and devotion would no longer be directed to the stars,
but our worship could return to the Earth.
My physical mother is gone. My spiritual mother remains. I am a woman rewriting
my genealogy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 241
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Mimi: “I let go of my conditioning. . . . But when I looked into the water closet and saw
what my body had expelled, the first thought that came into my mind was ‘Finally, I am rid
of the orthodoxy.’ My advice to you, dear, is do it consciously.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 246
“In Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and independent thinking
is not. I was taught as a young girl not to ‘make waves’ or ‘rock the boat.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 285
“The Mormon community we are part of also healed us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 295
Unspoken Hunger
Mormon Relief Society. “They rendered peace throughout our lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 136
Interviews
TL: I suppose it is fair to say that most people do not equate Mormon culture with
environmentalism. Yet you are very forthright in being both a Mormon and an
environmentalist. What do you see as the connection between the two?
TTW: It is true, many people would say "Mormon environmentalist" is an oxymoron, but
that is only because of the stereotype and veneer that is attached to the religion. Our history
is a history of community created in the name of belief. If you go back and look at the
teachings of Brigham Young, his journals and sermons, they are filled with very strong
notions of sustainability. Early brethren of the Mormon Church gave rousing speeches on
the perils of overgrazing and the misappropriation of water in the desert. Unfortunately,
much of this ethic has been lost as the Mormon Church has entered modernity. Like so
many other facets of American culture it has assumed a corporate and consumptive stance
with an emphasis on growth and business. But I believe there is change inside the
membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. Bill Smart, another
Mormon, and I put together an anthology of Mormon essays that celebrate community and
landscape, with Gibbs Smith, a Utah publisher. We asked around 40 members of the
Church in good standing, if they would write a piece about how their spiritual views have
enhanced their views of nature, or conversely, how nature has added to their sense of
Mormon theology. What emerged was an evocative testament New Genesis: A Mormon
Reader on Land and Community, a very diverse (and I must say surprising in its content),
collection of wide-ranging ideas, that we hope will be a touchstone for other Mormons to
contemplate their relationship to place. It could be said that the environmental movement
in the past has been a political movement. I believe it is becoming a spiritual one. Native
peoples have always known this. It is my hope that my own people within the Mormon
culture will remember what our own roots are to the American West and the responsibility
that comes with settlement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
I am so excited to be able to be part of the Border Book Festival, to be part of this
wondrous community in Las Cruces that exhibits this kind of wholeness. This is a very
special place. One day, I hope I can travel down to parts of Chihuahua where my
grandmother was born. She was part of the Mormon underground whose family practiced
polygamy. She would always tell me stories of how beautiful it was and what she
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remembered as a child growing up in northern Chihuahua. I know there are a lot of my
relatives still living there.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 5
I am a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
There are approximately ten million of us and I would imagine each individual has his or
her own spiritual interpretation of the gospel. Given that, I can tell you my religious views
are not entirely orthodox. There are many members within the Mormon religion who are
uncomfortable with my writings, many who feel I am not on the "path of righteousness,"
that you are either "in the Church or out of the Church."
And I have been told by various elders in the Church to tone down my voice. One
of the tenets in Mormon religion is to be completely supportive of the General Authorities
positions. I have questioned issues concerning women, politics, and the environment. In
1998, I co-edited with William B. Smart and Gibbs M. Smith and anthology of forty essays
all written by member of the Church called New Genesis: A Mormon Reader on Land and
Community.
So far (knock on wood), I have not been excommunicated. I still have a voice
within Mormon culture. Octavio Paz gives me courage when he writes, "If we are
interested in a revolution, an evolution of the Spirit, it requires both love and criticism."
I do not know what the response to LEAP will be within the Mormon community.
Probably mixed, with strong feelings on both sides. Certainly, this book focuses on my
own religious tradition, but I believe my critique and inquiries are not specific to
Mormonism, but rather an examination akin to all orthodoxies that forget the power and
possibility of personal revelation in the name of a codified belief system. I believe it is a
human hunger to find a creative embrace of our own spiritual path within each of our
religious traditions.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 3
My father has read LEAP. He has voiced concerns. He understands the risks I am taking
and what is at stake, even my own membership in the Mormon community. He worries
about my stance in the Church, what his friends and neighbors might think, and on some
level, how vulnerable I am within a tradition that is not altogether tolerant of dissent. He
also understands that I love my religion, that I mean no harm, and that I write with the
intent to broaden the discussion through my own personal sense of integrity, bowing to the
questions within my own heart that will not allow me to sleep.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 4
I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings. What I can tell
you about my home is that I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration
Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. When Brigham Young came through with the early
Mormon pioneers in 1847 and said "This is the place," that's the view we see every
morning when we leave the Canyon and enter the Salt Lake Valley. So I feel deeply
connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but
because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual
sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
I think that what I was talking about was that as a woman growing up in a Mormon
tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, we were taught -- and we are still led to believe -- that the
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most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism
ultimately takes our souls. So I think it's this larger issue of what is acceptable and what is
not; where do we maintain obedience and law and where do we engage in civil
disobedience -- where we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No,
this is no longer appropriate behavior." For me, that was a decision that I had to make and
did make personally, to commit civil disobedience together with many other individuals
from Utah and around the country and the world, in saying no to nuclear testing. Many
people don't realize that we have been testing nuclear bombs underground right up until
1992. President Bush at that time placed a moratorium on all testing in this country and
President Clinton has maintained that.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 4
London: How central is your Mormon faith to your identity as a writer -- has it had a big
influence on your work and ideas?
Williams: It's hard to answer because, again, I don't think we can separate our upbringing
from what we are. I am a Mormon woman, I am not orthodox. It is the lens through which
I see the world. I hear the Tabernacle Choir and it still makes me weep. There are other
things within the culture that absolutely enrage me, and for me it is sacred rage. But it's not
just peculiar to Mormonism -- it's any patriarchy that I think stops, thwarts, or denies our
creativity. So the question that I'm constantly asking myself is, What are we afraid of? I
think it's important for us to follow that line of fear, because that is ultimately our line of
growth. I feel that within the Mormon culture there is a tremendous amount of fear -- of
women's voices, of questioning of authority, and ultimately of our own creativity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
JW: Some would say that people like us -- people whose spirituality arises out of the earth
-- have become pagan. Do you think that's true?
TTW: I think so often our views of one another, of ourselves, shrink by the smallness of
our vocabulary. What's a Christian? What's a pagan? Recently I was in Costa Rica, where I
had the privilege of meeting a tribal medicine man. As we were walking in the rainforest
he was sweeping the narrow trail of snakes with his feathered staff. He turned and he said,
"I am a Christian, cosmologist, scientist, Earthist." And then he laughed. He said, "Does
that cover it all?" And I thought, that's what I am, too! You know, whether it's Christian,
whether it's pagan, whether it's an ecologist, whether it's a writer, a lover of language, a
lover of landscapes, can't we just say that our spirituality resides in our love? If that makes
us pagan, perhaps. If that makes us Christian, perhaps. But I love the notion that it's not
this or that, but this, that, and all of it. And, in a way, this is how I see spirituality emerging
on the planet. The constraints that we see within our religious traditions are not so
satisfying. The world has become so large. I almost feel like the doors are blowing off our
churches to let life come in and move freely.
What we're seeing is that we're taking the best of what we're being offered. There's
so much within my own tradition as a Mormon that I deeply cherish. The notion of
community, the notion of service, the notion of land, prayer -- things that aren't exclusive
to Mormonism, but that are certainly at the core of it. I can't separate my own sense of
family from my sense of community from my Mormon roots. But, alongside, I think there's
much to be gleaned from Buddhism, much to be gleaned from Catholicism, from that
which the Quakers practice, from much that I have been exposed to and learned from my
friends who are Indian people. And then there is so much to be gleaned from what we learn
from the Earth itself -- from simply walking the land, from the deer, the river, the wind.
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And so, together, through our traditions, through that which we are exposed, we come to
some semblance of a spiritual life, bits and pieces. In my own tradition, I hear my mother
saying, "Call it a crazy quilt."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
JW: Women, in particular, seem to speak of that sort of crazy-quilt religion. But within the
churches, of course, such an approach has mostly been rejected as unorthodox.
TTW: With the message that you need the structure that orthodoxy supplies -- that without
that structure, if we pick and choose the spiritual beliefs that are comfortable to us, then
we're somehow missing discipline, missing sacrifice.
But I think life is a discipline we don't need to seek. Each of us is aware every
single day of the discipline upon us, about the sacrifice, the suffering. I don't feel that I
have to have that imposed on me through an orthodoxy. I'm very mindful of that just being
human.
What I do struggle with is that when we practice our own spiritual life -- however
we define that -- we miss the collective rituals. We miss the delight and strength and
comfort that comes with our relations with others, and that comes with building a
community. Here in Castle Valley, as the millennium approached, there was a particular
cave where meditations were being practiced. People in the community would come and sit
for an hour, and then another person would come and sit for an hour. I took great solace in
that -- that as a community, surrounded by these buttes and mesas in the desert, we were
mindful of the passage of time in the sense of deep time.
Then, last Sunday was the monthly Fast and Testimony Meeting at my church.
What that means is you fast for 24 hours, mindful of what feeds the body, mindful of
hunger, even a spiritual hunger, and in that gesture you find a sense of humility. Then you
come together as a community and you break the fast with the sacrament, with the body
and blood of Christ. And then the time is ours to contemplate and to share what we've been
thinking, feeling, something that's happened during the week that moved us. So it's really a
time of stories, much like a Quaker meeting. And I just loved it! I realized that this is
something within my religious tradition that I cherish. I love listening to the members'
stories. And especially after forgoing food, I realized the stories feed us in the same ways
that food feeds us. And that that can only be found in the embrace of community. And the
ritual of sacrament means something to me. Again, I find both solace in the tradition and
also outside the tradition.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman interview, 4
JW: One of the stories that's interesting to me, since you bring up your Mormon heritage,
is the story of the Mormon people coming in search of land, and then finding the land -"This is the place!" -- in the Salt Lake valley. Has that heritage of a people seeking a
sacred land influenced Utah's public policy in the direction of conservation?
TTW: It's a complicated question. I started thinking about the conservation ethic in Utah,
specifically inherent in the Mormon religion, when we were confronted with a crisis in our
state. And that was the crisis of wilderness. You'll remember in 1994 when the
Republicans took over the House and Senate with the Gingrich revolution, how everything
shifted. Our political delegation in Utah couldn't have been more thrilled, with Orrin Hatch
and Representative Jim Hansen at the helm. It was decided that for once and for all they
would end the wilderness debate in Utah and because they had a majority they thought that
this would move through quickly. To Governor Mike Leavitt's credit, he said we needed to
have a public process. And so for six months there were hearings held in every county all
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over the state of Utah that had wilderness under consideration in Bureau of Land
Management land. Over 70 percent of Utahns wanted more wilderness, not less. In June,
Hatch and Bennett, the Senators from our state, as well as Hanson in the House, came up
with what was called "The Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995." This said that
1.7 million acres out of 22 million acres of BLM land would be designated as wilderness.
Those of us within the conservation community were appalled. The citizens' proposal had
been for 5.7 million acres. So a nasty fight ensued in the halls of Congress. Bottom line,
people spoke out, not only in Utah, but all over the country, and the bill died. And, because
of the political climate judged by a very astute Bill Clinton, the Grand Staircase Esconde
National Monument was created with almost 2 million acres of wilderness in Utah.
Our Senators would have had us believe that if you were Mormon, you were
Republican, you were anti-wilderness; if you were non-Mormon you were a Democrat,
you were pro-wilderness. Those of us within the Mormon culture said: That cannot be true!
So we set out to find stories that would show otherwise. We created a book called New
Genesis -- A Mormon Reader on Land and Community that contains about 40 stories from
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who spoke about how nature
informed their spirituality as a Mormon or, conversely, about how Mormonism has
enhanced their view of nature. It was very, very moving to see the different discussions,
everything from the natural history of the quilt, to a treatise on air pollution, to a
conversion story of the former mayor of Salt Lake City, a world-class rock climber, who,
hand on stone, felt the spirit of God and joined the Mormon church. In each of these essays
they tied the theme to a Mormon scripture, or to something in the doctrine, so that we were
trying to pull our history of a land ethic through time to where we are now at the beginning
of this new millennium. We also took a deep look at our history to say: What was the ethic
of Brigham Young when he came across the plains during the Mormon exodus, came into
the Salt Lake Valley, and said, "This is the place!"? We found that there was a very strong
conservation ethic. That over the pulpit, at Temple Square, in the Tabernacle, there were
talks given by general authorities that warned the saints of overgrazing, warned about
using too much water and upheld the value of water conservation. Somewhere along the
line we have forgotten that. It's been an interesting exercise of retrieval.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 4
As Harold Bloom has said, Mormonism is an "American religion." We have become very
successful. What was once community-based has now become more corporate-based. So I
think what we're seeing is not something unique to Mormonism, but something that we're
seeing in the evolution of American culture.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
“the Navajo culture sent me back home to my own. There are similarities, a strong family
structure reinforced through generational storytelling, a keen belief in the power of healing,
but there are also marked differences. I had to come to terms with the fact that in Mormon
culture, or any Christian religion for that matter, we are taught that human beings as having
dominion over the land. This is one of the things that has led to my own estrangement from
orthodoxy. Most Indigenous People do not view their relationship toward the earth this
way. They see themselves as a part of nature with a sense of kinship extended to all forms
of life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
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“One of the great traditions in Mormon religion is Testimony Meeting. For two hours,
usually the first Sunday of each month, everyone sits inside the chapel and, when so
moved, you rise and tell your story. . . In Mormon culture, I was taught to value my own
experience.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 124
“There has been a positive respond from the Mormon hierarchy of women because they
see in this book the values of family and community and prayer and faith that are all
honored within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 124-125
Speaking of family: “We knew that our relationship to the land was our relationship to
each other. We could hold Church in the middle of the Great Basin as well as in the
Monument Park Fourteenth Ward.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 125
“So there was this rugged individualism, embodied in the men in my family, that really is a
stereotype of the American West and that too is about ‘free agency,’ a tenet within
Mormonism. . . . My other grandparents . . . didn’t live by the letter of the law, but by the
spirit of the law, and that also supported my idea of individual freedom within orthodoxy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 125
“The message was clear, we could choose how we wanted to live our lives, we were strong
family, and we could endure whatever came our way. We had the intellectual and spiritual
freedom to move within the structure. Although an orthodox Mormon may think free
agency is about honoring obedience and finding freedom within that obedience, spiritual
laws and principles, I’ve never honored that belief. For me, the most important value is
independent thought, the freedom to choose a creative path. That’s how I have been able to
survive within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 126
The Book of Mormon “has taught me the power of story. . . . It has taught me the power of
a homeland, that place matters to a people, that each individual is entitled to [his or her]
own personal vision. I was raised in a religion that says: Joseph Smith had a question. He
went to a sacred grove of trees and fell to his knees in prayer. God appeared and counseled
him to start his own religion. That’s pretty powerful doctrine for a child. What it said to me
was that each of us is entitled to his or her own spiritual quest, and that your answer may
not be the same answer as your neighbor’s but each has credence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 130
MORMON
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MOTHER
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“What is it about a relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first
landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond—to move, to listen, to be nourished
and grow. . . . Our maternal environment is perfectly safe—dark, warm, and wet. It is a
residency inside the Feminine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
“The umbilical cord is cut—not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims
her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 50
Suffering shows us what we are attached to—perhaps the umbilical cord between Mother
and me has never been cut. Dying doesn’t cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 53
“But after midnight, silence. The depth and stillness of Great Salt Lake comes over the
wetlands like a mother’s calming hand. Morning approaches slowly, until each voice in the
marsh awakens.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“I laid my head on her lap and closed my eyes. I could not tell if it was my mother’s
fingers combing through my hair or the wind.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 156
John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The
experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community.”
I think of my family stories—Mother’s in particular—how much I need them now,
how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds
die with them.
The same could be said of each passing whale.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 175
“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my
grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I
can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 178
“One night, a full moon watched over me like a mother.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 189
The four trees we planted will grow in the absence of my mother. Faith holds their roots,
the roots I can no longer see.”
266
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 198
“I am reminded that what I adore, admire, and draw from Mother is inherent in the Earth.
My Mother’s spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of
mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, her warmth, and her breath, even her arms
around me—are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 214
My Mother’s spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of
mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, her warmth, and her breath, even her arms
around me—are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 214
“A full moon hung in a starlit sky. It was Mother’s face illumine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 232
We are far too conciliatory. If we as Mormon women believe in God the Father and
in his son, Jesus Christ, it is only logical that a Mother-in-Heaven balances the sacred
triangle. I believe the Holy Ghost is female, although she has remained hidden, invisible,
deprived of a body, she is the spirit that seeps into our hearts and directs us to the well. The
‘still, small voice’ I was taught to listen to as a child was ‘the gift of the Holy Ghost.’
Today I choose to recognize this presence as holy intuition, the gift of the Mother. My
prayers no longer bear the ‘proper’ masculine salutation. I include both Father and Mother
in Heaven. If we could introduce the Motherbody as a spiritual counterpoint to the
Godhead, perhaps our inspiration and devotion would no longer be directed to the stars,
but our worship could return to the Earth.
My physical mother is gone. My spiritual mother remains. I am a woman rewriting
my genealogy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 241
“We turn our deaths over to someone else. In the process, our deaths have little privacy.
We lose the spiritual instruction a good death can offer. No death is easy. We are rarely
prepared. What I have learned through the deaths of the women of my family is that it’s
not only possible to live well, it is possible to die well. They wanted to face death as part of
life. There were no rules when my mother was dying, there was no precedent for us. So
we, my family, just walked into that unknown territory with as much trust as possible, our
mother our guide.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
“Mothers. Daughters. Granddaughters. The myth of Demeter and Persephone lives through
us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 261
“And I felt the presence of angels, even my mother, her wings spread above me like a
hovering dove.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
267
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
 is this essentialist, or is it an undercutting of the notion of Feminine: a complex,
multivalent, variant “Feminine.”
 not necessarily essentialist: by connecting with earth they gain power. Doesn’t
imply only women are connected?
When I’m in wilderness, I don’t feel it’s an institution. There is no ceiling or limitations.
No human expectations that dictate its direction. When I’m in wilderness, I don’t feel that
it’s contrived. It’s what it is. And it’s okay if we escape. I mean, yes, I am myself a
dichotomy. I live in the city, and I go to the land to be refreshed. I think people have
always done that on some level or another, in terms of that aesthetic need to be fed, to be
still, to be calm, to be nourished – that whole idea of Mother Earth, if you want to get
cosmic, Ed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 59
MOTHER
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MUSIC
“Mountain Lion, whose eyes I did not see, lay on the mesa, her whiskers retrieving each
note carried by the wind.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Lion’s Eyes, Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 31
“One night, beneath the ruins of Keet Seel, we hard flute music—music so sweet it could
have split the seeds of corn.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Kokopelli’s Return,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 43
“The land seemed to bow with the melody of the flute. . . . The flute music flowed out
from the cliff dwelling like an ancient breath.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Kokopelli’s Return,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 43
Unspoken Hunger
“Desert music of mourning doves and crickets began.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 24-25
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MYSTERY
…
“Paradox preserves mystery, and mystery inspires belief.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 53
“My connection to the natural world is my connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and
whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“there is a place of peace—even if it’s a square foot of an empty lot, a garden, or the sky at
night. There is something beyond which will hold us in all of life’s ambiguity. I choose to
court the mysteries. I don’t think there is such a thing as security, but I know my home and
I know my land, and as long as I live, I will stand my ground in the places I love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
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NAKED, BARE
the “searing simplicity of form. You cannot help but be undone by its sensibility and light,
nothing extra. Before the stillness of sandstone cliffs, you stand still, equally bare.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“By undressing, exposing, and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our
authentic selves. Stripped free from society’s oughts and shoulds, we emerge as
emancipated beings. The bear is free to roam.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
“And in that time, I shed my clothing like snakeskin.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 69
“It is time for us to take off our masks, to step out from behind our personas –
whatever they might be: educators, activists, biologists, geologists, writers, farmers,
ranchers, and bureaucrats—and admit we are lovers, engaged in an erotics of place. Loving
the land. Honoring its mysteries. Acknowledging, embracing the spirit of place—there is
nothing more legitimate and there is nothing more true.
That is why we are here. It is why we do what we do. There is nothing intellectual
about it. We love the land. It is a primal affair.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 84
> cf Gary Snyder: “no one loves rock”
It is for my mouth, forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
--Walt Whitman
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys, to the
beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from our hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable in our emotional response to the world.
And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being "broken open." To
engage. To participate. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a
personal transformation that bears collective gifts.
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
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may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
JW: I've read that the etymology of "ecology" is "ecos," which means home.
TTW: Yes. Again, we are most mindful of those relationships that we live with every
single day. I love the fact that I live in an erosional landscape. You watch the wind and you
realize as you see the sand swirling about you that arches are still being created, that this
isn't something that belongs to the geologic past. Metaphorically, that is also very
powerful. To me, a spiritual life is also part of an erosional life. We are eroding the façade.
Wind -- spirit -- sculpts us, sculpts our character, our consciousness, in ways we can't even
know. I am shaped differently from others because of the spiritual processes that have
formed me. There is physical erosion that goes on in the desert and spiritual erosion that
goes on in our search for the truth, however we define that for ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
“I am interested in taboos, because I believe that’s where the power of our culture lies. I
love taking off their masks so we can begin to face the world openly. I believe that will be
our healing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
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NARRATIVE OF RETREAT
“There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near the
lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the
outside world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports
the curve of my spine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
FINCH: Let me play devil’s advocate a minute. Aren’t you sort of being an aesthetic elitist?
I mean you simply don’t want to see the signs of civilization that you depend on. . . . you
want something different from where it is you have to live.
WILLIAMS: See, I don’t think it is elitist. I think what’s elitist is private land. Wilderness is
public land in the most profound sense. It’s there for everyone.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 58
When I’m in wilderness, I don’t feel it’s an institution. There is no ceiling or limitations.
No human expectations that dictate its direction. When I’m in wilderness, I don’t feel that
it’s contrived. It’s what it is. And it’s okay if we escape. I mean, yes, I am myself a
dichotomy. I live in the city, and I go to the land to be refreshed. I think people have
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always done that on some level or another, in terms of that aesthetic need to be fed, to be
still, to be calm, to be nourished – that whole idea of Mother Earth, if you want to get
cosmic, Ed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 59
FINCH: “one charge that has been leveled at nature writers is that what they do is escapist
literature, that there are really serious problems that need to be confronted in our time and
just going into the woods or the mountains or the plains or wherever and celebrating what
you see there is really, in context, a trivial exercise.”
--Robert Finch, with Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 60-61
FINCH: “we have in the past looked upon nature as something fundamentally outside of
human tampering which we can use as a refuge – from ourselves, really, and from our
mistakes, and also as a testing ground for ourselves.”
--Robert Finch, with Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 63
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NATURE
Refuge
Her grandmother Mimi. “She was not only fascinated by energy, but obsessed by it—how
energy is used and expelled, conserved and stored, wasted, and recycled. Much of her
philosophy of life resided in her belief in an open system of energy, not closed, why she
saw the Earth as alive not dead, and why she believed the Universe was similarly
constructed. It is also why she believed ‘her energy’ would continue after she died.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 312-313
“Ten years later I find myself contemplating these same things, processes of order and
randomness, chaos theory and creativity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
Looking back, perhaps, these are the very ideas at the heart of Refuge and I didn’t
even know it; I only knew what I saw in the rising Great Salt Lake, the displacement of
birds, the displacement of our own family, the disorder and randomness of cancer, the
healing grace of Earth.
Transformation.
The spiral.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 313
“I was raised to believe in a spirit world, that life exists before the earth and will continue
to exist afterward, that each human being, bird, and bulrush, along with all other life forms
had a spirit life before it came to dwell physically on the earth. Each occupied an assigned
sphere of influence, each has a place and a purpose.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 14
As the Brooks Range recedes behind us, I am mindful that Mardy is approaching 101 years
of age. She has never shed her optimism for wild Alaska. I am half her age and my niece,
Abby, is half of mine. We share her passion for this order of quiet freedom. America's
wildlands are vulnerable and they will always be assailable as long as what we value in
this nation is measured in monetary terms, not spiritual ones.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
The power of nature is the power of a life in association. Nothing stands alone. On my
haunches, I see a sunburst lichen attached to limestone; algae and fungi are working
together to break down rock into soil. I cannot help but recognize a radical form of
democracy at play. Each organism is rooted in its own biological niche, drawing its
power from its relationship to other organisms. An equality of being contributes to an
ecological state of health and succession.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
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and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
I hear Walt Whitman’s voice once again. “The quality of Being . . . is the lesson of nature.”
Raw, wild beauty is a deeply held American value. It is its own declaration of
independence. Equality is experienced through humility. Liberty is expressed through the
simple act of wandering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a-b
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NATURE – CULTURE
“When we tamper with the balance of things the scales rarely meet equilibrium again. This
story is written over and over in our history, be it with Native Peoples, economics, or
bears. We are grossly insensitive to the connectedness of life. Eric Hoffer makes the point:
‘Lack of sensitivity is basically an unawareness of ourselves.’ In terms of culture which is
intrinsically linked with landscape, is it possible to meet another with empathetic eyes?
Perhaps. If we can begin to focus beyond ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 113-114
“Landscape shapes culture. . . . Perhaps we can begin to find the origins of our cultural
inheritance in the land – not to move backwards, but forward to understanding the
profound interconnectedness of all living things. As Gregory Bateson says, ‘If the world be
connected . . . then thinking in terms of stories must be share by all mind or minds,
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 135
“Native people understand language as an articulation of kinship, all manner of relations.
To the Dine, hozho honors balance in the world, a kind of equilibriated grace, how human
beings stand in relation to everything else. If a native tongue is lost, the perceived
landscape is also lost. Conversely, if the landscape is destroyed, the language that evolved
alongside is also destroyed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 137
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NATURE – HUMAN
Red
“When traveling to southern Utah for the first time, it is fair to ask, if the redrocks were cut
would they bleed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
“And then after having made enough pilgrimages to the slickrock to warrant sufficient
separation from society’s oughts and shoulds, look again for the novice you were, who
asked if the standstone bleeds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
“If you draw wet sand that dries quickly, then you will know you have become part of the
desert. Not until then can you claim ownership.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
“The landscape that makes you vulnerable also makes you strong. This is the bedrock of
southern Utah’s beauty: its chameleon nature according to light and weather and season
encourages us to make peace with our own contradictory nature. The trickster quality of
the canyons is Coyote’s cachet.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 24
“individuals who care for the rocks will find openings—large openings—that become
passageways into the unseen world, where music is heard through doves’ wings and
wisdom is gleaned in the tails of lizards.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25
“Mountain Lion is a god, one of the supernaturals that has power over us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Lion’s Eyes, Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 30
“Mountain Lion, whose eyes I did not see, lay on the mesa, her whiskers retrieving each
note carried by the wind.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Lion’s Eyes, Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 31
All of the story “The Bowl.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Bowl,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 32-36
All of “Buried Poems.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 37ff
“Halfway down the canyon, I felt stirrings in my belly. Sweet corn was sprouting all along
the river.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Kokopelli’s Return,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 45
“Inside the redrock ledge, the emotional endurance of the tortoise stares back at me. I
blink. To take. To be taken. To die. The desert tortoise presses me on the sand, down on all
fours.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 97
278
A group of friends gather in the desert—call it a pilgrimage—at the confluence of
the Little Colorado and the Colorado Rivers in the Grand Canyon. . . . Nothing but deep
joy can be imagined. . . . They take off their clothes and sink to their waists, turn, roll over,
and wallow in pleasure. Their skins are slippery with clay. They rub each other’s bodies;
arms, shoulders, backs, torsos, even their faces are painted in mud, and they become the
animals they are. Blue eyes. Green eyes. Brown eyes behind masks. In the heat, lying on
ledges, they bake until they crack like terracotta. For hours, they dream the life of lizards.
In time, they submerge themselves in the Little Colorado, diving and surfacing
freshly human.
D. H. Lawrence writes: “There exist two great modes of life—the religious and the
sexual.” Eroticism is the bridge.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 109
“I stop. The silence that lives in these sacred hallways presses against me. I relax. I
surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal of my breath rises in me like music, like love, as
the possessive muscles between my legs tighten and release. I come to the rock in a
moment of stillness, giving and receiving, where there is no partition between my body
and the body of Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing
with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me
with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only
to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought.
Simply, here. . . . my body mixes with the body of the water like jazz, the currents like
jazz. I too am free to improvise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 201-202
Refuge
“There are those birds you gauge your life by. The burrowing owls five miles from the
entrance to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge are mine. Sentries. Each year, they alert
me to the regularities of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 8
“We spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth
have been mined.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 10
“Our attachment to the land was our attachment to each other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 15
“The birds and I share a natural history.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 20
“Maybe it’s the expanse of the sky above and water below that soothes my soul. Or maybe
it’s anticipation of seeing something new.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
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“The long-legged birds with their eyes focused down transform a seemingly sterile world
into a fecund one. It is here in the marshes with the birds that I seal my relationship to
Great Salt Lake.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 22
“I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my
mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There
are other languages being spoke by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to
consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see
ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no
more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My
serenity surfaces in my solitude.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
“I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries.
The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had
always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
“I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. Devastation respects no boundaries.
The landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had
always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change. Quicksand.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 40
The pulse of the Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island’s shores, becomes
the force wearing against my mother’s body And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing
their way toward quiet bays on the island, I recall watching Mother sleep, imagining the
dreams that were encircling her, wondering what she knows that I must learn for myself.
The light changes, Antelope Island is blue. Mother awakened and I looked away.
Antelope Island is no longer accessible to me. It is my mother’s body floating in
uncertainty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 64
“To wander through a gull colony is disorienting. In the midst of shrieking gulls, you begin
to speak, but your voice is silenced. They pull the clouds around you as you walk on
eggshells. You quickly realize that you do not belong.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 73
I love to watch gulls soar over the Great Basin. It is another trick of the lake to lure
gulls inland. On days such as this, when my would has been wrenched, the simplicity of
flight and form above the lake untangles my grief.
“Glide” the gulls write in the sky—and, for a few brief moments, I do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 75
“I continue to watch the gulls. Their pilgrimage from salt water to fresh becomes my own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 76
“The heartbeats I felt in the womb—two heartbeats, at once, my mother’s and my own—
are heartbeats of the land. All of life drums and beats, at once, sustaining a rhythm audible
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only to the spirit. I can drum my heartbeat back into the Earth, beating, hearts beating my
hands on the Earth—like a ruffed grouse on a long, beating, hearts beating—like a bittern
in the marsh, beatinga, hearts beating. My hands on the Earth beating, heart beating. I
drum back my return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 85
Letter from Mother to Terry: “More and more, I am realizing the natural world is my
connection to myself. Landscape brings me simplicity. . . . I find my peace, my solitude, in
the time I am alone in nature. . . . The natural world is a third party in our marriage. It
holds us close and lets us revel in the intimacy of all that is real.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 86-87
I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of
Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it
won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.
Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you
see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me
experience is all we have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 92
I turn around three hundred and sixty degrees: water as far as I can see. The echo of
Lake Bonneville lapping against the mountains returns.
The birds of Bear River have been displaced; so have I.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 97
“First stars appear. A crescent moon. I throw down my sleeping bag. The stillness of the
desert instructs me like a trail of light over water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
The wind rolls over me. Particles of sand skitter across my skin, fill my ears and
nose. I am aware only of breathing. The workings of my lungs are amplified. The wind
picks up. I hold my breath. It massages me. A raven lands inches away. I exhale. The raven
flies.
Things happen quickly in the desert.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
“Mother’s whole being is accelerated. I see her insatiable curiosity intensify. Her desire to
absorb everything that is fresh and natural and alive is magnified. She is the bird touching
both heaven and earth, flying with newfound knowledge of what it means to be alive.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
281
Her inner retreat of the past few months has momentarily been replaced by
openness.
“It’s all inside,” she said. “I just needed to get away, to be reminded by the desert
of who I am and who I am not. The exposed geologic layers in the redrock mirror the
depths within myself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
Wangari: “I am Kikuyu. My people believe if you are close to the Earth, you are close to
people.”
“How so?” I asked.
“What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family.
Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a
matter of living the circle.
“Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship
with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We
choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is
money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 137
Dad: “Politicians don’t understand that the land, the water, the air, all have minds of their
own. I understand it because I work with the elements every day. Our livelihood depends
on it. . . . Sure, this lake has a mind, it cares nothing for ours.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 139
“We are evenly spaced like herons along the banks of the Bear River.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 142
“There is a spray of gunshot. The heron flies. Three ibises spring up, then float back down
into the grasses. I turn. Suddenly, I feel as vulnerable as the long-legged birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 144
“The hostility of this landscape teaches me how to be quiet and unobtrusive, how to find
grace among spiders with a poisonous bite. I sat on a lone boulder I the midst of the
curlews. By now, they had grown accustomed to me. This too, I found encouraging—that
in the face of stressful intrusions, we can eventually settle in. One beings to almost trust
the intruder as a presence that demands greater intent toward life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 147
“There is something unnerving about my solitary travels around the northern stretches of
Great Salt Lake. I am never entirely at ease because I am aware of its will. Its mood can
change in minutes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“You stand in the throbbing silence of the Great Basin, exposed and alone. . . . Only the
land’s mercy and a calm mind can save my soul. And it is here I find grace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
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“I pray to birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray
to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—
the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of
what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
“Brooke will come later this evening. Until then, I shall curl up in the grasses like a bedded
animal and dream.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 150
“I laid my head on her lap and closed my eyes. I could not tell if it was my mother’s
fingers combing through my hair or the wind.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 156
I lay out these ten sections on the flat granite rocks I am sitting on. The sun
threatens to dry them. But I wait for the birds. Within minutes, Clark’s nutcrackers and
gray jays join me. I such on oranges as the mountains begin to work on me.
This is why I always return. This is why I can always go home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 160
John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The
experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community.”
I think of my family stories—Mother’s in particular—how much I need them now,
how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds
die with them.
The same could be said of each passing whale.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 175
“I am reminded that what I adore, admire, and draw from Mother is inherent in the Earth.
My Mother’s spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of
mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, her warmth, and her breath, even her arms
around me—are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 214
“I count her breaths. They have the intensity and fullness of a surfacing whale’s.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 223
“A full moon hung in a starlit sky. It was Mother’s face illumine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 232
“There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near the
lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the outside
world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports the curve
of my spine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
Once out at the lake, I am free. Native. Wind and waves are like African drums
driving the rhythm home. I am spun, supported, and possessed by the spirit who dwells
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here. Great Salt Lake is a spiritual magnet that will not let me go. Dogma doesn’t hold me.
Wildness does. A spiral of emotion. It is ecstasy without adrenaline. My hair is tossed,
curls are blown across my face and eyes, much like the whitecaps cresting over the waves.
Wind and waves. Wind and waves. The smell of brine is burning my lungs. I can
taste it on my lips. I want more brine, more salt. Wet hands. I lick my fingers, until I am
sucking them dry. I close my eyes. The smell and taste combined reminds me of making
love in the Basin; flesh slippery with sweat in the heat of the desert. Wind and waves. A
sigh and a surge.
I pull away from the lake, pause, and rest easily in the sanctuary of sage.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 240
“I have been marked by the desert. The scar meanders down the center of my forehead
like a red, clay river.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 243
“The unknown Utah that some see as a home for used razor blades, toxins, and biological
warfare, is a landscape of the imagination, a secret we tell to those who will keep it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
“I can no longer participate in the killing,” Dad said. “When I see the deer, I see Diane.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 251
“I realize months afterward that my grief is much larger than I could ever have imagined.
The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the
flooded desert, become extensions of my family. Grief dares us to love once more.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 252
Terry Tempest Williams to Mimi: “The hollow eggs translated into hollow wombs. The
Earth is not well and neither are we. I saw the health of the planet as our own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 262-263
“Refuge is not a place outside myself. Like the lone heron who walks the shores of Great
Salt Lake, I am adapting as the world is adapting.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
Gnostics quote: “For what is inside of you is what is outside of you and the one who
fashions you on the outside is the one who shaped the inside of you. And what you see
outside of you, you see inside of you, it is visible and it is your garment.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
Mimi talking about Nancy Holt. “She camped at a site for tend days and, at that time,
wondered if she could stay in the desert that long. After a few days, she located a particular
sound within the land and began to chant. This song became her connection to the Great
Salt Lake desert. She told me she fluctuated from feeling very small to feeling very
expansive. I remember her words, ‘I became like the ebb and flow of light inside the
tunnels.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 268-269
284
Mimi dies. “Lying in my hammock at home, the wind rocks me back and forth. It is all that
is left to comfort me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 273
“Mimi and I shared a clandestine vision of things. I could afford to dream because she
could interpret the story. We spoke through the shorthand of symbols: an egg, an owl. And
most of what we shared was secret, much like the migration of birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 273
“Brooke and I slip our red canoe into Half-Moon Bay. Great Salt Lake accepts us like a
lover.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
“The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one’s genealogy with the earth
was to commit treason against one’s soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
“The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to
get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong,
women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 290
Unspoken Hunger
“The umbilical cord between man and earth has not been severed here. The Maasai pasture
their cattle next to leopard and lion. They know the songs of grasses and the script of
snakes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 4
The whole essay: “Undressing the Bear”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 51ff
“In these moments, I felt innocent and wild, privy to secrets and gifts exchanged only in
nature. I was the tree, split open by change. I was the flood, bursting through grief. I was
the rainbow at night, dancing in darkness. Hands on the earth, I closed my eyes and
remembered where the source of my power lies. My connection to the natural world is my
connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
285
“By undressing, exposing, and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our
authentic selves. Stripped free from society’s oughts and shoulds, we emerge as
emancipated beings. The bear is free to roam.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“If we choose to follow the b ear, we will be saved from a distractive and domesticated
life. The bear becomes our mentor. We must journey out, so that we might journey in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“I find myself being mentored by the land once again, as two great blue herons fly over
me. Their wingbeats are slow, so slow they remind me that, all around, energy is being
conserved. I too can bring my breath down to dwell in a deeper place where my blood-soul
restores to my body what society has drained and dredged away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 62
“D. H. Lawrence writes, ‘In every living thing there is a desire for love, for the
relationship of unison with the rest of things.’
I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love. It is a
vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections. Andre Breton
says, ‘Hardly anyone dares to face with open eyes the great delights of love.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“’Blood knowledge,’ says D. H. Lawrence. ‘Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut
himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh,
what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal
feeling, taken away from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what
is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots. . . .’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“Dam, dike, or drain any of them and somewhere, silence prevails. No water: no fish. No
water: no plants. No water: no life. Nothing breathes. The land-body becomes a corpse.
Stone Creek Woman crumbles and blows away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 71
Pieces of White Shell
“There have been mornings in Utah when I appreciated the Wasatch Range. Many when I
have not. The mountains are always there. It is I who fade in and out of the valley.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 35
Franc Newcomb: “It is a Navajo belief that every form of animal or plant life on the face of
the earth belongs to the god that created that particular plant or animal and gave it life;
therefore, human beings have no right to use or destroy any part of this creation without
permission from the creator.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 67
Franc Newcomb: “In the Navajo religion, each small form of life is accorded a
proportionate spiritual status, ceremonial respect, and economic importance as that given
to any of the greater forms of creation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 67
286
Clyde Kluckhohn: “Navajos accept nature and adapt themselves to her demands as best
they can, but they are not utterly passive, not completely pawns of nature. They do a great
many things that are designed to control nature physically and to repair damage caused by
the elements. But they do not ever hope to master nature. For the most part The People try
to influence her with various songs and rituals. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 70
“Through the Deerhunting Way one can see many connections, many circles. It becomes a
model for ecological thought expressed through mythological language. The cyclic nature
of the four deers’ advice to the hunter is, in fact, good ecological sense.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 105
“When we tamper with the balance of things the scales rarely meet equilibrium again. This
story is written over and over in our history, be it with Native Peoples, economics, or
bears. We are grossly insensitive to the connectedness of life. Eric Hoffer makes the point:
‘Lack of sensitivity is basically an unawareness of ourselves.’ In terms of culture which is
intrinsically linked with landscape, is it possible to meet another with empathetic eyes?
Perhaps. If we can begin to focus beyond ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 113-114
“Oral tradition reminds one of community and community in the Native American sense
encompasses all life forms: people, land, and creatures. Barry Lopez extends this notion
when he says, ‘The correspondence between the interior landscape and exterior landscape
is story.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 135
Open Space of Democracy
It is called "Bear Shaman" -- an Iñupiat sculpture carved out of soapstone. At one end is
Man, crouched close to the earth. At the other end is Bear, in search of prey. Both Man and
Bear live inside the same body. Their shared heart determines who will be seen and who
will disappear. Shape-shifting is its own form of survival.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43a
A long-tailed jaeger sits next to me. I try not to move. With my legs crossed and
my eyes barely open, I enter the space of meditation.
A wolf howls. My body leaps. The jaeger flies. Fear floods my heart. Presence
creates presence. I am now alert. To feel yourself prey is to be shocked back into the
reality of the Arctic's here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
287
We walk for several hours along the tundra shelf, talking very little. Such joy. How do we
return home without breaking these threads that bind us to life? How do we return our
gratitude for all we have seen? We stop and lie on our backs, side by side, watching the
clouds. A deep and abiding stillness passes through us. Our hands clasp.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47b
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
It is for my mouth, forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
--Walt Whitman
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
Interviews
TL: When I heard about the theme of this year's Border Book Festival, Our Bodies / Our
Earth, I immediately thought of your work, Terry. As much as anyone's, your writing
seems to connect the human body with the more-than-human natural world. Why is this
connection so important to you?
TTW: How can we not align our bodies with the Earth? We are made of the same stuff, so
to speak: water, minerals, our blood like a river flowing inside our veins. To imagine
ourselves as something outside of the Earth, foreign, removed, separate, strikes me as one
of the reasons our collective relationship to the natural world and other creatures has been
severed. I believe our health and the health of the land are intrinsically tied. I've witnessed
this as "hibakusha" (the Japanese word for 'explosion-affected people'), downwinders, and
the predominance of cancer in our family due in large part, I believe, to the fallout in Utah
from nuclear testing of the 1950's and 60's. To see ourselves as part of the Earth and its
community, not apart from it as Robinson Jeffers writes, to me can be an act of humility
and awareness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 1
Our lack of intimacy with the natural world is in direct correspondence with our lack of
intimacy with each other. Our bodies, the body of the Earth -- there is no separation. When
we cause harm to the natural world, we also cause harm to ourselves. The health of the
planet is our own.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
288
Traditionally, Christianity has made a distinction, a spiritual separation between
human beings and other creatures, be they plants or animals. We have dominion over the
Earth. This philosophy within the Judeo-Christian mind has wreaked havoc on the planet.
We have abused our natural resources and given little thought to the notion of
sustainability.
I believe this is changing as we witness what the devastating effects of our
irresponsible actions have created in terms of environmental degradation, be it global
warming or deforestation or quite simply, the loss of open space within our cities and
towns. We are slowly learning what it means to be good stewards, to enter into a dialogue
with the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
To be in correspondence with the world around us -- to learn the names of things, to
delight in all that is wild, even our own beating hearts, to embrace our sacred
responsibilities toward the sustenance of life, to remember what we seem to have
forgotten, that we are part of this beautiful, broken healing Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
London: What do you think happens when we lose a sense of intimacy with the natural
world around us?
Williams: I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with
each other. What we perceive as non-human, outside of us, is actually in direct relationship
with us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
London: We tend to take very extreme views of nature in America. We see it as ours to do
whatever we please with, or, conversely, as something to rope off and protect from human
intervention. Do you think we will ever learn to coexist with nature in a way that benefits
both?
Williams: I believe it is possible, and I think we have powerful role-models among us in
the American West. Certainly the Hopis, a timeless civilization that understands
sustainability and what that means about living in harmony, in tandem with the natural
world. We have much to learn from them, and they will survive us, I feel certain about
that. When you look at the Pueblo communities along the Rio Grande, when you talk to the
Navajo people, the Ute people, and certainly the native peoples of California who still have
their communities intact, it is what they have always known: that we are not apart from
nature but a part of it.
London: But we don't have much of a history of living in tune with nature.
Williams: You are absolutely right, for us as Anglos who are very new to this landscape,
we don't have a history yet. I look at Los Angeles and I ask myself, How can this ever be
sustainable? And what are we contributing to that? Because we are all complicit. None of
us is without blame. It's so difficult and it's so overwhelming and I think we have to make
small choices in our own lives that can loom large collectively. But I worry. I think it's
about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st
century. I certainly don't have the answers.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 9
Julie A. Wortman: When we arranged for this interview, you told me that you didn't think
you had much to say about weather. Yet in your writing you frequently talk about such
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things as the solstice and your need for below-ground time during winter in order to be
able to continue your above-ground public life the rest of the year. In your essay,
"Undressing the Bear," you write of "female rain falling gently, softly, as a fine mist over
the desert." And your book Refuge, which was my introduction to your way of viewing
life, is a powerful intertwining of your reflections about the slow flooding of the Bear
River Migratory Bird Refuge by the Great Salt Lake because of climatic changes and the
ebbing of your mother's life owing to the breast cancer she and so many women in your
family have contracted through exposure to the effects of nuclear testing carried on the
desert winds. So to me it seems you have a great deal to say about weather.
Terry Tempest Williams: Isn't that interesting? Maybe weather is like skin -- we're so
close to it we don't even think about talking about it. And you may be right. I may, in fact,
be obsessed with weather. And maybe it's just being born with the name Tempest, I don't
know. But when you bring this topic up, I suddenly realize that I live with weather, that
weather informs my days. In the household I grew up in, 5:15p.m. was sacred time around
our dinner table, because that's when the weather report was broadcast. My father's
business depended on the weather because he worked outside in a family pipeline
construction business. Certainly, living here in Castle Valley, part of Utah's Red Rock
Desert, every minute is infused and informed with and by weather -- clouds, wind, sun,
heat, cold. Weather keeps us paying attention -- you can't get complacent here in the
American West when there's so much sky. You watch the storms move in. You watch the
rainbows. You watch the virga -- the rain that is falling but never reaches the ground. I find
that living out here, in the desert in particular, my eyes are always focused upward. And I
am reminded over and over again that there are forces out here that are much stronger and
bigger than I am.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
She wrote Refuge “to remember my mother and grandmothers and what it was that we
shared, and as a way of recalling how women conduct their lives in the midst of family, in
the midst of illness, in the midst of death—in the midst of day-to-day living. I wrote
Refuge to celebrate the correspondence between the landscape of my childhood and the
landscape of my family, to explore the idea of how one finds refuge in change. And it is
Refuge that gave me my voice as a woman.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122
She wrote Refuge “to remember my mother and grandmothers and what it was that we
shared, and as a way of recalling how women conduct their lives in the midst of family, in
the midst of illness, in the midst of death—in the midst of day-to-day living. I wrote
Refuge to celebrate the correspondence between the landscape of my childhood and the
landscape of my family, to explore the idea of how one finds refuge in change. And it is
Refuge that gave me my voice as a woman.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122
Her mother “believed that the natural world was a third partner in her marriage.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 128
NATURE-HUMAN
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NATURE – POLITICS
Peter Matthiessen said “the American psyche that wants war is the same psyche that
doesn’t want wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Patriot’s Journal,” Unspoken Hunger, 108
Indy: Why the need for wilderness?
TTW: Wild country is so essential to our psychology. The context of our lives has shifted.
We're feeling things, seeing things differently. My first impulse when I got home from
Washington, when I saw the Wasatch mountains, I just burst into tears. My husband and I
got into the car and drove up to the Tetons. We went on this trail that we've hiked for 20
years. The sound of sirens that were screaming in my psyche were replaced by bugling elk.
It was so powerful to understand what sustains us in time of terror and times of calm as
well. Wild lands remind us what it means to be human, what it means to be connected to
something larger than ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: What priority do we assign conservation of wild lands given the current emphasis on
international affairs and national defense?
TTW: I think wild lands have never been more important than they are now. They are also
more threatened as a result of the events of Sept. 11. Just today, a senator from Arkansas
was trying to tie the President's energy bill to the bill for the war effort. America's Red
Rock Wilderness is threatened by the urgency to dig for gas and oil. Right now, right on
the boundary of Canyonlands, there are huge machines, trucks with massive tires,
thumping the land to test it for gas preserves. There are assumptions that we are now at
war and environmental and ecological integrity no longer matters. We're going to have to
be very strong, very smart, very certain in our cause.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
NATURE - POLITICS
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NATURE – RELIGION
Red
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.
There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is best retrieved in
solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
“In Utah, there was a man with a vision. . . . . He loved the land he saw before him, a
landscape so vast, pristine, and virginal, that he recognized it as the kingdom of God, a
place for saints with a desire for home. The desert country of the Great Basin and Colorado
Plateau was an answer to prayers of spiritual sovereignty.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 74
Brigham Young: “Here are the stupendous works of the God of Nature, though all do not
appreciate His wisdom as manifested in his works. . . . I could sit here for a month and
reflect on the mercies of God.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 74
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the
sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There
is no place to hide and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of
mirages because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life
is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have
moved on.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ walking in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ And when I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77-78
Mormon scripture:
The earth rolls upon her wings, and the sun giveth his light by day, and the moon
giveth her light by night, and the stars also give their light, as they roll upon their wings in
their glory, in the midst and power of God.
Unto what shall I liken these kingdoms that ye may understand?
Behold all these are kingdoms and any man who hath seen any or the least of these
hath seen God moving in his majesty and power.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
292
“Without a philosophy of wildness and the recognition of its inherent spiritual values, we
will, as E. O. Wilson reminds us, ‘descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how
much the natural world means to us.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“For those of us who so love these lands in Utah, who recognize America’s Redrock
Wilderness as a sanctuary for the preservation of our souls, Senate Bill 884, the Utah
Public Lands Management Act of 1995, is the beginning of this forgetting, a forgetting we
may never reclaim.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“To be in relation to everything around us, above us, below us, earth, sky, bones, blood,
flesh, is to see the world whole, even holy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
“I stop. The silence that lives in these sacred hallways presses against me. I relax. I
surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal of my breath rises in me like music, like love, as
the possessive muscles between my legs tighten and release. I come to the rock in a
moment of stillness, giving and receiving, where there is no partition between my body
and the body of Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“The fire now bears the last testament to trees. I blow into the religious caverns of wood
and watch them burn brightly. My breath elucidates each yellow room and I remember the
body as sacrament.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Fire,” Red, 208
Refuge
“And if the natural world was assigned spiritual values, then those days spent in wildness
were sacred. We learned at an early age that God can be found wherever you are,
especially outside.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 14
“Back on the bus and moving, I wrote in my notebook ‘one hundred white-faced glossy
ibises—companions of the gods.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 18
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the
sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There
is no place to hide, and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“In the severity of a salt desert, I am brought down to my knees by its beauty. My
imagination is fired. My heart opens and my skin burns in the passion of these moments. I
will have not other gods before me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
293
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ When I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
“There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near the
lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the outside
world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports the curve
of my spine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
Once out at the lake, I am free. Native. Wind and waves are like African drums
driving the rhythm home. I am spun, supported, and possessed by the spirit who dwells
here. Great Salt Lake is a spiritual magnet that will not let me go. Dogma doesn’t hold me.
Wildness does. A spiral of emotion. It is ecstasy without adrenaline. My hair is tossed,
curls are blown across my face and eyes, much like the whitecaps cresting over the waves.
Wind and waves. Wind and waves. The smell of brine is burning my lungs. I can
taste it on my lips. I want more brine, more salt. Wet hands. I lick my fingers, until I am
sucking them dry. I close my eyes. The smell and taste combined reminds me of making
love in the Basin; flesh slippery with sweat in the heat of the desert. Wind and waves. A
sigh and a surge.
I pull away from the lake, pause, and rest easily in the sanctuary of sage.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 240
Unspoken Hunger
“O’Keefe’s watercolor Canyon with Crows (1917) creates a heartfelt wash of ‘her spiritual
home,’ a country that elicits participation.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 23
“speak to a group of Mormons about the spirituality of nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 23
On her brother: “He reminds me of what it means to live and love with a broken heart; how
nothing is sacred, how everything is sacred. He was a weather vane—a storm and a
clearing at once.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 38
When James Watt was asked what he feared most about environmentalists, his
response was simple: ‘I fear they are pagans.’
He is right to be fearful.
I would like to suggest Pan is not dead, that Echo lives in her repetitive world, in
the cycles and circles of nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 83
Others
What I know in my bones is that I forget to take time to remember what I know.
The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of
breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves. We are animals,
living, breathing organisms engaged not only in our own evolution but the evolution of a
294
species that has been gifted with nascence. Nascence--to come into existence; to be born;
to bring forth; the process of emerging.
Even in death we are being born. And it takes time.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
Interviews
“The natural world was the spiritual world.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 4
London: In this culture we tend to draw very distinct lines between the spiritual world and
the political world. And yet you don't seem to see any separation between them. You've
said that for you it's all one -- the spiritual and the political, your home life and your
landscape.
Williams: I think we learn that lesson well by observing the natural world. There is no
separation. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about -- the
patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.
Somewhere along the line we have become segregated in the way we think about things
and become compartmentalized. Again, I think that contributes to our sense of isolation
and our lack of a whole vision of the world -- seeing the world whole, even holy. I can't
imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would
be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
So I love the interrelatedness of things. We were just observing out at Point Reyes
a whole colony of elephant seals and it was so deeply beautiful, and it was so deeply
spiritual. It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak
of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. How the males, the bulls, have this
capacity to dive a mile deep, can you imagine? And along the way they sleep while they
dive. And I kept thinking, "And what are their dreams?" And the fact that they can stay
under water for up to two hours. Think of the kind of ecological mind that an elephant seal
holds. Then looking at the females, these unbelievably luxurious creatures that were just
sunbathing on this crescent beach with the waves breaking out beyond them. Then they
would just ripple out into the water in these blue-black bodies, just merging with the water.
It was the most erotic experience I've ever seen. We were there for hours. No separation
between the spiritual and the physical. It was all one. I had the sense that we had the
privilege of witnessing other -- literally another culture, that extension of community.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
TL: I suppose it is fair to say that most people do not equate Mormon culture with
environmentalism. Yet you are very forthright in being both a Mormon and an
environmentalist. What do you see as the connection between the two?
TTW: It is true, many people would say "Mormon environmentalist" is an oxymoron, but
that is only because of the stereotype and veneer that is attached to the religion. Our history
is a history of community created in the name of belief. If you go back and look at the
teachings of Brigham Young, his journals and sermons, they are filled with very strong
notions of sustainability. Early brethren of the Mormon Church gave rousing speeches on
the perils of overgrazing and the misappropriation of water in the desert. Unfortunately,
much of this ethic has been lost as the Mormon Church has entered modernity. Like so
many other facets of American culture it has assumed a corporate and consumptive stance
with an emphasis on growth and business. But I believe there is change inside the
membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. Bill Smart, another
Mormon, and I put together an anthology of Mormon essays that celebrate community and
landscape, with Gibbs Smith, a Utah publisher. We asked around 40 members of the
Church in good standing, if they would write a piece about how their spiritual views have
enhanced their views of nature, or conversely, how nature has added to their sense of
Mormon theology. What emerged was an evocative testament New Genesis: A Mormon
Reader on Land and Community, a very diverse (and I must say surprising in its content),
collection of wide-ranging ideas, that we hope will be a touchstone for other Mormons to
contemplate their relationship to place. It could be said that the environmental movement
in the past has been a political movement. I believe it is becoming a spiritual one. Native
peoples have always known this. It is my hope that my own people within the Mormon
culture will remember what our own roots are to the American West and the responsibility
that comes with settlement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
“I find my spirituality in the connectedness of all life. Everything is endowed with its own
spirit. I was taught there was a spirit world that was created before this Earth and that it
exists now, and therefore all life is sacred.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 131
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
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JW: It is kind of like taking religion indoors into a climate-controlled sanctuary. In doing
that, there's a terrible negative result for a politics of place.
TTW: That's right, because we can abdicate our responsibilities. That was one of the
aspects of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that seized me. It
seems that, as Christians, it is very easy for us to contemplate heaven and to contemplate
hell. It's not so easy for us to be engaged on the Earth. I was so struck by the painting's side
panels of heaven and hell, and then the center panel, of Earth, where you see this wild
engagement -- even love-making -- with the Earth. With the birds on the same physical
scale as the human beings, there is this wonderful confluence of consciousness in that
center panel that we forget. We lose track of the central delights of a spiritual life -- hand
on rock, body in water, the sweet conversations that exist when we're completely present in
place, home, Earth. Again, not that separation of heaven and hell, past and future. The
present is the gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
JW: I've read that the etymology of "ecology" is "ecos," which means home.
TTW: Yes. Again, we are most mindful of those relationships that we live with every
single day. I love the fact that I live in an erosional landscape. You watch the wind and you
realize as you see the sand swirling about you that arches are still being created, that this
isn't something that belongs to the geologic past. Metaphorically, that is also very
powerful. To me, a spiritual life is also part of an erosional life. We are eroding the façade.
Wind -- spirit -- sculpts us, sculpts our character, our consciousness, in ways we can't even
know. I am shaped differently from others because of the spiritual processes that have
formed me. There is physical erosion that goes on in the desert and spiritual erosion that
goes on in our search for the truth, however we define that for ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
TTW: Water in the desert is like prayer in our lives, that contact with some force that is
both beyond us and a part of us. I go down to the banks of the Colorado River weekly -and in the summer daily -- and, as I watch that powerful body of water, watch the
muscularity held in the currents, I'm always mindful of what it is carrying downriver. We,
too, can be carried away.
It could be said that we have taken our love inside. We go into our houses, we shut
the door, and we have very isolated, lonely lives. When we take our love outside, we not
only take it outside with the Earth, with nature, with birds, with animals -- the ravens,
vultures and coyotes where I live -- but we take it into community. It is in community that
we find another component of our spiritual life. And that has everything to do with service.
How do we serve? What are we in the service of? And, again, that's not about heaven, it is
about right here, right now.
In the community where we live, which is very small, the needs are great. And they
can only be met through service and love and compassion and sacrifice. To me, these are
powerful components of a religious life, of a spiritual life. I find the older I get, I'm less in
need of an organization as much as a community. I don't need the organization of a
religion. I do need the community where we can share a spiritual life. And I think there's a
subtle difference.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
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JW: Some would say that people like us -- people whose spirituality arises out of the earth
-- have become pagan. Do you think that's true?
TTW: I think so often our views of one another, of ourselves, shrink by the smallness of
our vocabulary. What's a Christian? What's a pagan? Recently I was in Costa Rica, where I
had the privilege of meeting a tribal medicine man. As we were walking in the rainforest
he was sweeping the narrow trail of snakes with his feathered staff. He turned and he said,
"I am a Christian, cosmologist, scientist, Earthist." And then he laughed. He said, "Does
that cover it all?" And I thought, that's what I am, too! You know, whether it's Christian,
whether it's pagan, whether it's an ecologist, whether it's a writer, a lover of language, a
lover of landscapes, can't we just say that our spirituality resides in our love? If that makes
us pagan, perhaps. If that makes us Christian, perhaps. But I love the notion that it's not
this or that, but this, that, and all of it. And, in a way, this is how I see spirituality emerging
on the planet. The constraints that we see within our religious traditions are not so
satisfying. The world has become so large. I almost feel like the doors are blowing off our
churches to let life come in and move freely.
What we're seeing is that we're taking the best of what we're being offered. There's
so much within my own tradition as a Mormon that I deeply cherish. The notion of
community, the notion of service, the notion of land, prayer -- things that aren't exclusive
to Mormonism, but that are certainly at the core of it. I can't separate my own sense of
family from my sense of community from my Mormon roots. But, alongside, I think there's
much to be gleaned from Buddhism, much to be gleaned from Catholicism, from that
which the Quakers practice, from much that I have been exposed to and learned from my
friends who are Indian people. And then there is so much to be gleaned from what we learn
from the Earth itself -- from simply walking the land, from the deer, the river, the wind.
And so, together, through our traditions, through that which we are exposed, we come to
some semblance of a spiritual life, bits and pieces. In my own tradition, I hear my mother
saying, "Call it a crazy quilt."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and
earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but
rather the culture of modernity."
TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was
speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I
think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in
correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of
the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying
that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're
retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very
positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered.
That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but
on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all
know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
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masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
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NATURE WRITING
See: Language
“I have added to this mix of essays, congressional testimony, newspaper clippings, and
journals entries, to create both a chronology and collage for the reader, to feel the swell of
a community trying to speak on behalf of wild places that are threatened by development
or legislation in the United States Congress.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 9
“In this country, wind is the architect of beauty, movement in the midst of peace. This is
what I seek as a writer. Art is created through the collision of ideas, forces that shape,
sculpt, and define thought. There is a physicality to beauty, to any creative process.
Perhaps an index to misery is when we no longer perceive beauty—that which stirs the
heart—or have lost a willingness to embrace change. Does the wind harass sandstone or
caress it? . . . There is a peculiar patience to both wind and rock, alongside a flashpoint of
the fleeting and the eternal.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 153
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely
or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
“I mean, what is nature writing? When I think about the writers I love: Virginia Woolf,
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Melville—it goes beyond gender. They are writers
whose language is the embodiment of the natural world, of those primal forces that create
‘the lightning region of the soul’ on the page.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 11
“To speak about nature is to ultimately address issues of health, justice, and sovereignty.
Nature writing in the pure sense is not cynical. It can be a literature of hope and faith and
how we might move within our communities to heal our severed relations.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 15
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TL: Your work is part of what seems to be a renaissance in the genre of nature writing.
Why do you think this renaissance is occurring, if you think it is?
TTW: I think there has always been a strong tradition in American letters of place-based
literature, literature that sees landscape as character. Look at Melville, Thoreau, Emerson,
Dickinson, Whitman of the nineteenth century and in this century, Mary Austin writing
about the desert, Willa Cather writing about the prairies, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck
honoring the land in their novels and short stories. The list goes on and on, poets, too. W.S.
Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver. Is this to be called "Nature Writing?" If there is a
"renaissance" in the genre as you suggest with contemporary writers particularly in the
American West, perhaps it is because we are chronicling the losses of the exploitation we
are seeing, that we are trying to grapple with "an ethic of place" and what that means to our
communities in all their diversity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
TL: What influence, if any, do you think such writing is having on the larger public
debates about environmental matters?
TTW: Writers who see the land for its wisdom such as Aldo Leopold, A Sand County
Almanac, and Rachel Carson, Silent Spring made an enormous contribution to public
awareness, even policy changes in the government agencies and the establishment of
NEPA and the EPA. Writers such as Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, I know for
myself, inspired my own thinking about place, alongside Peter Matthiessen, Simon Ortiz,
Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard. The diversity of writers today who are not afraid to
articulate the truth of our lives, the depth of our humanity, writers such as Denise Chavez,
Benjamin Saenz, Chuck Bowden, Gary Nabham, Susan Tweit, Tony Nelson, Linda Hogan,
Naomi Shihab Nye, Pico Iyer, Rachel Bagby, too many to name, are giving us a new
language to see the world with, new stories born out of individual landscapes that enable
us to see the world whole and extend our notion of community to include all life forms,
plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. And these writings in all their eloquence
are also political.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
TL: I think a lot of nature writers struggle with the issue of audience. It is easy to write to
the converted, to those who read environmental publications and who seek out nature
writing. But there is also a great need to reach people who would never seek out this sort of
writing, to do the hard work of conversion, as it were. How do you see yourself negotiating
this problem?
TTW: As a writer, I honestly don't think much about "negotiating the problem" of
audience. As I said earlier, I write out of my questions, and I believe that those things
which are most personal are in fact, most general. Hopefully, if we write out of our
humanity, our vulnerable nature, then some chord is struck with a reader and we touch on
the page. I know that is why I read, to find those parts of myself in a story that I can not
turn away from. The writers that move me are the ones who create beauty and truth out of
their sufferings, their yearnings, their discoveries. It is what I call the patience of words
born out of the search.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a
writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a
community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing
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is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of
my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing
about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse -- to try to make sense of the world, to try
to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries
of what is acceptable.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
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NEW
Red
“I love sitting by the river. A deep calm washes over me in the face of this fluid continuity
where it always appears the same, yet I know each moment of the Rio Colorado is new.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 148
“Boredom could catch up with me. But it never does, only the music, river music, the
continual improvisation of water. Perhaps the difference between repetition and boredom
lies in our willingness to believe in surprise, the subtle shifts of form that loom large in a
trained and patient eye.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
“I think about a night of lovemaking with the man I live with, how it is that a body so
known and familiar can still take my breath all the way down, then rise and fall, the river
that flows through me, through him, this river, the Colorado River keeps moving,
beckoning us to do the same, nothing stagnant, not today, not ever, as my mind moves as
the river moves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
“The wind reminds me of endurance. The wind will always return to stir things up, keep
things fresh, where nothing can be taken for granted. Life is not static, comfortable, or
predictable. An Episcopal prayer readers, ‘Come like the wind . . . and cleanse.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 153
“Now on shore like a freshly born human, upright, I brush my body dry, and turn to see
that I am once again standing in front of the Birthing Rock, my Rock of Instruction, that I
have sought through my life, defied in my life, even against the will of my own biology.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 162-163
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“I have watched rockslides, waterfalls, flash floods, and dust devils take these wildlands in
hand and transpose them into something new. . . . The Colorado River is raging, scouring,
sculpting the landscape. The landscape is changing. We are changing. What are we to
make of our own short stay on this beloved blue planet of ours as it rotates and revolves in
space?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185
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Refuge
“Maybe it’s the expanse of the sky above and water below that soothes my soul. Or maybe
it’s anticipation of seeing something new.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 21
Unspoken Hunger
“For a naturalist, traveling into unfamiliar territory is like turning a kaleidoscope ninety
degrees. Suddenly, the colors and pieces of glass find a fresh arrangement. The light shifts,
and you enter a new landscape in search of the order you know to be there.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 3
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ONE, UNITY
Pieces of White Shell
“Through her generative powers the Navajo can see themselves as an organic whole, one
with the earth. Changing Woman is this personification.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 44
Red
we are in the process of
becoming Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 71
“I think about a night of lovemaking with the man I live with, how it is that a body so
known and familiar can still take my breath all the way down, then rise and fall, the river
that flows through me, through him, this river, the Colorado River keeps moving,
beckoning us to do the same, nothing stagnant, not today, not ever, as my mind moves as
the river moves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
Let me tease another word from the heart of a nation: sacrifice. Not to bear children
may be its own form of sacrifice. How do I explain my love of children, yet our decision
not to give birth to a child? Perhaps it is about sharing. I recall watching my niece, Diane,
nine years old, on her stomach, eye to eye with a lizard; neither moved while
contemplating the other. In the sweetness of that moment, I felt the curvature of my heart
become the curvature of Earth, the circle of family complete. Diane bears the name of my
mother and wears my DNA as closely as my daughter would.
Must the act of birth be seen only as a replacement for ourselves? Can we not also
conceive of birth as an act of the imagination, giving body to a new way of seeing? Do
children need to be our own to be loved as our own?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158-159
“I stop. The silence that lives in these sacred hallways presses against me. I relax. I
surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal of my breath rises in me like music, like love, as
the possessive muscles between my legs tighten and release. I come to the rock in a
moment of stillness, giving and receiving, where there is no partition between my body
and the body of Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
“I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing
with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me
with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only
to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought.
Simply, here. . . . my body mixes with the body of the water like jazz, the currents like
jazz. I too am free to improvise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 201-202
“My fear of heights is overcome by my desire to merge.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 203
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Refuge
“I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my
mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There
are other languages being spoke by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to
consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see
ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no
more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My
serenity surfaces in my solitude.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
“I am absorbed into the present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 52
“We drifted for hours. Merging with salt water and sky so completely, we were resolved,
dissolved, in peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 78
There are dunes beyond Fish Springs. Secrets hidden from interstate travelers. They
are the armatures of animals. Wind swirls around the sand and ribs appear. There is
musculature in dunes.
And they are female. Sensuous curves—the small of a woman’s back. Breasts.
Buttocks. Hips and pelvis. They are the natural shapes of Earth. Let me lie naked and
disappear. Crypsis.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
“Relief comes only through concentration, losing ourselves in the studied behavior of
birds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“I am reminded that what I adore, admire, and draw from Mother is inherent in the Earth.
My Mother’s spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of
mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, her warmth, and her breath, even her arms
around me—are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 214
“Mother and I become one. One breathing organism. Everything we had ever shared in our
lives manifested itself in this moment, in each breath. Here and now.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 230
Unspoken Hunger
“D. H. Lawrence writes, ‘In every living thing there is a desire for love, for the
relationship of unison with the rest of things.’
I think of my own stream of desires, how cautious I have become with love. It is a
vulnerable enterprise to feel deeply and I may not survive my affections. Andre Breton
says, ‘Hardly anyone dares to face with open eyes the great delights of love.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
Interviews
306
“I write about what I know, and I am inspired by what I don’t know – which is enormous. I
believe in the longing for unity, that we may in fact be asking for a new way to think about
science in reality are asking for a new way to think about ourselves, that this yearning to
heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that separate us from
ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for unity has
everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
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OPENING
“My heart finds openings in these wetlands, particularly in winter.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
308
ORDER
“For a naturalist, traveling into unfamiliar territory is like turning a kaleidoscope ninety
degrees. Suddenly, the colors and pieces of glass find a fresh arrangement. The light shifts,
and you enter a new landscape in search of the order you know to be there.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 3
“When in the presence of natural order, we remember the potentiality of life, which has
been overgrown by civilization.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 9
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OTHER
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
OTHER
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PAIN
London: That terror is also related to a certain pain that we can experience -- which you
spoke of recently when you said that the pain that we feel when we confront the natural
world is a very different one from the mental anguish that many of us live with day in and
day out.
Williams: The Japanese have a word -- aware -- which, in my understanding is, again, that
full range -- both the joy and the sorrow of our life. One does not exist without the other.
And I really feel that. It's the delicacy and the strength of our relations. And I feel it most
acutely in those intimate moments -- with another person, in a landscape that is beloved.
London: But what about this pain that comes from mental anguish? You write of the
"distracted and domesticated" life. Why is that so dangerous?
Williams: Because then I think we're skating on surfaces. I know it in my own life -- and I
think that is where this frustration comes in. It's not the place we want to be, but it's the
place our society requires that we be. There is no fulfillment there. So we become numbed,
we become drugged, we become less than we are. And I think that we know that. That is
the anguish I hear you talking about. Whereas the pain that one feels in the natural world
arises out of beauty. The pain that we feel when we are making love with someone is that
we know it will end. It's that paradoxical response of joy and suffering. One, as we were
saying, cannot exist without the other. They mirror each other. They live in the same
house. And it moves us to tears.
I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese
accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page
looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there,
what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers
from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our
relations.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 7
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PATIENCE
…..
The open space of democracy is a landscape that encourages diversity and discourages
conformity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Democracy can also be messy and chaotic. It requires patience and persistence.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
Patience is more powerful than anger. Humor is more attractive than fear.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
Social change takes time. Communities are built on the practice of patience and
imagination -- the belief that we are here for the duration and will take care of our
relations in times of both drought and abundance. These are the blood and flesh
gestures of commitment.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56b
At dinner, I asked [Wangari Maathai] what she had learned in these twenty years.
She did not hesitate. "Patience. Patience." And then she talked about how often those
working on the margins to create the open space of justice and democracy are not the ones
who end up inhabiting that space.
"We have to step inside that space we have created for political engagement
and claim it for ourselves." she said.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Salt Lake City, UT
PATIENCE
312
PATRIOTISM
“Those who raise questions are told to raise American flags instead. A hollow patriotism
has emerged.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 40
Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law,
person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?
Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing
witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?
And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires
empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
I was invited by the literature department of the University of Hiroshima and the Japanese
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment to give a reading. The
newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun was sponsoring my visit. I read "The Clan of One-breasted
Women," which is the epilogue from my book Refuge, about our family's struggles and
adjustment with my mother's death from cancer and its ultimate relationship with nuclear
testing. I spoke of what it meant to grow up in a traditional Mormon home, our adherence
to strict moral principles and the subtle constraints placed on women in the name of
patriarchy. I shared how the price of obedience became too high as I watched the women
in my family die common heroic deaths. I spoke about committing civil disobedience with
other women from Utah at the Nevada Test Site, of my arrest and release as I sought to
both confront and reconcile my government's irresponsible actions. Blind obedience in the
name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Hiroshima Journey,” 3
There is the same hope and promise here inside the Mayberry Preserve. With the
Colorado River on its northern boundary, Fisher Towers and the Negro Bill Wilderness
Study Areas east and west of the orchard and the town of Castle Valley directly to the
south, it is a place where human history and natural history converge.
I believe we are capable of creating a world that can accommodate the tamed and
untamed life, that we can in fact see ourselves as part of a larger biological community,
that it is not at odds with a sense of deep democracy but compatible with it. Call it a new
patriotism: red rocks, white clouds, blue sky. Is not the wild imagination of open spaces
simply an expansion of our pledge of allegiance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
On Mary Austin: “I view her as a sister, soulmate, and a literary mentor, a woman who
inspires us toward direct engagement with the land in life as well as on the page.” She was
unafraid of political action embracing the rights of Indian people, women, and wildlands.
Mary Austin was a poet, a pioneer, and a patriot.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mary Austin’s Ghost,” Red, 166
“Wildness is a deeply American value.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 188
313
How do we engage in conversation at a time when the definition of what it means to be
a patriot is being narrowly construed? You are either with us or against us.
Discussion is waged in absolutes not ambiguities. Corporations have more access to
power than people. We, the people. Fear has replaced discussion. Business practices
have taken precedence over public process. It doesn't matter what the United Nations
advises or what world opinion may be. America in the early years of the twenty-first
century has become a force unto itself. The laws it chooses to abide by are its own.
What role does this leave us as individuals within a republic?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
How do we engage in responsive citizenship in times of terror? Do we have the
imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires empathy and
reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 21
Patriots act -- they are not handed a piece of paper called by that same name and asked
to comply.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Indy: What can we do to raise the issue to a level of national importance?
TTW: We need to remember that there are other definitions of natural resources, like
courage and beauty. Those of us who believe in the value of wilderness are going to have
to get stronger and stronger. There will be a time when speaking out about the environment
is going to be seen as anti-patriotic. Maybe we will have to create a new vocabulary. It's
not them and us, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals; it's all of us
trying to survive and live together on Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: How do we reconcile the need to conserve wilderness when government is clamoring
to divide and conquer the land?
TTW: We need to view conservation as an act of democracy. As locals tied to the
exploitive susceptibility of the land we live on, we wind up thanking our federal
government for saving us from ourselves when they act to preserve wilderness. I know this
sounds like a completely idealistic statement, but I believe that a nation's appetite for
beauty transcends a state's hunger for greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 5
I think that what I was talking about was that as a woman growing up in a Mormon
tradition in Salt Lake City, Utah, we were taught -- and we are still led to believe -- that the
most important value is obedience. But that obedience in the name of religion or patriotism
ultimately takes our souls. So I think it's this larger issue of what is acceptable and what is
not; where do we maintain obedience and law and where do we engage in civil
disobedience -- where we can cross the line physically and metaphorically and say, "No,
this is no longer appropriate behavior." For me, that was a decision that I had to make and
did make personally, to commit civil disobedience together with many other individuals
from Utah and around the country and the world, in saying no to nuclear testing. Many
people don't realize that we have been testing nuclear bombs underground right up until
1992. President Bush at that time placed a moratorium on all testing in this country and
President Clinton has maintained that.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 4
315
PEACE, PACIFISM, NONVIOLENCE, WAR
When I returned home to Castle Valley I went for a long walk on the sage flats. “One does
not walk for peace,” I recalled Thich Nhat Hanh saying, “One walks in peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
Here in the redrock desert, which now carries the weight of more leases for oil and gas
than its fragile red skin can support, due to the aggressive energy policy of the Bush
administration, the open space of democracy appears to be closing. The Rocky
Mountain states are feeling this same press of energy extraction with scant thought being
given to energy alternatives. A domestic imperialism has crept into our country with the
same assured arrogance and ideology-of-might that seem evident in Iraq.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
Thich Nhat Hanh: In Congress, in city halls, in statehouses, and schools, we need people
capable of practicing deep listening and loving speech. Unfortunately, many of us have
lost this capacity. To have peace, we must first have understanding, and understanding is
not possible without gentle, loving communication. Therefore, restoring communication is
an essential practice for peace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 28-29
October 2004,
PEACE, PACIFISM, NONVIOLENCE, WAR
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PERSERVERANCE
………..
The open space of democracy is a landscape that encourages diversity and discourages
conformity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Democracy can also be messy and chaotic. It requires patience and persistence.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
PERSERVERANCE
317
PILGRIMAGE
Red
“And then after having made enough pilgrimages to the slickrock to warrant sufficient
separation from society’s oughts and shoulds, look again for the novice you were, who
asked if the standstone bleeds.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, ““The Coyote Clan,”
Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 23
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the
sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There
is no place to hide and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ walking in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ And when I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77-78
Refuge
. . . The next day, I returned and witnessed the same pilgrimage. After all these
years of cohabitation, the gulls had finally seized my imagination.
I had to follow.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 71
“I continue to watch the gulls. Their pilgrimage from salt water to fresh becomes my own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 76
“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the
sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There
is no place to hide, and so we are found.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ When I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
“I pray to birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray
to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—
the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of
what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
318
“The unknown Utah that some see as a home for used razor blades, toxins, and biological
warfare, is a landscape of the imagination, a secret we tell to those who will keep it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
“Mimi and I are on a Great Basin pilgrimage.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
Unspoken Hunger
Shells: “They remind me of my natural history, that I was tutored by a woman who courted
solitude and made pilgrimages to the edges of our continent in the name of her own
pleasure, that beauty, awe, and curiosity were values illuminated in our own house.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 15
O’Keefe: “Her pilgrimages to the canyon were frequent. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 22
“Three years ago, the pilgrimage was aborted. I fell.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 54
“Over the years, I have made pilgrimages to her [Stone Creek Woman]. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 67
“We have made a pilgrimage to the center of the universe, Abbey’s country.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 73
Interviews
TL: You have been a strong supporter of the preservation of wilderness in Utah. Can you
briefly explain why?
TTW: I have been a strong supporter of wilderness preservation in Utah because it feels
like these lands deserve protection from the continued rape of the West. That is not to say
that I do not have respect for the extractive industry in my state, I do. But I believe some
lands are truly special, say the word, "sacred," even--that because of their importance
biologically speaking to the migration corridors of animals, the habitat necessary for
threatened and delicate species of plants, and the spiritual values they hold for society and
inspire: silence, awe, beauty, majesty--that these lands have their own sovereignty that
deserves to be honored and defended by the law.
I know it is very popular these days in some parts of the Academy to say that
"wilderness" is simply a human construct, that wilderness has become irrelevant before it
has become resolved. We do not have language that adequately conveys what wildness
means, but I do not believe we can "deconstruct" nature. This notion strikes me as a form
of intellectual arrogance. Personally, I feel grateful to the national park ideal, places of
pilgrimage within North America that allow the public to engage with the natural world. I
am grateful to those who enacted the 1964 Wilderness Act and the other pieces of
legislation that try to maintain a possible integrity of clean air and water.
Wilderness reminds us of restraint, that is a difficult and contentious idea for our
society that defines itself on growth and consumption. There is no question this is "an
American idea" but until we can come to sustainable vision where we do not exploit
everything in sight, it's the best we can do-- Our challenge is how to create sustainable
lives and sustainable communities in a dance with wildness. I believe that is what we are
319
working toward in the American West and it is not easy. In fact, it is a long and arduous
and at times, difficult process, one that requires a good deal of listening and patience and
compassion. I keep thinking of Stegner when he said, "We need a society to match the
scenery."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
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PLACE
Red
“It is a simple equation: place + people = politics.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 3
Navajo: “The stories they told animated the country, made the landscape palpable and the
people accountable to the health of the land. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“What stories do we tell that evoke a sense of place?”
“How do the stories we tell about ourselves in relationship to place shape our perceptions
of place? Is there room for retelling our own creation stories, even Genesis?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“If a sense of place can give rise to a politics of place, where might an erotics of place
lead?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 16
“Just when you believe in your own sense of place, plan on getting lost. It’s not your
fault—blame it on Coyote.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 24
When I think of movement and migration, how one finds and creates home, I think
of the promise of parrots, the small gestures of faith carried by those who choose to inhabit
the Desert West.
So little stays in place. When the soul does come to rest, it is usually through
devotion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 132
Unspoken Hunger
“Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding
the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 12
“We are here to honor Ed, to honor Clarke, Becky . . .; to acknowledge family, tribe, and
clan. And it has everything to do with love: loving each other, loving the land. This is a
rededication of purpose and place.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 77
Others
Slowly, we are coming to realize, one acre at a time, that the spirit of a place preserved
enters our own. We are transformed by wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
Interviews
TL: Your work is part of what seems to be a renaissance in the genre of nature writing.
Why do you think this renaissance is occurring, if you think it is?
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TTW: I think there has always been a strong tradition in American letters of place-based
literature, literature that sees landscape as character. Look at Melville, Thoreau, Emerson,
Dickinson, Whitman of the nineteenth century and in this century, Mary Austin writing
about the desert, Willa Cather writing about the prairies, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck
honoring the land in their novels and short stories. The list goes on and on, poets, too. W.S.
Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver. Is this to be called "Nature Writing?" If there is a
"renaissance" in the genre as you suggest with contemporary writers particularly in the
American West, perhaps it is because we are chronicling the losses of the exploitation we
are seeing, that we are trying to grapple with "an ethic of place" and what that means to our
communities in all their diversity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
Interviews
TL: One of your early books, Pieces of Whiteshell, is set in the Navajo nation. What did
you learn from the Navajo? How did your experience with them influence your direction as
a writer?
TTW: One of the things I learned from the Dine when I taught on the Navajo Reservation
was the power of stories inherent in the land. It made me wonder as Anglos, what stories
we tell that evoke a sense of place, of landscape and community. Again, we have much to
learn from Indian people and the long-time Hispanic families who have inhabited these
regions in the West for centuries about what it means to live in place.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, How do we find
refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with
my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a
sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in
community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place
translate into a politics of place? And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning
inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1-2
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a
writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a
community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing
is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of
my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing
about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse -- to try to make sense of the world, to try
to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries
of what is acceptable.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
I think it's what we're used to. Home is where we have a history. So when I'm standing in
the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white
because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of
my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is
beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing
the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on
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the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy
place to me.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live
among... The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community,
to include all life forms -- plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings -- then I believe
a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our
neighborhoods, to our home. Otherwise, who is there to chart the changes? If we are not
home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put
... if we don't know the names of things, if don't know pronghorn antelope, if we don't
know blacktail jackrabbit, if we don't know sage, pinyon, juniper, then I think we are living
a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of
true desolation. I remember a phone call from a friend of mine who lives along the
MacKenzie River. She said, "This is the first year in twenty that the chinook salmon have
not returned." This woman knows the names of things. This woman is committed to a
place. And she sounded the alarm.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
London: You mentioned Pico Iyer. He has described home as the sense of a bleak
landscape -- something that inspires the sort of melancholy that only a truly familiar place
can evoke. That seems so very different from what you are saying.
Williams: Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell you that in many ways I know of
no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a
blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because
when you are so familiar, you know the shadow. My family lives all around me. We see
each other daily. It's very, very complicated. I think that families hold us together and they
split us apart. I think my heart breaks daily living in Salt Lake City, Utah. But I still love it.
And that is the richness, the texture. So when Pico talks about home being a place of
isolation, I think he's right. But it's the paradox. I think that's why I so love Great Salt
Lake. Every day when I look out at that lake, I think, "Ah, paradox" -- a body of water than
no one can drink. It's the liquid lie of the desert. But I think we have those paradoxes
within us and certainly the whole idea of home is windswept with paradox.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 3
This is my place. It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay
home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community?
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because
you’re not going to go away. It also means making a commitment to bear witness, and
engaging in ‘casserole diplomacy’ by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the
children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitments are real.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322-323
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POLITICS
Lorenzo Becawtini, a businessman in Florence, joined us. "Antiglobalization is not a
slogan," he said, "it is a rigorous reconfiguration of democracy that places power and
creativity back into the hands of villagers and townspeople, providing them with as
many choices as possible."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55b
 can we have such a reconfiguration with the current political and social structure?
Will electing a Democratic presidential candidate have any significant impact on
this?
POLITICS
324
POSITIVE ALTERNATIVE
see also: healing
Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law,
person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?
Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing
witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?
And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires
empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
325
POWER
………
Open Space of Democracy
Power may be a game of power and money to those who have it, but for those of us who
don’t, politics is the public vehicle by which we exercise our voices within a democratic
society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Here is my question: what might a different kind of power look like, feel like? And can
power be distributed equitably among ourselves, even beyond our own species?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others.
This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be
loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is
all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the
presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
[Discussion with Gale Norton, Secretary of the Interior] What I remember is saying how
weary we all are in the American West, that we feel we have no say, that public process
has been thwarted in the name of oil and gas priorities. She spoke of their community
collaboration projects and how we had to find ways to balance the various demands on the
land. She promised to send me a copy of their brochure (which she did). We were both on
edge. I fear I went into a mad rant, but have to trust some part of me held back my wild
frustration in an attempt to be gracious and respectful of the office she holds. The space
between us was vast and tense and palpable. We were both women of the west, from the
west, Colorado and Utah. Neighbors. What shaped our different views of landscape? What
would we agree on? And at what point in our development did we forge such contrary
allegiances? This is the conversation I wish we could have had, that maybe one day we can
have. I would be curious to know what we would agree on. Instead, the awkward silences
exposed both of our ideologies, our beliefs, our hopes. The difference was one of power.
She didn't have to talk to me. I was desperate to talk to her.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 8 October
2004, Salt Lake City, UT
326
POWER
327
PRAYER
Red
“To find one’s own equilibrium,” he tells me this morning by the river. “That is
what I want to learn.”
He finds rocks that stand on their own and bear the weight of others. An exercise in
balance and form. Downriver, I watch him place a thin slab of sandstone on a rock
pedestal, perfectly poised. He continues placing pebbles on top, testing the balance. In
another sculpture, he leans two flat rocks against each other like hands about to pray.
The stillness of stones, their silence, is a rest not against the music of the river.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 150
Essay: “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 184ff
“I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful
of the animals that we are . . . an animal who understands a sense of humility when
watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs . . . an animal
who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes . . . an animal who has not forgotten
what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the
source of all true visions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187
Refuge
“I pray to birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray
to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—
the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of
what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
I say a silent prayer for the curlew, remembering the bond of two days before when
I sat in their valley nurtured by solitude. I ask the curlew for cinnamon-barred feathers and
take them.
They do not come easily.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 152
In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood
of God. women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have
always bestowed benisons upon our families.
Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we
pray.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 158
In Mexico on the Day of the Dead. “Songs were sung. More prayers were offered. And
slowly my individual sorrow was absorbed into a sea of collective tears. We all wept.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 277
Others
328
What I know in my bones is that I forget to take time to remember what I know.
The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of
breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves. We are animals,
living, breathing organisms engaged not only in our own evolution but the evolution of a
species that has been gifted with nascence. Nascence--to come into existence; to be born;
to bring forth; the process of emerging.
Even in death we are being born. And it takes time.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
To make the abstract real, to be unafraid to speak of what we love in the language of story,
to remember we are engaged in bloodwork, one day at a time. The presence of personal
engagement, its own form of prayer.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting it Right”
“There has been a positive respond from the Mormon hierarchy of women because they
see in this book the values of family and community and prayer and faith that are all
honored within the Mormon tradition.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 124-125
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PRESENCE
…………….
A long-tailed jaeger sits next to me. I try not to move. With my legs crossed and
my eyes barely open, I enter the space of meditation.
A wolf howls. My body leaps. The jaeger flies. Fear floods my heart. Presence
creates presence. I am now alert. To feel yourself prey is to be shocked back into the
reality of the Arctic's here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
PRESENCE
330
PRESENT
Red
“Present. Completely present. My eyes focus on one current in particular, a small eddy that
keeps circling back on itself. Around and around, a cottonwood leaf spins; a breeze gives it
a nudge, and it glides downriver, this river braided with light.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
“I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing
with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me
with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only
to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought.
Simply, here. . . . my body mixes with the body of the water like jazz, the currents like
jazz. I too am free to improvise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 201-202
Refuge
“I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my
mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There
are other languages being spoke by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to
consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see
ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no
more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My
serenity surfaces in my solitude.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
“We have lost track of time in a birdwatchers’ trance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 49
“I am absorbed in the present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 52
“We are all anxious, except Mother. She says it doesn’t matter what they find, all we have
is now.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 65
Mother: “You live each moment and when you see the sunset at the end of the day, you are
so grateful to be part of that experience.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 84
Mother: “For the first time in my life, I started to be fully present in the day I was living. I
was alive. My goals were no longer long-range plans, they were daily goals, much more
meaningful to me because at the end of each day, I could evaluate what I had done.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 116
“I am suspended between the past and future, held by a spider’s filament stretched across a
river.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 161
331
“You still don’t understand, do you?” Mother said to me. “It doesn’t matter how
much time I have left. All we have is now. I wish you could all accept that and let go of
your projects. Just let me live so I can die.”
Here words cut through me like broken glass. This afternoon, she said, “Terry, to
keep hoping for life in the midst of letting go is to rob me of the moment I am in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 161
Mother “was quietly walking with the present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 191
Mother: “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” she said. “Let’s just take one day at a time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 200
Mother: “Something extraordinary is happening to me. The only way I can describe
it to you is that I am moving into a realm of pure feeling. Pure color.”
. . . “Maybe that’s what this business of eternal life is . . .”
She took my hand again. “No, no, you’re missing it—it’s right here, right now.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 217
“In my heart I say, “Let go . . . let go . . . follow the light . . .” There is a crescendo of
movement, like walking up a pyramid of light. And it is sexual, the concentration of love,
of being fully present. Pure feeling. Pure color. I can feel her spirit rising through the top
of her head. Her eyes focus on mine with total joy—a fullness that transcends words.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 231
Unspoken Hunger
“We are fully present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 5
“The two herons who flew over me have now landed downriver. I do not believe they are
fearful of love. I do not believe their decisions are based on a terror of loss. They are not
docile, loyal, or obedient. They are engaged in a rich, biological context, completely
present. They are feathered Buddhas casting blue shadows on the snow, fishing on the
shortest day of the year.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 64
Interviews
If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys, to the
beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from our hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be
vulnerable in our emotional response to the world.
And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being "broken open." To
engage. To participate. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a
personal transformation that bears collective gifts.
I also believe that until we have touched death or traveled into some of the dark
corners of our own soul and held those we love in their own shadowed moments, that we
may not be as willing to "be broken open." We protect our safest selves as long as possible.
And then it happens, in an instant, who knows what may spark the change, our facade
breaks, we stand in the center of our life, bare-bodied and beautiful, naked, exposed,
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courageous. Fear is replaced by being fully present in the moment at hand. We are alive.
We are vulnerable. We are teachable once again. Call it a humility in the deepest sense.
We allow ourselves to be touched. The false self, the fearful self is shattered. We enter the
current of life. This for me is the rupture of ego and the beginning of empathy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 5
JW: It is kind of like taking religion indoors into a climate-controlled sanctuary. In doing
that, there's a terrible negative result for a politics of place.
TTW: That's right, because we can abdicate our responsibilities. That was one of the
aspects of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that seized me. It
seems that, as Christians, it is very easy for us to contemplate heaven and to contemplate
hell. It's not so easy for us to be engaged on the Earth. I was so struck by the painting's side
panels of heaven and hell, and then the center panel, of Earth, where you see this wild
engagement -- even love-making -- with the Earth. With the birds on the same physical
scale as the human beings, there is this wonderful confluence of consciousness in that
center panel that we forget. We lose track of the central delights of a spiritual life -- hand
on rock, body in water, the sweet conversations that exist when we're completely present in
place, home, Earth. Again, not that separation of heaven and hell, past and future. The
present is the gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
“Our culture has chosen to define erotic in very narrow terms, terms that largely describe
pornography or voyeurism, the opposite of a relationship that asks for reciprocity. One of
the things I was interested in with Desert Quartet was to explore the use of language in its
pure sense, to use the word ‘erotic’ to intensify, to expand our view of Eros, to literally be
in relationship on the page. When we’re in relation, whether it is with a human being, with
an animal, or with the desert, I think there is an exchange of the erotic impulse. We are
engaged, we are vulnerable, we are both giving and receiving, we are fully present in that
moment, and we are able to heighten our capacity for passion which I think is the full
range of emotion, both the joy and sorrow that one feels when in wild country. To speak
about Eros in a particular landscape is to acknowledge our capacity to love Other.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 3-4
“I believe there is an unspeakable joy in being fully present and responding totally to the
moment. For me, that’s were joy dwells and feeling lies; in fact, I think that’s the well of
all strength and wisdom—knowing that all we have, all we will ever have, is right now;
that’s the gift.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Peterson (Bloomsbury) interview
Jenson: What does erotic mean to you?
Terry Tempest Williams: It means ‘in relation.” Erotic is what those deep relations are and
can be that engage the whole body—our heart, our mind, our spirit, our flesh. It is that
moment of being exquisitely present.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 310
“To be able to have that core of serenity in the middle of huge oscillations; to be present in
those waves and emotional tides, but to possess a solidarity of soul. That’s what I would
like to hold for myself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 314
333
“It has to do with seizing the moment, perceiving what is necessary in that moment.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 324
334
PRESERVATIONISM
Perhaps she was remembering the emotion in Olaus's voice when he testified before the
Senate two decades earlier and said:
We long for something more, something that has a mental, a spiritual impact on us.
This idealism, more than anything else, will set us apart as a nation striving for
something worthwhile in the universe. It is inevitable, if we are to progress as
people in the highest sense, that we shall become ever more concerned with the
saving of the intangible resources, as embodied in this move to establish the Arctic
Wildlife Range.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
What are we willing to give our lives to if not the perpetuation of the sacred? Can we
continue to stand together in our collective wisdom and say, these particular lands are
inviolable, deserving protection by law and the inalienable right of safe passage for all
beings that dwell here? Wilderness designation is the promise of this hope held in trust.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
PRESERVATIONISM
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QUAKER
JW: Some would say that people like us -- people whose spirituality arises out of the earth
-- have become pagan. Do you think that's true?
TTW: I think so often our views of one another, of ourselves, shrink by the smallness of
our vocabulary. What's a Christian? What's a pagan? Recently I was in Costa Rica, where I
had the privilege of meeting a tribal medicine man. As we were walking in the rainforest
he was sweeping the narrow trail of snakes with his feathered staff. He turned and he said,
"I am a Christian, cosmologist, scientist, Earthist." And then he laughed. He said, "Does
that cover it all?" And I thought, that's what I am, too! You know, whether it's Christian,
whether it's pagan, whether it's an ecologist, whether it's a writer, a lover of language, a
lover of landscapes, can't we just say that our spirituality resides in our love? If that makes
us pagan, perhaps. If that makes us Christian, perhaps. But I love the notion that it's not
this or that, but this, that, and all of it. And, in a way, this is how I see spirituality emerging
on the planet. The constraints that we see within our religious traditions are not so
satisfying. The world has become so large. I almost feel like the doors are blowing off our
churches to let life come in and move freely.
What we're seeing is that we're taking the best of what we're being offered. There's
so much within my own tradition as a Mormon that I deeply cherish. The notion of
community, the notion of service, the notion of land, prayer -- things that aren't exclusive
to Mormonism, but that are certainly at the core of it. I can't separate my own sense of
family from my sense of community from my Mormon roots. But, alongside, I think there's
much to be gleaned from Buddhism, much to be gleaned from Catholicism, from that
which the Quakers practice, from much that I have been exposed to and learned from my
friends who are Indian people. And then there is so much to be gleaned from what we learn
from the Earth itself -- from simply walking the land, from the deer, the river, the wind.
And so, together, through our traditions, through that which we are exposed, we come to
some semblance of a spiritual life, bits and pieces. In my own tradition, I hear my mother
saying, "Call it a crazy quilt."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
JW: Women, in particular, seem to speak of that sort of crazy-quilt religion. But within the
churches, of course, such an approach has mostly been rejected as unorthodox.
TTW: With the message that you need the structure that orthodoxy supplies -- that without
that structure, if we pick and choose the spiritual beliefs that are comfortable to us, then
we're somehow missing discipline, missing sacrifice.
But I think life is a discipline we don't need to seek. Each of us is aware every
single day of the discipline upon us, about the sacrifice, the suffering. I don't feel that I
have to have that imposed on me through an orthodoxy. I'm very mindful of that just being
human.
What I do struggle with is that when we practice our own spiritual life -- however
we define that -- we miss the collective rituals. We miss the delight and strength and
comfort that comes with our relations with others, and that comes with building a
community. Here in Castle Valley, as the millennium approached, there was a particular
cave where meditations were being practiced. People in the community would come and sit
for an hour, and then another person would come and sit for an hour. I took great solace in
that -- that as a community, surrounded by these buttes and mesas in the desert, we were
mindful of the passage of time in the sense of deep time.
336
Then, last Sunday was the monthly Fast and Testimony Meeting at my church.
What that means is you fast for 24 hours, mindful of what feeds the body, mindful of
hunger, even a spiritual hunger, and in that gesture you find a sense of humility. Then you
come together as a community and you break the fast with the sacrament, with the body
and blood of Christ. And then the time is ours to contemplate and to share what we've been
thinking, feeling, something that's happened during the week that moved us. So it's really a
time of stories, much like a Quaker meeting. And I just loved it! I realized that this is
something within my religious tradition that I cherish. I love listening to the members'
stories. And especially after forgoing food, I realized the stories feed us in the same ways
that food feeds us. And that that can only be found in the embrace of community. And the
ritual of sacrament means something to me. Again, I find both solace in the tradition and
also outside the tradition.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman interview, 4
JW: One of the stories that's interesting to me, since you bring up your Mormon heritage,
is the story of the Mormon people coming in search of land, and then finding the land -"This is the place!" -- in the Salt Lake valley. Has that heritage of a people seeking a
sacred land influenced Utah's public policy in the direction of conservation?
TTW: It's a complicated question. I started thinking about the conservation ethic in Utah,
specifically inherent in the Mormon religion, when we were confronted with a crisis in our
state. And that was the crisis of wilderness. You'll remember in 1994 when the
Republicans took over the House and Senate with the Gingrich revolution, how everything
shifted. Our political delegation in Utah couldn't have been more thrilled, with Orrin Hatch
and Representative Jim Hansen at the helm. It was decided that for once and for all they
would end the wilderness debate in Utah and because they had a majority they thought that
this would move through quickly. To Governor Mike Leavitt's credit, he said we needed to
have a public process. And so for six months there were hearings held in every county all
over the state of Utah that had wilderness under consideration in Bureau of Land
Management land. Over 70 percent of Utahns wanted more wilderness, not less. In June,
Hatch and Bennett, the Senators from our state, as well as Hanson in the House, came up
with what was called "The Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995." This said that
1.7 million acres out of 22 million acres of BLM land would be designated as wilderness.
Those of us within the conservation community were appalled. The citizens' proposal had
been for 5.7 million acres. So a nasty fight ensued in the halls of Congress. Bottom line,
people spoke out, not only in Utah, but all over the country, and the bill died. And, because
of the political climate judged by a very astute Bill Clinton, the Grand Staircase Esconde
National Monument was created with almost 2 million acres of wilderness in Utah.
Our Senators would have had us believe that if you were Mormon, you were
Republican, you were anti-wilderness; if you were non-Mormon you were a Democrat,
you were pro-wilderness. Those of us within the Mormon culture said: That cannot be true!
So we set out to find stories that would show otherwise. We created a book called New
Genesis -- A Mormon Reader on Land and Community that contains about 40 stories from
members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who spoke about how nature
informed their spirituality as a Mormon or, conversely, about how Mormonism has
enhanced their view of nature. It was very, very moving to see the different discussions,
everything from the natural history of the quilt, to a treatise on air pollution, to a
conversion story of the former mayor of Salt Lake City, a world-class rock climber, who,
hand on stone, felt the spirit of God and joined the Mormon church. In each of these essays
they tied the theme to a Mormon scripture, or to something in the doctrine, so that we were
337
trying to pull our history of a land ethic through time to where we are now at the beginning
of this new millennium. We also took a deep look at our history to say: What was the ethic
of Brigham Young when he came across the plains during the Mormon exodus, came into
the Salt Lake Valley, and said, "This is the place!"? We found that there was a very strong
conservation ethic. That over the pulpit, at Temple Square, in the Tabernacle, there were
talks given by general authorities that warned the saints of overgrazing, warned about
using too much water and upheld the value of water conservation. Somewhere along the
line we have forgotten that. It's been an interesting exercise of retrieval.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 4
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QUESTION, INQUIRY
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as
we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power.
We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding
calm that will shatter fear and complacency.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
QUESTION, INQUIRY
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RADICAL
……….
Open Space of Democracy
Revolutionary patience. This community of Americans never let go of their wild, unruly
faith that love can lead to social change. The Muries believed that the protection of
wildlands was the protection of natural processes, the unseen presence in wilderness. The
Wilderness Act, another one of their dreams, was signed in 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
The power of nature is the power of a life in association. Nothing stands alone. On my
haunches, I see a sunburst lichen attached to limestone; algae and fungi are working
together to break down rock into soil. I cannot help but recognize a radical form of
democracy at play. Each organism is rooted in its own biological niche, drawing its
power from its relationship to other organisms. An equality of being contributes to an
ecological state of health and succession.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
Looking over my shoulder from the rise on the bridge, all I could see was an endless river
of people walking, many hand in hand, all side by side, peacefully, united in place with a
will for social change. Michelangelo was among them, as art students from Florence
raised replicas of his Prigioni above their heads, the unfinished sculptures of prisoners
trying to break free from the confines of stone. Machiavelli was among them, as
philosophy students from Rome carried his words: "There is nothing more difficult to take
in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in
the introduction of a new order of things." Leonardo da Vinci was among them, his
words carrying a particularly contemporary sting: "And by reason of their boundless
pride... there shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth or in the
waters that shall not be pursued and molested or destroyed."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
 Obviously the reference to Machiavelli calling for a new order suggests that all
radical change may not be progressive
The hundreds of thousands of individuals who walked together in the name of social
change could be seen as the dignified, radical center walking boldly toward the future. As
an American in Florence, I wondered, how do we walk with the rest of the world when our
foreign policies seem to run counter to the rising global awareness of a world hungry for
honest diplomacy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 56a
If we cannot begin to embrace democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to
think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways . . . .
if we fail to see the necessity of each of us to participate in the formation of an ethical life .
. . if we cannot bring a sense of equity and respect into our homes, our marriages, our
schools, and our churches, alongside our local, state, and federal governments, then
democracy simply becomes, as Dewey suggests, “a form of idolatry,” as we descend into
the basement of nationalism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
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RADICAL
341
REAL, UNREAL, SURREAL, ILLUSION
Red
Desert as teacher.
Desert as mirage.
Desert as illusion, largely our own.
What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in
the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is
time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 5-6
“Slowly she raised her body like a lizard. . . . Her hands, like serpents, encouraged primal
sounds as she arched forward and back with the grasses. She was the wind that inspired
change. They were a tribe creating a landscape where lines between the real and imagined
were thinly drawn.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Woman’s Dance,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 53-54
Refuge
Brooke to Terry: “It’s all an illusion. Nothing is as it appears. The air refracting the sun’s
rays, transforming sand into water; make sense?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 85-86
Letter from Mother to Terry: “More and more, I am realizing the natural world is my
connection to myself. Landscape brings me simplicity. . . . I find my peace, my solitude, in
the time I am alone in nature. . . . The natural world is a third party in our marriage. It
holds us close and lets us revel in the intimacy of all that is real.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 86-87
I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of
Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it
won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.
Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you
see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me
experience is all we have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 92
“It is one of those curious days when time and season are out of focus, when what you
know I hidden behind the weather.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 141
Mother dying: “Nothing seems real. The family is insulated from the outside world by the
walls of this house. It feels holy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 213
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RED
Desert as teacher.
Desert as mirage.
Desert as illusion, largely our own.
What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in
the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is
time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 5-6
“reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our
psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
The woman wallowing in the red clay mud in “The Bowl.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Bowl,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 35
“I finally inched my way down, wrapping my hands around the trunk. Feet on Earth. I took
out my water bottle and saturated the roots. Pink sand turned red. I left the desert in a state
of wetness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 107-108
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“The redrock desert of southern Utah teaches me over and over again: red endures. Let it
not be my rage or anger that endures, but a passion for the bloodroot country of my
burning soul that survives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 138
“The flicker flies. A fire burns. Loves is as varied as the spectrum red. Break my heart with
the desert’s silence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
“This river has muscle when flexed against stone, carved stone, stones that appear as
waves of rock, secret knowledge known only through engagement. I am no longer content
to sit, but stand and walk, walk to the river, enter the river, surrender my body to water
now red, red is the Colorado, blood of my veins. “
343
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music, Red, 150
To move through wild country in the desert or in the woods is to engage in a
walking meditation, a clearing of the mind, where we remember what we have so easily
lost.
Time.
Time and space.
The shape of time and space are different in wilderness. Time is something
encountered through the senses not imposed upon the mind. We walk, we sit, we eat, we
sleep, we look, we smell, we touch, we hear, we taste our own feral nature. What we know
in a wild place is largely translated through the body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185-186
The American West is burning, millions of acres are burning. It is the summer of
2000. It is the summer of 2001. It is Sept. 11: New York City is burning; the Pentagon is
burning [later addition] with apocalyptic skies, where the sun glows red and round through
gray-black clouds. The fire is now internal, moving underground. What have we
suppressed that has led us to this flame-jumping, blazing inferno?
Strike the match.
Stare into the flame.
Dare to be burned by the heat of our own ambitious hearts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Strike Moment,” Red, 191-192 (with later addition from the
internet)
Refuge
Her fall and scar. “I have been marked by the desert. The scar meanders down the center of
my forehead like a red, clay river. A natural feature on a map. I see the land and myself in
context.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 243-244
“Brooke and I slip our red canoe into Half-Moon Bay. Great Salt Lake accepts us like a
lover.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 275
Unspoken Hunger
O’Keefe: “It is as though O’Keefe is standing with all her passion inside a red-hot circle
with everything around her in motion.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 22
Others
There is the same hope and promise here inside the Mayberry Preserve. With the
Colorado River on its northern boundary, Fisher Towers and the Negro Bill Wilderness
Study Areas east and west of the orchard and the town of Castle Valley directly to the
south, it is a place where human history and natural history converge.
I believe we are capable of creating a world that can accommodate the tamed and
untamed life, that we can in fact see ourselves as part of a larger biological community,
that it is not at odds with a sense of deep democracy but compatible with it. Call it a new
patriotism: red rocks, white clouds, blue sky. Is not the wild imagination of open spaces
simply an expansion of our pledge of allegiance?
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
I turn to my own small perspective, a perspective that focuses on the place where I live and
love, to the harvest moon casting blue light over the desert, where color still registers on
the red cliff face of sandstone. I can’t sleep. On my back on our porch, I watch the moon
with my binoculars for hours, and think about the miracle of life, simply that. Earth is our
charismatic leader, the moon, the mountain lion who slips into the layers of sandstone like
a passing shadow.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
Interview
TTW: How do we create that middle ground in a world that is so often defined as black
and white? It may require a new vocabulary.
Indy: Perhaps the language of red?
TTW: Yes. How do we find red in a world that is often defined in terms of black and
white? The subtleties of our own perceptions are being lost to time. There's no time to
enter the deep color of red. In a very real way, it's the color of the country that I live in, the
red rock desert of southern Utah with its red rocks, red rivers, red sand. Red is blood. It's
passion. It's the body broken open. It's love. There's danger in red. It's the color of rage, of
destruction. To see red over time is to see red as a way to transformation. I'm asking how
do we learn to live in the center of red. How do we act out of our own hearts? How do we
stand inside the integrity of our own souls? How do we speak the language of red? How
can we find and speak a language indigenous to the heart?
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3-4
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
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REFORM
The Muries and their circle of friends challenged the ethical structure of the United States
government and institutions such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Olaus and his
brother, Adolph, changed the public's perception of predators through their research on
coyotes in Yellowstone and wolves in Denali. Olaus supported his colleague Rachel
Carson when she was under fire from the Department of Agriculture following the
publication of Silent Spring. Mardy campaigned endlessly for the protection of wild
Alaska; they changed laws and made new ones, even the Wilderness Act of 1964.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion,
REFORM
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REFUGE, RETREAT
Leap
Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the
bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I cam to Spain to get away from my
torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for
development.
There are too many of us, six billion and rising, our collective impact on fragile
communities is deadly.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 115
Refuge
“The Bird Refuge was a sanctuary for my grandmother and me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 15
“I fled for Bear River, for the birds, wishing someone would rescue me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 68
“How do you find refuge in change?” I asked quietly.
Mimi put her broad hand on mine. “I don’t know. . .” she whispered. “You just go
with it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 119
Her inner retreat of the past few months has momentarily been replaced by
openness.
“It’s all inside,” she said. “I just needed to get away, to be reminded by the desert
of who I am and who I am not. The exposed geologic layers in the redrock mirror the
depths within myself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 136
“I am retreating into the Wasatch Mountains. I cannot travel west to Great Salt Lake. It is
too exposed, too wicked and hot with one-hundred degree temperatures.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 159
“Refuge once again, this time in the reverie of southern Utah.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 167
“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my
grandmother, or even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I
can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 178
On not having children: “I am afraid of losing my solitude, my time to retreat and my time
to create.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 220-221
“This is the secret den of my healing, where I come to whittle down my losses.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
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“I pull away from the lake, pause, and rest easily in the sanctuary of sage.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 240
“The landscapes we know and return to become places of solace. We are drawn to them
because of the stories they tell, because of the memories they hold, or simply because of
the sheer beauty that calls us back again and again.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
“The Great Salt Lake is a refuge for these migrants.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 264
“Refuge is not a place outside myself. Like the lone heron who walks the shores of Great
Salt Lake, I am adapting as the world is adapting.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 267
. . . Together [with Brooke] we sprinkle marigold petals into Great Salt Lake.
My basin of tears.
My refuge.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 280
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RELIGION, SACRED, HOLY, SPIRITUAL
Red
“Erosion. Perhaps this is what we need, an erosion of all we have held secure. A rupture of
all we believed sacred, sacrosanct. A psychic scouring of our extended ideals such as
individual property rights in the name of economic gain at the expense of ecological
health.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 160
After defeat of dam on Green River: “The preservation and protection of wilderness
became part of our sacred responsibility, a responsibility that each generation will carry.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red, 182
Refuge
“These small owls pursue their prey religiously at dusk.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 9
“I was raised to believe in a spirit world, that life exists before the earth and will continue
to exist afterward, that each human being, bird, and bulrush, along with all other life forms
had a spirit life before it came to dwell physically on the earth. Each occupied an assigned
sphere of influence, each has a place and a purpose.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 14
“Mimi whispered to me how ibises are the companions of gods. ‘Ibis escorts Thoth, the
Egyptian god of wisdom and magic. . . .’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 18
Mother: “During the surgery, I had a spiritual experience that changed my life. Just before
I awakened in the recovery room, I was literally in the arms of my Heavenly Father.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 83
“The heartbeats I felt in the womb—two heartbeats, at once, my mother’s and my own—
are heartbeats of the land. All of life drums and beats, at once, sustaining a rhythm audible
only to the spirit. I can drum my heartbeat back into the Earth, beating, hearts beating my
hands on the Earth—like a ruffed grouse on a long, beating, hearts beating—like a bittern
in the marsh, beating, hearts beating. My hands on the Earth beating, heart beating. I drum
back my return.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 85
“At dusk, I left the swan like a crucifix on the sand. I did not look back.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 122
“Mother and I break bread for the geese. We leave small offerings throughout the meadow.
It is bread made by the monks from stone-ground grain. She puts her arm back through
mine as we walk shoulder-high in sunflowers.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 193
“To acknowledge that which we cannot see, to give definition to that which we do not
know, to create divine order out of chaos, is the religious dance.”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 196
Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our
desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of
invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in
the absence of fact.
The four trees we planted will grow in the absence of my mother. Faith holds their
roots, the roots I can no longer see.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 198
Mother dying: “Nothing seems real. The family is insulated from the outside world by the
walls of this house. It feels holy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 213
Mother dying. “It is sacred time.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 213
Once out at the lake, I am free. Native. Wind and waves are like African drums
driving the rhythm home. I am spun, supported, and possessed by the spirit who dwells
here. Great Salt Lake is a spiritual magnet that will not let me go. Dogma doesn’t hold me.
Wildness does. A spiral of emotion. It is ecstasy without adrenaline. My hair is tossed,
curls are blown across my face and eyes, much like the whitecaps cresting over the waves.
Wind and waves. Wind and waves. The smell of brine is burning my lungs. I can
taste it on my lips. I want more brine, more salt. Wet hands. I lick my fingers, until I am
sucking them dry. I close my eyes. The smell and taste combined reminds me of making
love in the Basin; flesh slippery with sweat in the heat of the desert. Wind and waves. A
sigh and a surge.
I pull away from the lake, pause, and rest easily in the sanctuary of sage.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 240
On cancer: “Diane, it is one of the most spiritual experiences you will ever encounter.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 282
Unspoken Hunger
On her brother: “He reminds me of what it means to live and love with a broken heart; how
nothing is sacred, how everything is sacred. He was a weather vane—a storm and a
clearing at once.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 38
“And I felt the presence of angels, even my mother, her wings spread above me like a
hovering dove.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
Open Space of Democracy
We can ask ourselves within the context and specificity of our own lives, how fear can be
transformed into courage, silence transformed into honest expression, and spiritual
isolation quelled through a sense of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
350
Beauty is presence and it resides in the Brooks Range. . . . These are not mountains but
ramparts of raw creation. The retreat of gods. Crags, cirques, and glaciers sing hymns to
ice. Talus slopes in grays and taupes become the marbled papers, creased and folded,
inside prayer books.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 38a
<Rock People> They can mark the threshold of sacred space.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 39b
My eyes catch the illumined wings of a tern, an Arctic tern, fluttering, foraging
above the river -- the embodiment of grace, suspended. The tern animates the vast
indifference with its own vibrant intelligence. Black cap; blood-red beak pointed down;
white body with black-tipped wings. With my eyes laid bare, I witness a bright thought in
big country. While everyone is sleeping, the presence of this tern hovering above the river,
alive, alert, engaged, becomes a vision of what is possible.
On this night, I met the Arctic Angel and vowed the 22,000 miles of her migratory
path between the Arctic and Antarctica would not be in vain. I will remember her. No
creature on Earth has spent more time in daylight than this species. No creature on Earth
has shunned darkness in the same way as the Arctic tern. No creature carries the strength
and delicacy of determination on its back like this slight bird. If air is the medium of the
Spirit, then the Arctic tern is its messenger.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion,
This windswept country is so revealing that you see what you are spiritually, morally.
--Benjamin Wyer Bragonier
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 43b
Perhaps she was remembering the emotion in Olaus's voice when he testified before the
Senate two decades earlier and said:
We long for something more, something that has a mental, a spiritual impact on us.
This idealism, more than anything else, will set us apart as a nation striving for
something worthwhile in the universe. It is inevitable, if we are to progress as
people in the highest sense, that we shall become ever more concerned with the
saving of the intangible resources, as embodied in this move to establish the Arctic
Wildlife Range.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
As the Brooks Range recedes behind us, I am mindful that Mardy is approaching 101 years
of age. She has never shed her optimism for wild Alaska. I am half her age and my niece,
Abby, is half of mine. We share her passion for this order of quiet freedom. America's
wildlands are vulnerable and they will always be assailable as long as what we value in
this nation is measured in monetary terms, not spiritual ones.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
What are we willing to give our lives to if not the perpetuation of the sacred? Can we
continue to stand together in our collective wisdom and say, these particular lands are
inviolable, deserving protection by law and the inalienable right of safe passage for all
beings that dwell here? Wilderness designation is the promise of this hope held in trust.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
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Beauty is another word for God.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
{On Whitman and Lincoln} Both men were purveyors of a spiritual democracy borne out
of love and loss. Both men articulated the wisdom of their hearts borne out of direct
engagement. . . .
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
It is time to ask, when will our national culture of self-interest stop cutting the bonds of
community to shore up individual gain and instead begin to nourish communal life
through acts of giving, not taking? It is time to acknowledge the violence rendered to our
souls each time a mountaintop is removed to expose a coal vein in Appalachia or when a
wetland is drained, dredged, and filled for a strip mall. And the time has come to demand
an end to the wholesale dismissal of the sacredness of life in all its variety and forms, as
we witness the repeated breaking of laws, and the relaxing of laws, in the sole name of
growth and greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
We have made the mistake of confusing democracy with capitalism and have mistaken
political engagement with a political machinery we all understand to be corrupt. It is time
to resist the simplistic, utilitarian view that what is good for business is good for humanity
in all its complex web of relationships. A spiritual democracy is inspired by our own
sense of what we can accomplish together, honoring an integrated society where the
social, intellectual, physical, and economic well-being of all is considered, not just the
wealth and health of the corporate few.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
"To care is neither conservative nor radical," writes John Ralston Saul. "It is a form of
consciousness." To be in the service of something beyond ourselves -- to be in the
presence of something other than ourselves, together -- this is where we can begin to craft
a meaningful life where personal isolation and despair disappear through the shared
engagement of a vibrant citizenry.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59a
Others
“But perhaps Rachel Carson’s true courage lies in her willingness to align science with the
sacred, to admit that her bond toward nature is a spiritual one.”
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
Interviews
“… is to read the world whole and holy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 11
“the essential element of legacy is story, the umbilical cord that connects the past, present,
and future. When you tell a story it’s as though a third person has entered the room, and
you become accountable for that sacred knowledge. Story binds us to community. Part of
the reason I could write Refuge, which is so intensely personal, is my belief that inside
story the personal is transformed into the general, the universal. Story becomes the
conscience of our communities.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122-123
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
JW: It is kind of like taking religion indoors into a climate-controlled sanctuary. In doing
that, there's a terrible negative result for a politics of place.
TTW: That's right, because we can abdicate our responsibilities. That was one of the
aspects of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that seized me. It
seems that, as Christians, it is very easy for us to contemplate heaven and to contemplate
hell. It's not so easy for us to be engaged on the Earth. I was so struck by the painting's side
panels of heaven and hell, and then the center panel, of Earth, where you see this wild
engagement -- even love-making -- with the Earth. With the birds on the same physical
scale as the human beings, there is this wonderful confluence of consciousness in that
center panel that we forget. We lose track of the central delights of a spiritual life -- hand
on rock, body in water, the sweet conversations that exist when we're completely present in
place, home, Earth. Again, not that separation of heaven and hell, past and future. The
present is the gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
JW: I've read that the etymology of "ecology" is "ecos," which means home.
TTW: Yes. Again, we are most mindful of those relationships that we live with every
single day. I love the fact that I live in an erosional landscape. You watch the wind and you
realize as you see the sand swirling about you that arches are still being created, that this
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isn't something that belongs to the geologic past. Metaphorically, that is also very
powerful. To me, a spiritual life is also part of an erosional life. We are eroding the façade.
Wind -- spirit -- sculpts us, sculpts our character, our consciousness, in ways we can't even
know. I am shaped differently from others because of the spiritual processes that have
formed me. There is physical erosion that goes on in the desert and spiritual erosion that
goes on in our search for the truth, however we define that for ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
JW: I was thinking about what you say in your essay about Stone Creek Woman, this
apparition of redrock and maidenhair ferns that you've seen in a waterfall on Stone Creek
in the Grand Canyon: "I've made a commitment to visit Stone Creek Woman as often as I
can. I believe she monitors the floods and droughts of the Colorado plateau, and I believe
she can remind us that water in the West is never to be taken for granted." You then go on
to say: "Water in the American West is blood. Rivers, streams, creeks become arteries,
veins, capillaries. Dam, dyke, or drain any of them and somewhere silence prevails. No
water, no fish; no water, no plants; no water, no life. Nothing breathes. The land/body
becomes a corpse. Stone Creek Woman crumbles and blows away."
TTW: Water in the desert is like prayer in our lives, that contact with some force that is
both beyond us and a part of us. I go down to the banks of the Colorado River weekly -and in the summer daily -- and, as I watch that powerful body of water, watch the
muscularity held in the currents, I'm always mindful of what it is carrying downriver. We,
too, can be carried away.
It could be said that we have taken our love inside. We go into our houses, we shut
the door, and we have very isolated, lonely lives. When we take our love outside, we not
only take it outside with the Earth, with nature, with birds, with animals -- the ravens,
vultures and coyotes where I live -- but we take it into community. It is in community that
we find another component of our spiritual life. And that has everything to do with service.
How do we serve? What are we in the service of? And, again, that's not about heaven, it is
about right here, right now.
In the community where we live, which is very small, the needs are great. And they
can only be met through service and love and compassion and sacrifice. To me, these are
powerful components of a religious life, of a spiritual life. I find the older I get, I'm less in
need of an organization as much as a community. I don't need the organization of a
religion. I do need the community where we can share a spiritual life. And I think there's a
subtle difference.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
JW: Some would say that people like us -- people whose spirituality arises out of the earth
-- have become pagan. Do you think that's true?
TTW: I think so often our views of one another, of ourselves, shrink by the smallness of
our vocabulary. What's a Christian? What's a pagan? Recently I was in Costa Rica, where I
had the privilege of meeting a tribal medicine man. As we were walking in the rainforest
he was sweeping the narrow trail of snakes with his feathered staff. He turned and he said,
"I am a Christian, cosmologist, scientist, Earthist." And then he laughed. He said, "Does
that cover it all?" And I thought, that's what I am, too! You know, whether it's Christian,
whether it's pagan, whether it's an ecologist, whether it's a writer, a lover of language, a
lover of landscapes, can't we just say that our spirituality resides in our love? If that makes
us pagan, perhaps. If that makes us Christian, perhaps. But I love the notion that it's not
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this or that, but this, that, and all of it. And, in a way, this is how I see spirituality emerging
on the planet. The constraints that we see within our religious traditions are not so
satisfying. The world has become so large. I almost feel like the doors are blowing off our
churches to let life come in and move freely.
What we're seeing is that we're taking the best of what we're being offered. There's
so much within my own tradition as a Mormon that I deeply cherish. The notion of
community, the notion of service, the notion of land, prayer -- things that aren't exclusive
to Mormonism, but that are certainly at the core of it. I can't separate my own sense of
family from my sense of community from my Mormon roots. But, alongside, I think there's
much to be gleaned from Buddhism, much to be gleaned from Catholicism, from that
which the Quakers practice, from much that I have been exposed to and learned from my
friends who are Indian people. And then there is so much to be gleaned from what we learn
from the Earth itself -- from simply walking the land, from the deer, the river, the wind.
And so, together, through our traditions, through that which we are exposed, we come to
some semblance of a spiritual life, bits and pieces. In my own tradition, I hear my mother
saying, "Call it a crazy quilt."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
JW: Women, in particular, seem to speak of that sort of crazy-quilt religion. But within the
churches, of course, such an approach has mostly been rejected as unorthodox.
TTW: With the message that you need the structure that orthodoxy supplies -- that without
that structure, if we pick and choose the spiritual beliefs that are comfortable to us, then
we're somehow missing discipline, missing sacrifice.
But I think life is a discipline we don't need to seek. Each of us is aware every
single day of the discipline upon us, about the sacrifice, the suffering. I don't feel that I
have to have that imposed on me through an orthodoxy. I'm very mindful of that just being
human.
What I do struggle with is that when we practice our own spiritual life -- however
we define that -- we miss the collective rituals. We miss the delight and strength and
comfort that comes with our relations with others, and that comes with building a
community. Here in Castle Valley, as the millennium approached, there was a particular
cave where meditations were being practiced. People in the community would come and sit
for an hour, and then another person would come and sit for an hour. I took great solace in
that -- that as a community, surrounded by these buttes and mesas in the desert, we were
mindful of the passage of time in the sense of deep time.
Then, last Sunday was the monthly Fast and Testimony Meeting at my church.
What that means is you fast for 24 hours, mindful of what feeds the body, mindful of
hunger, even a spiritual hunger, and in that gesture you find a sense of humility. Then you
come together as a community and you break the fast with the sacrament, with the body
and blood of Christ. And then the time is ours to contemplate and to share what we've been
thinking, feeling, something that's happened during the week that moved us. So it's really a
time of stories, much like a Quaker meeting. And I just loved it! I realized that this is
something within my religious tradition that I cherish. I love listening to the members'
stories. And especially after forgoing food, I realized the stories feed us in the same ways
that food feeds us. And that that can only be found in the embrace of community. And the
ritual of sacrament means something to me. Again, I find both solace in the tradition and
also outside the tradition.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman interview, 4
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JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and
earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but
rather the culture of modernity."
TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was
speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I
think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in
correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of
the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying
that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're
retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very
positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered.
That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but
on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all
know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 5
JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are
saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.
TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions,
we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the
masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine
or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven
or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live
in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And
that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it
means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is
a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was
broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we
begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this
heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why
I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions
outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 6
RELIGION, SPIRITUAL, SACRED
356
RELIGION AND POLITICS
THEMES
Spiritual resistance
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our
convictions when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the
harsh measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the
rocks.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
Integration of politics and religion
London: In this culture we tend to draw very distinct lines between the spiritual world and
the political world. And yet you don't seem to see any separation between them. You've
said that for you it's all one -- the spiritual and the political, your home life and your
landscape.
Williams: I think we learn that lesson well by observing the natural world. There is no
separation. That is the wonderful ecological mind that Gregory Bateson talks about -- the
patterns that connect, the stories that inform and inspire us and teach us what is possible.
Somewhere along the line we have become segregated in the way we think about things
and become compartmentalized. Again, I think that contributes to our sense of isolation
and our lack of a whole vision of the world -- seeing the world whole, even holy. I can't
imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we
would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?
So I love the interrelatedness of things. We were just observing out at Point Reyes
a whole colony of elephant seals and it was so deeply beautiful, and it was so deeply
spiritual. It was fascinating listening to this wonderful biologist, Sarah Allen Miller, speak
of her relationship to these beings for 20 years. How the males, the bulls, have this
capacity to dive a mile deep, can you imagine? And along the way they sleep while they
dive. And I kept thinking, "And what are their dreams?" And the fact that they can stay
under water for up to two hours. Think of the kind of ecological mind that an elephant seal
holds. Then looking at the females, these unbelievably luxurious creatures that were just
sunbathing on this crescent beach with the waves breaking out beyond them. Then they
would just ripple out into the water in these blue-black bodies, just merging with the water.
It was the most erotic experience I've ever seen. We were there for hours. No separation
between the spiritual and the physical. It was all one. I had the sense that we had the
privilege of witnessing other -- literally another culture, that extension of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 5
Environmentalism is political and spiritual
TL: I suppose it is fair to say that most people do not equate Mormon culture with
environmentalism. Yet you are very forthright in being both a Mormon and an
environmentalist. What do you see as the connection between the two?
TTW: It is true, many people would say "Mormon environmentalist" is an oxymoron, but
that is only because of the stereotype and veneer that is attached to the religion. Our history
is a history of community created in the name of belief. If you go back and look at the
teachings of Brigham Young, his journals and sermons, they are filled with very strong
notions of sustainability. Early brethren of the Mormon Church gave rousing speeches on
the perils of overgrazing and the misappropriation of water in the desert. Unfortunately,
much of this ethic has been lost as the Mormon Church has entered modernity. Like so
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many other facets of American culture it has assumed a corporate and consumptive stance
with an emphasis on growth and business. But I believe there is change inside the
membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. Bill Smart, another
Mormon, and I put together an anthology of Mormon essays that celebrate community and
landscape, with Gibbs Smith, a Utah publisher. We asked around 40 members of the
Church in good standing, if they would write a piece about how their spiritual views have
enhanced their views of nature, or conversely, how nature has added to their sense of
Mormon theology. What emerged was an evocative testament New Genesis: A Mormon
Reader on Land and Community, a very diverse (and I must say surprising in its content),
collection of wide-ranging ideas, that we hope will be a touchstone for other Mormons to
contemplate their relationship to place. It could be said that the environmental
movement in the past has been a political movement. I believe it is becoming a spiritual
one. Native peoples have always known this. It is my hope that my own people within the
Mormon culture will remember what our own roots are to the American West and the
responsibility that comes with settlement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
Spirituality of Environmental Responsibility
After defeat of dam on Green River: “The preservation and protection of wilderness
became part of our sacred responsibility, a responsibility that each generation will carry.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold,” Red,
182
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
JW: It is kind of like taking religion indoors into a climate-controlled sanctuary. In doing
that, there's a terrible negative result for a politics of place.
TTW: That's right, because we can abdicate our responsibilities. That was one of the
aspects of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that seized me. It
seems that, as Christians, it is very easy for us to contemplate heaven and to contemplate
hell. It's not so easy for us to be engaged on the Earth. I was so struck by the painting's side
panels of heaven and hell, and then the center panel, of Earth, where you see this wild
engagement -- even love-making -- with the Earth. With the birds on the same physical
scale as the human beings, there is this wonderful confluence of consciousness in that
center panel that we forget. We lose track of the central delights of a spiritual life -- hand
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on rock, body in water, the sweet conversations that exist when we're completely present in
place, home, Earth. Again, not that separation of heaven and hell, past and future. The
present is the gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 2
Mormon integration of nature and civics
“My ancestors moved and settled as a result of spiritual beliefs. They gathered in the
belief of an integrated life where nature, culture, religion, and civic responsibility were
woven in the context of family and community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
Language of law and science integrated with spiritual language of the heart
“As we step over the threshold of the twenty-first century, let us acknowledge that the
preservation of wilderness is not so much a political process as a spiritual one, that the
language of law and science used so successfully to define and defend what wilderness has
been in the past century must now be fully joined with the language of the heart to
illuminate what these lands mean to the future.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187-188
RELIGION AND POLITICS
359
RELIGION AND SOCIAL - THEMES
Mormon social vision
“My ancestors moved and settled as a result of spiritual beliefs. They gathered in the belief
of an integrated life where nature, culture, religion, and civic responsibility were
woven in the context of family and community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried it. He
called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
Spiritual significance of community
TTW: Water in the desert is like prayer in our lives, that contact with some force that is
both beyond us and a part of us. I go down to the banks of the Colorado River weekly -and in the summer daily -- and, as I watch that powerful body of water, watch the
muscularity held in the currents, I'm always mindful of what it is carrying downriver. We,
too, can be carried away.
It could be said that we have taken our love inside. We go into our houses, we shut
the door, and we have very isolated, lonely lives. When we take our love outside, we not
only take it outside with the Earth, with nature, with birds, with animals -- the ravens,
vultures and coyotes where I live -- but we take it into community. It is in community
that we find another component of our spiritual life. And that has everything to do with
service. How do we serve? What are we in the service of? And, again, that's not about
heaven, it is about right here, right now.
In the community where we live, which is very small, the needs are great. And they
can only be met through service and love and compassion and sacrifice. To me, these are
powerful components of a religious life, of a spiritual life. I find the older I get, I'm less in
need of an organization as much as a community. I don't need the organization of a
religion. I do need the community where we can share a spiritual life. And I think
there's a subtle difference.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 3
360
“I write about what I know, and I am inspired by what I don’t know – which is enormous. I
believe in the longing for unity, that we may in fact be asking for a new way to think about
science in reality are asking for a new way to think about ourselves, that this yearning to
heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that separate us from
ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for unity has
everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
> all three together
A community’s collective rituals as central to spirituality
JW: Women, in particular, seem to speak of that sort of crazy-quilt religion. But within the
churches, of course, such an approach has mostly been rejected as unorthodox.
TTW: With the message that you need the structure that orthodoxy supplies -- that without
that structure, if we pick and choose the spiritual beliefs that are comfortable to us, then
we're somehow missing discipline, missing sacrifice.
But I think life is a discipline we don't need to seek. Each of us is aware every
single day of the discipline upon us, about the sacrifice, the suffering. I don't feel that I
have to have that imposed on me through an orthodoxy. I'm very mindful of that just being
human.
What I do struggle with is that when we practice our own spiritual life -- however
we define that -- we miss the collective rituals. We miss the delight and strength and
comfort that comes with our relations with others, and that comes with building a
community. Here in Castle Valley, as the millennium approached, there was a particular
cave where meditations were being practiced. People in the community would come and sit
for an hour, and then another person would come and sit for an hour. I took great solace in
that -- that as a community, surrounded by these buttes and mesas in the desert, we were
mindful of the passage of time in the sense of deep time.
Then, last Sunday was the monthly Fast and Testimony Meeting at my church.
What that means is you fast for 24 hours, mindful of what feeds the body, mindful of
hunger, even a spiritual hunger, and in that gesture you find a sense of humility. Then you
come together as a community and you break the fast with the sacrament, with the body
and blood of Christ. And then the time is ours to contemplate and to share what we've been
thinking, feeling, something that's happened during the week that moved us. So it's really a
time of stories, much like a Quaker meeting. And I just loved it! I realized that this is
something within my religious tradition that I cherish. I love listening to the members'
stories. And especially after forgoing food, I realized the stories feed us in the same ways
that food feeds us. And that that can only be found in the embrace of community. And
the ritual of sacrament means something to me. Again, I find both solace in the tradition
and also outside the tradition.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman interview, 4
Community’s sacred knowledge
“the essential element of legacy is story, the umbilical cord that connects the past, present,
and future. When you tell a story it’s as though a third person has entered the room,
and you become accountable for that sacred knowledge. Story binds us to community.
Part of the reason I could write Refuge, which is so intensely personal, is my belief that
inside story the personal is transformed into the general, the universal. Story becomes the
conscience of our communities.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122-123
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Community and ethics of place
Seeing Earth from space: “we recognize our home, our family, our community, and
therefore become fiercely accountable for the landscape that we are a part of. We can begin
to adopt an ethics of place.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 60-61
> all three together
Need for a new social structure
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a
spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth
but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were
extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something
beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many
people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual
beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other
organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.
TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet.
It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers.
We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but
heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our
bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place,
here and now.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Wortman Interview, 1
RELIGION AND SOCIAL - THEMES
362
RESISTANCE
Leap
“The stakes are high. High on the ridge. Pull the stakes. One by one by one. Count your
many blessings see what God has done. Take the wooden stakes out of the Earth into our
hands one vertical the other horizontal tie them together with orange plastic tape turn them
into crosses plant them in the soil see how rage grows see he rage flies dragonflies be calm
they say sit at the table they say come into consensus they say with the power vested in
them they say oh say can you see my body a clear cut my voice a serpent wrapped around
the tree the power vested in me like a fire burning.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 126
Red
These lands “will not remain ecologically intake without our own vigilance, without our
willingness to protect what is wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“The region of the American West shares common ground with the South: each has found
its voice in loss. The South was forever shaped by the Civil War, and today we in the West
are in the midst of our own. It is not a battle over issues of slavery. It is a battle over public
and private uses of land, what will be developed and what will remain sovereign. Guns are
replaced by metaphorical monkey wrenches and shovels.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 7
“I have added to this mix of essays, congressional testimony, newspaper clippings, and
journals entries, to create both a chronology and collage for the reader, to feel the swell of
a community trying to speak on behalf of wild places that are threatened by development
or legislation in the United States Congress.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 9
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
“Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that
carries our history, our dreams, holds us to a moral line of behavior that transcends
thought. And in each of these places, home work is required, a participation in public life
to make certain all is not destroyed under the banner of progress, expediency, or ignorance.
We cannot do it alone. This is the hope of a bedrock democracy, standing our ground in the
places we love, together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
“Red is a gesture and bow to my homeland.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is
destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate
participation by those who saw what was coming.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
The canyons of southern Utah are giving birth to a Coyote Clan – hundreds, maybe even
thousands, of individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they are
infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails
tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25-26
End of “Perfect Kiva.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Perfect Kiva,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 50-51
“This country’s wisdom still resides in its populace, in the pragmatic and generous spirits
of everyday citizens who have not forgotten their kinship with nature. They are individuals
who will forever hold the standard of the wild high, knowing in their hearts that natural
engagement is not an interlude but a daily practice, a commitment each generation must
renew in the name of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70
“What we have witnessed in the ongoing struggle to protect America’s Redrock
Wilderness is that responsive citizenship matters. Individual voices are heard, and when
collectively spoken they reverberate on canyon walls. This passion for the wild endures
and can lead to social change long after a specific piece of legislation has been forgotten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70-71
“Statement”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 72 ff
Breyten Breytenback, “Tortoise Steps”: “The revolutionary question is: What about the
Other? . . . It is not enough to rail against the descending darkness of barbarity . . . One can
refuse to play the game. A holding action can be fought. Alternatives must be kept alive.
While learning the slow art of revolutionary patience.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 84
“I resist. Who will follow? Must someone follow?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 94
> resist father and family
“Learning the slow art of revolutionary patience, I listen to my family.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 98
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112-113
<Pulling orange survey tape off the branches & pulling out the developer’s stakes.>
Just as we finished, a swarm of dragonflies descended upon us, winged crosses, translucent
blue. We believed these small acts of defiance could raise the dead.
364
Now, I do not. They were, in fact, acts of madness, desperation. And I am not
proud of what I have done. I do not believe we can stop growth any more than we can
shunt our own evolution. It is our nature to expand.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 119
> I disagree
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
Refuge
“Restraint is the steel partition between a rational mind and a violent one. I knew rage. It
was fire in my stomach with no place to go.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 12
I walked calmly over to their truck and leaned my stomach against their door. I
held up my fist a few inches from the driver’s face and slowly lifted my middle finger to
the sky.
“This is for you—from the owls and me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 12-13
“Nothing inspires me more than a little controversy. We are in the business of waking
people up to their surroundings. A museum is a good place to be quietly subversive on
behalf of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 44
“In Mormon culture, authority is respected, obedience is revered, and independent thinking
is not. I was taught as a young girl not to ‘make waves’ or ‘rock the boat.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 285
“One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert.
They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its
phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that
they would never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as sparks
broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
365
“The women danced and drummed and sang for weeks, preparing themselves for what was
to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of their children, for the sake of the
land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new
contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their
own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
“The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one’s genealogy with the earth
was to commit treason against one’s soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
The women invade the town, despite being pregnant. They were arrested. When asked why
they came and who they were, they replied, “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim
the desert for our children.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahns
for trespassing on military lands. They are still conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours
was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.
As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body.
She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
“And these?” she asked sternly.
“Weapons,” I replied.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
“I love the challenge of living in a small community where the politics of place is no
longer an abstraction but something very real, as you face your neighbor honestly over
land-use issues not hundreds of miles away, but in your backyard.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 306
“Peace requires generational vigilance, never to be taken for granted.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 307
Unspoken Hunger
The canyons of southern Utah are giving birth to a Coyote Clan – hundreds, maybe
even thousands, of individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they
are infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails
tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts.
Members of the Clan are not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in
their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh louder than
anyone on the planet. And they have enormous range.
The Coyote Clan is a raucous bunch: they have drunk from desert potholes and
belched forth toads. They tell stories with such virtuosity that you’ll swear you have been
in the presence of preachers.
366
The Coyote Clan is also serene. They can float on their backs down the length of
any river or lose entire afternoons in the contemplation of stone.
Members of the Clan court risk and will dance on slickrock as flash floods erode
the ground beneath their feet. It doesn’t matter. They understand the earth re-creates itself
day after day. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 78
“Lee Milner’s gaze through her apartment window out over the cattails was not unlike the
heron’s. It will be this stalwartness in the face of terror that offers wetlands their only
hope. When she motioned us down in the grasses to observe the black-crowned night heron
still fishing at dusk, she was showing us the implacable focus of those who dwell there.
This is our first clue to residency.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 44
Others
“These are Rachel’s sons and daughters who are taking the facts and fueling them with
passionate resistance to protect the integrity of their hometowns and communities.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 54
“In 2002, Rachel Carson’s spirit is among us. Like her, we can be both fierce and
compassionate at once. We can remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America’s landscape and it is precisely that character that will protect it. We
can carry a healthy sense of indignation within us that will shatter the complacency that
has seeped into our society in the name of all we have lost, knowing there is still so much
to be saved.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 57
Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law,
person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?
Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing
witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?
And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires
empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
We cannot afford to take anything for granted in the name of wildness. Surely there is a
line that cannot be crossed and that line is drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge. Conservation is a generational stance where vows to preserve an ecological
integrity in the interest of community must be renewed over and over again.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Do we have it in us to rise up against the current political winds that say unabashedly,
"the only thing we are interested in conserving is this blessed American way of life."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
We have within us our own natural resources, a renewable energy for the wild fueled by
the power of our hearts. There is no crisis here. We can gather together and stand, a million
or more, as witnesses for the wild. We can raise our arms high above our heads, gently
curve our elbows and bow, bow to the caribou, in the name of love.
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--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Interviews
“I have made a personal commitment to stop nuclear testing. My pen is my weapon, and as
an act of hope or ritual, I choose to cross the line and commit civil disobedience. . . . You
do what you can on whatever level you can, and you do what you do best. And by the
power of our minds and our own hearts, we can write the world. This is about passion and
presence. . . . Our obligation as writers is to make people uncomfortable, to push the
borders of what is possible.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
Others
Neighbors. Shared concerns. A respect for our differences and strength in what we
share. This is happening throughout America. I honestly believe this. I look to the people
who are standing their ground in the Bolsa Chica and Ballona Wetlands in the Los Angeles
Basin against tremendous opposition, billion-dollar developments, movie moguls like
Steven Spielberg, oil interests, and freeways. Look to a small group of neighbors in Yaak,
Montana, the North Woods in New England, restoration work in the prairies of the
Midwest, urban gardens, the incredible work of local land trusts to preserve and protect
what they see as critical habitat for wildlife and the human spirit—all these examples
provide models of compassion and savvy, at once.
Faith and stamina.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
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RESISTANCE - THEMES
Resistance as part of her writing
“I have added to this mix of essays, congressional testimony, newspaper clippings, and
journals entries, to create both a chronology and collage for the reader, to feel the swell of
a community trying to speak on behalf of wild places that are threatened by development
or legislation in the United States Congress.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 9
“I resist. Who will follow? Must someone follow?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 94
> resist father and family
The need for social change
“What we have witnessed in the ongoing struggle to protect America’s Redrock
Wilderness is that responsive citizenship matters. Individual voices are heard, and when
collectively spoken they reverberate on canyon walls. This passion for the wild endures
and can lead to social change long after a specific piece of legislation has been forgotten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70-71
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112-113
Passionate participation
I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is
destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate
participation by those who saw what was coming.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
Coyote Clan
The canyons of southern Utah are giving birth to a Coyote Clan – hundreds, maybe even
thousands, of individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they are
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infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails
tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25-26
“This country’s wisdom still resides in its populace, in the pragmatic and generous spirits
of everyday citizens who have not forgotten their kinship with nature. They are individuals
who will forever hold the standard of the wild high, knowing in their hearts that natural
engagement is not an interlude but a daily practice, a commitment each generation must
renew in the name of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70
The canyons of southern Utah are giving birth to a Coyote Clan – hundreds, maybe
even thousands, of individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they
are infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails
tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts.
Members of the Clan are not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in
their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh louder than
anyone on the planet. And they have enormous range.
The Coyote Clan is a raucous bunch: they have drunk from desert potholes and
belched forth toads. They tell stories with such virtuosity that you’ll swear you have been
in the presence of preachers.
The Coyote Clan is also serene. They can float on their backs down the length of
any river or lose entire afternoons in the contemplation of stone.
Members of the Clan court risk and will dance on slickrock as flash floods erode
the ground beneath their feet. It doesn’t matter. They understand the earth re-creates itself
day after day. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 78
BATTLE FOR THE WEST
“The region of the American West shares common ground with the South: each has found
its voice in loss. The South was forever shaped by the Civil War, and today we in the West
are in the midst of our own. It is not a battle over issues of slavery. It is a battle over public
and private uses of land, what will be developed and what will remain sovereign. Guns are
replaced by metaphorical monkey wrenches and shovels.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 7
Acts of resistance
“The stakes are high. High on the ridge. Pull the stakes. One by one by one. Count your
many blessings see what God has done. Take the wooden stakes out of the Earth into our
hands one vertical the other horizontal tie them together with orange plastic tape turn them
into crosses plant them in the soil see how rage grows see he rage flies dragonflies be calm
they say sit at the table they say come into consensus they say with the power vested in
them they say oh say can you see my body a clear cut my voice a serpent wrapped around
the tree the power vested in me like a fire burning.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 126
“It’s called theft in the name of preservation,” he says. “The ladder is held hostage
at the local museum. It belongs in the desert. It must be returned.”
The friends move closer around the table.
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“Tomorrow—“ he says.
“Tonight,” they insist.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Perfect Kiva,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 50-51
“Statement” before Congress as an act of resistance.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 72 ff
Breyten Breytenback, “Tortoise Steps”: “The revolutionary question is: What about the
Other? . . . It is not enough to rail against the descending darkness of barbarity . . . One
can refuse to play the game. A holding action can be fought. Alternatives must be kept
alive. While learning the slow art of revolutionary patience.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 84
<Pulling orange survey tape off the branches & pulling out the developer’s stakes.>
Just as we finished, a swarm of dragonflies descended upon us, winged crosses, translucent
blue. We believed these small acts of defiance could raise the dead.
Now, I do not. They were, in fact, acts of madness, desperation. And I am not
proud of what I have done. I do not believe we can stop growth any more than we can
shunt our own evolution. It is our nature to expand.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 119
> I disagree
I walked calmly over to their truck and leaned my stomach against their door. I
held up my fist a few inches from the driver’s face and slowly lifted my middle finger to
the sky.
“This is for you—from the owls and me.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 12-13
“Nothing inspires me more than a little controversy. We are in the business of waking
people up to their surroundings. A museum is a good place to be quietly subversive on
behalf of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 44
“One night, I dreamed women from all over the world circled a blazing fire in the desert.
They spoke of change, how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its
phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that
they would never fear the witch inside themselves. The women danced wildly as sparks
broke away from the flames and entered the night sky as stars.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“The women danced and drummed and sang for weeks, preparing themselves for what was
to come. They would reclaim the desert for the sake of their children, for the sake of the
land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 287
“A contract had been made and broken between human beings and the land. A new
contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their
own.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
371
“The time had come to protest with the heart, that to deny one’s genealogy with the earth
was to commit treason against one’s soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 288
The women invade the town, despite being pregnant. They were arrested. When asked why
they came and who they were, they replied, “We are mothers and we have come to reclaim
the desert for our children.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahns
for trespassing on military lands. They are still conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours
was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more
than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.
As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body.
She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.
“And these?” she asked sternly.
“Weapons,” I replied.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 289
“These are Rachel’s sons and daughters who are taking the facts and fueling them with
passionate resistance to protect the integrity of their hometowns and communities.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 54
Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law,
person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?
Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing
witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?
And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires
empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
Neighbors. Shared concerns. A respect for our differences and strength in what we
share. This is happening throughout America. I honestly believe this. I look to the people
who are standing their ground in the Bolsa Chica and Ballona Wetlands in the Los
Angeles Basin against tremendous opposition, billion-dollar developments, movie moguls
like Steven Spielberg, oil interests, and freeways. Look to a small group of neighbors in
Yaak, Montana, the North Woods in New England, restoration work in the prairies of the
Midwest, urban gardens, the incredible work of local land trusts to preserve and protect
what they see as critical habitat for wildlife and the human spirit—all these examples
provide models of compassion and savvy, at once.
Faith and stamina.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Getting It Right”
“I have made a personal commitment to stop nuclear testing. My pen is my weapon, and as
an act of hope or ritual, I choose to cross the line and commit civil disobedience. . . . You
do what you can on whatever level you can, and you do what you do best. And by the
power of our minds and our own hearts, we can write the world. This is about passion and
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presence. . . . Our obligation as writers is to make people uncomfortable, to push the
borders of what is possible.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
Models of resistance
“In 2002, Rachel Carson’s spirit is among us. Like her, we can be both fierce and
compassionate at once. We can remember that our character has been shaped by the
diversity of America’s landscape and it is precisely that character that will protect it. We
can carry a healthy sense of indignation within us that will shatter the complacency that
has seeped into our society in the name of all we have lost, knowing there is still so much
to be saved.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 57
The need for vigilance
These lands “will not remain ecologically intake without our own vigilance, without our
willingness to protect what is wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“Peace requires generational vigilance, never to be taken for granted.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 307
The need for resistance
“Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that
carries our history, our dreams, holds us to a moral line of behavior that transcends
thought. And in each of these places, home work is required, a participation in public life
to make certain all is not destroyed under the banner of progress, expediency, or ignorance.
We cannot do it alone. This is the hope of a bedrock democracy, standing our ground in the
places we love, together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
The need for quiet listening in nature
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
Politics of (local) place
“I love the challenge of living in a small community where the politics of place is no
longer an abstraction but something very real, as you face your neighbor honestly over
land-use issues not hundreds of miles away, but in your backyard.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Note to the Reader,” Refuge, 306
Revolutionary patience
Breyten Breytenback, “Tortoise Steps”: “The revolutionary question is: What about the
Other? . . . It is not enough to rail against the descending darkness of barbarity . . . One
can refuse to play the game. A holding action can be fought. Alternatives must be kept
alive. While learning the slow art of revolutionary patience.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 84
373
“Learning the slow art of revolutionary patience, I listen to my family.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 98
RESISTANCE - THEMES
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RESPECT
If we cannot engage in respectful listening there can be no civil dialogue and without civil
dialogue we the people will simply become bullies and brutes, deaf to the truth that we are
standing on the edge of a political chasm that is beginning to crumble. We all stand to lose
ground. Democracy is an insecure landscape.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
If we cannot begin to embrace democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to
think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways . . . .
if we fail to see the necessity of each of us to participate in the formation of an ethical life .
. . if we cannot bring a sense of equity and respect into our homes, our marriages, our
schools, and our churches, alongside our local, state, and federal governments, then
democracy simply becomes, as Dewey suggests, “a form of idolatry,” as we descend into
the basement of nationalism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a
RESPECT
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RESPONSIBILITY
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
RESPONSIBILITY
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RESTRAINT
………
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
RESTRAINT
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SCIENCE
“In Silent Spring we . . . witness how a confluence of poetry and politics with sound
science can create an ethical stance toward life.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
“But perhaps Rachel Carson’s true courage lies in her willingness to align science with the
sacred, to admit that her bond toward nature is a spiritual one.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
“I write about what I know, and I am inspired by what I don’t know – which is enormous. I
believe in the longing for unity, that we may in fact be asking for a new way to think about
science in reality are asking for a new way to think about ourselves, that this yearning to
heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that separate us from
ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for unity has
everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
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SELF
…
Unspoken Hunger
“My connection to the natural world is my connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and
whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“By undressing, exposing, and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our
authentic selves. Stripped free from society’s oughts and shoulds, we emerge as
emancipated beings. The bear is free to roam.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
379
SERVICE, SACRIFICE
“There she is, the One Who Gives Birth. Something can pass through stone. I place one
hand on her belly and the other on mine. Desert Mothers, all of us, pregnant with
possibilities, in the service of life, domestic and wild; it is our freedom to choose how we
wish to live, labor, and sacrifice in the name of love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
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SILENCE, STILLNESS
Red
the “searing simplicity of form. You cannot help but be undone by its sensibility and light,
nothing extra. Before the stillness of sandstone cliffs, you stand still, equally bare.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.
There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is best retrieved in
solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
ringing
this
silence
This silence-our
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red,
--is the bedrock of
democracy.
“She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sound of water bursting through the silence
of the canyon.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Bowl,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 34-35
“These animals [tortoises] may live beyond one hundred years. They walk for miles largely
unnoticed carrying a stillness with them.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 91
The desert tortoise is still.
I suspect he hears my voice simply for what it is: human. The news and questions I
deliver are returned to me and somehow dissipate in the silence.
It is enough
to breathe, here, together.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 97
“The sun rose. There is a silence to creation. I stood and faced east, stretched upward,
stretched down, pressed my hands together.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 106-107
“I write from the stillness of night anticipating—always anticipating. I write to listen. I
write out of silence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 113
“I listen to the hum of dawn that exists below the silence. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 130
381
I want to learn the landscape of the desert, to be able to translate this landscape of
red into a landscape of heat that quickens the heart and gives courage to silence, a silence
that is heard.
I want to learn how to speak the language of red.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 138
“The flicker flies. A fire burns. Loves is as varied as the spectrum red. Break my heart with
the desert’s silence.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 140
This living would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of
stillness, a listener of wind where each dialect is not only heard but understood.
Can we imagine such a livelihood?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 141
“We do not trust slowness, silence, or stillness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 145
“To find one’s own equilibrium,” he tells me this morning by the river. “That is
what I want to learn.”
He finds rocks that stand on their own and bear the weight of others. An exercise in
balance and form. Downriver, I watch him place a thin slab of sandstone on a rock
pedestal, perfectly poised. He continues placing pebbles on top, testing the balance. In
another sculpture, he leans two flat rocks against each other like hands about to pray.
The stillness of stones, their silence, is a rest not against the music of the river.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 150
“The wide-open vistas that sustain our souls, the depth of silence that pushes us toward
sanity, return us to a kind of equilibrium. We stand steady on Earth. The external space I
see is the internal space I feel.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
“I stop. The silence that lives in these sacred hallways presses against me. I relax. I
surrender. I close my eyes. The arousal of my breath rises in me like music, like love, as
the possessive muscles between my legs tighten and release. I come to the rock in a
moment of stillness, giving and receiving, where there is no partition between my body
and the body of Earth.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Earth,” Red, 197
Refuge
“First stars appear. A crescent moon. I throw down my sleeping bag. The stillness of the
desert instructs me like a trail of light over water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 109
“Maybe it is not the darkness we fear most, but the silences contained within the darkness.
Maybe it is not the absence of the moon that frightens us, but the absence of what we
expect to be there. A wedge of long-billed curlews flying in the night punctuates the
silences and their unexpected calls remind us the only thing we can expect is change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 146
382
“But after midnight, silence. The depth and stillness of Great Salt Lake comes over the
wetlands like a mother’s calming hand. Morning approaches slowly, until each voice in the
marsh awakens.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
“We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they
are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—
it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of
Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 193
“Thomas Merton writes, ‘Silence is the strength of our interior life. . . . If we fill our lives
with silence, then we will live in hope.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 193
Mother finally says, “I just want to listen to the silence with you by my side.”
The fullness of silence. I am learning what this means. Mother and I have grown so
used to simply being, at times I find it difficult to speak.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 219
“Words had once again lost their urgency. Silence. That ringing silence. I sat by the side of
her bed and held her hand while the ice chips melted.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 219
Unspoken Hunger
“I saw him penetrate stillness with his senses.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 5
Isak Dinesen: “I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who
had come from a rushed and noisy world into still country.”
--quoted in Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 11
“Dam, dike, or drain any of them and somewhere, silence prevails. No water: no fish. No
water: no plants. No water: no life. Nothing breathes. The land-body becomes a corpse.
Stone Creek Woman crumbles and blows away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 71
“Who is witness to this full-bodied beauty? Who can withstand the recondite wisdom and
sonorous silence of wildness?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 120
“Who were these artists, these scribes? When were they here? And what did they witness?
Time has so little meaning in the center of the desert. The land holds a collective memory
in the stillness of open spaces. Perhaps our only obligation is to listen and remember.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 124
“Night in the Cabeza restores silence to the desert, that holy, intuitive silence. . . . . I
wonder how it is that in the midst of wild serenity we as a species choose to shatter it again
383
and again. Silence is our national security, our civil defense. By destroying silence, the
legacy of our deserts, we leave no room for peace, the deep peace that elevates and stirs
our souls. It is silence that rocks and awakens us to the truth of our dreams.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 124
Pieces of White Shell
“The silence was uncomfortable, almost unbearable, until it became a metaphor of how
one approaches the land: with silence, with patience, and with time. The children know.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 19
“Silence. I don’t want there to be: Silence. I want to talk, listen, share, spend entire
afternoons in womanly conversation about her life, mine. Somehow, I sense that a
thousand years do not separate us.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 127
Open Space of Democracy
I enter a trance; the mantra of mountains rises, range after range of naked rock and peaks. I
have no sense of time or scale, simply note this dynamic world that is both still and
passing.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 39a
I stand up and scan the hillside of dwarf birch and willow. Nothing. Nothing but stillness,
my own awareness now hungry for movement.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion,
We walk for several hours along the tundra shelf, talking very little. Such joy. How do we
return home without breaking these threads that bind us to life? How do we return our
gratitude for all we have seen? We stop and lie on our backs, side by side, watching the
clouds. A deep and abiding stillness passes through us. Our hands clasp.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47b
Others
I write from the stillness of night anticipating--always anticipating. I write to listen. I write
out of silence.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
Interviews
London: One of your great gifts as a writer is your ability to translate your experience of
nature into words. Yet nature seems to inspire in us not words but silence -- after all, that is
one of the most profound reasons for living close to nature, to get beyond words. Do you
find that sometimes the words get in the way?
Williams: That is so true, and I love what you just said about silence going beyond words.
And, who knows, hopefully there will come a time when I have no words, when I can
honor and hold that kind of stillness that I so need, crave, and desire in the natural world. I
think you are absolutely right. Isn't that intimacy? When you are with a landscape or a
human being where there is no need to speak, but simply to listen, to perceive, to feel. And
I worry... (I think I must be worried all the time -- maybe that is the other side of joy, you
know, holding that line of the full range of emotions.) But we are losing our sense of
silence in the world. …………
384
So, I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a
"conspiracy" against higher thoughts. If we can no longer see the stars, then where can our
thoughts travel to? So, I think there is much to preserve -- not just landscape, but the
qualities that are inherent in landscape, in wild places: silence, darkness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 6
“we need to sit at any table mindful of what it means to be silent. Our silence is also our
voice and our voice is also our silence. It depends on what a particular situation demands.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 10
385
SOCIAL & NATURE: FAMILY, COMMUNITY, & EARTH
“this yearning to heal the fragmentation and divisions that separate us from nature, that
separate us from ourselves, that separate us from God or the mysteries, that this longing for
unity has everything to do with family, with community and the landscape we are part of.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43-44
> all three together
Seeing Earth from space: “we recognize our home, our family, our community, and
therefore become fiercely accountable for the landscape that we are a part of. We can begin
to adopt an ethics of place.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 60-61
> all three together
What we share as human being is so much more than what separates us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 39b
For me, it is all about relationships.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 10 October
2004,
SOCIAL AND NATURE: FAMILY, COMMUNITY, & EARTH
386
SOCIAL VISION
Refuge
It’s not a bad model, cooperation in the name of community. Brigham Young tried
it. He called it the United Order.
The United Order was a heavenly scheme for a totally self-sufficient society based
on the framework of the Mormon Church. It was a seed of socialism planted by a
conservative people.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 99
“Lorenzo Snow was creating a community based on an ecological model: cooperation
among individuals within a set of defined interactions. Each person was operating within
their own ‘ecological niche,’ strengthening and sustaining the overall structure or
‘ecosystem.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 100
“The ecological model of the Brigham City Cooperative began to crumble. They were
forgetting one critical component: diversity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“History has shown us that exclusivity in the name of empire building eventually fails.
Fear of discord undermines creativity. And creativity lies at the heart of adaptive
evolution.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 102
“there is an organic difference between a system of self-sufficiency and a self-sustaining
system. One precludes diversity, the other necessitates it. Brigham Young’s United Order
wanted to be independent from the outside world. The Infinite Order of Pelicans suggests
there is no such thing.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 103
Perhaps it is time to give birth to a new idea, many new ideas.
Perhaps it is time to give birth to new institutions, to overhaul our religious,
political, legal, and educational systems that are no longer working for us.
Perhaps it is time to adopt a much needed code of ethics, one that will exchange the
sacred rights of humans for the rights of all beings on the planet.
We can begin to live differently.
We have choices before us, conscious choices, choices of conscience and
consequence, not in the name of political correctness, but ecological responsibility and
opportunity.
We can give birth to creation.
To labor in the name of social change. To bear down and push against the
constraints of our own self-imposed structures. To sacrifice in the name of an ecological
imperative. To be broken open to a new way of being.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 159-160
Unspoken Hunger
387
“By undressing, exposing, and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our
authentic selves. Stripped free from society’s oughts and shoulds, we emerge as
emancipated beings. The bear is free to roam.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“If we choose to follow the b ear, we will be saved from a distractive and domesticated
life. The bear becomes our mentor. We must journey out, so that we might journey in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
388
SOLITUDE, SOLITARY, ALONE
Red
“I believe that spiritual resistance—the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions
when everything around us asks us to concede—that our capacity to face the harsh
measures of a life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks.
There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the earth. It is best retrieved in
solitude amidst the stillness of days in the desert.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
Refuge
Mother: “The gift of being alone. I can never get enough.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 15
The mother: “Those days on the river were a meditation, a renewal. I found my strength in
its solitude. It is with me now.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
“I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my
mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There
are other languages being spoke by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to
consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see
ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no
more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My
serenity surfaces in my solitude.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
Letter from Mother to Terry: “More and more, I am realizing the natural world is my
connection to myself. Landscape brings me simplicity. . . . I find my peace, my solitude, in
the time I am alone in nature. . . . The natural world is a third party in our marriage. It
holds us close and lets us revel in the intimacy of all that is real.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 86-87
“Each of us must face our own Siberia,” she says. “We must come to peace within our own
isolation. No one can rescue us. My cancer is my Siberia.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 93
“On a day like today when the air is dry and smells of salt, I have found my open space,
my solitude, and sky. And I have found the birds who require it.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 147
“There is something unnerving about my solitary travels around the northern stretches of
Great Salt Lake. I am never entirely at ease because I am aware of its will. Its mood can
change in minutes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“You stand in the throbbing silence of the Great Basin, exposed and alone. . . . Only the
land’s mercy and a calm mind can save my soul. And it is here I find grace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
389
I say a silent prayer for the curlew, remembering the bond of two days before when
I sat in their valley nurtured by solitude. I ask the curlew for cinnamon-barred feathers and
take them.
They do not come easily.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 151
… A meteor flashed and as quickly disappeared. The waves continued to hiss and
retreat, hiss and retreat.
In the West Desert of the Great Basin, I was not alone.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 190
“There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets hover like angels. It is a cave near the
lake where water bubbles up from inside the earth. I am hidden and saved from the outside
world. Leaning against the back wall of the cave, the curve of the rock supports the curve
of my spine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237
Unspoken Hunger
Shells: “They remind me of my natural history, that I was tutored by a woman who courted
solitude and made pilgrimages to the edges of our continent in the name of her own
pleasure, that beauty, awe, and curiosity were values illuminated in our own house.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 15
“As a writer and a woman with obligations to both family and community, I have tried to
adopt this ritual in the balancing of a public and private life. We are at home in the deserts
and mountains, as well as in our dens. Above ground in the abundance of spring and
summer, I am available. Below ground in the deepening of autumn and winter, I am not. I
need hibernation in order to create.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 58
On Stone Creek Woman: “But in the solitude of that side canyon where I swam at her feet,
she reminds me we must stand vigilant.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 72
“I allow myself to struggle with the obligations of a public life and the spiritual necessity
for a private one.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 133
Others
What will we make of the life before us? How do we translate the gifts of solitary beauty
into the action required for true participatory citizenship?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 42a
I write in a solitude born out of community.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
Interviews
390
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
FINCH: Let me play devil’s advocate a minute. Aren’t you sort of being an aesthetic elitist?
I mean you simply don’t want to see the signs of civilization that you depend on. . . . you
want something different from where it is you have to live.
WILLIAMS: See, I don’t think it is elitist. I think what’s elitist is private land. Wilderness is
public land in the most profound sense. It’s there for everyone.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 58
391
SONG
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
This is the secret den of my healing, where I come to whittle down my losses. I
carve chevrons, the simple image of birds, on rabbit bones cleaned by eagles. And I sing
without the embarrassment of being heard.
The men in my family have migrated south for one year to lay pipe in southern
Utah.
My keening is for my family, fractured and displaced.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 237-238
> note she say the men have “migrated”
“I pray to birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray
to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—
the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of
what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to
listen.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
In Mexico on the Day of the Dead. “Songs were sung. More prayers were offered. And
slowly my individual sorrow was absorbed into a sea of collective tears. We all wept.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 277
Mimi talking about Nancy Holt. “She camped at a site for tend days and, at that time,
wondered if she could stay in the desert that long. After a few days, she located a particular
sound within the land and began to chant. This song became her connection to the Great
Salt Lake desert. She told me she fluctuated from feeling very small to feeling very
expansive. I remember her words, ‘I became like the ebb and flow of light inside the
tunnels.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 268-269
Unspoken Hunger
“The umbilical cord between man and earth has not been severed here. The Maasai
pasture their cattle next to leopard and lion. They know the songs of grasses and the script
of snakes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 4
“These wetlands did not sparkle and sing. They were moribund.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 43
392
SORROW, LONELINESS, GRIEF
Leap
Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the
bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I cam to Spain to get away from my
torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for
development.
There are too many of us, six billion and rising, our collective impact on fragile
communities is deadly.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Leap, 115
Refuge
I knelt down and scooped up a handful. Microscopic animals and a myriad of
larvae drained from my hands. Within seconds, the marsh in microcosm slipped through
my fingers.
I was not prepared for the loneliness that followed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 41
I love to watch gulls soar over the Great Basin. It is another trick of the lake to lure
gulls inland. On days such as this, when my would has been wrenched, the simplicity of
flight and form above the lake untangles my grief.
“Glide” the gulls write in the sky—and, for a few brief moments, I do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 75
Mother: “Maybe I have never been allowed to grieve. Maybe I have never allowed myself
to grieve.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 154
Father can’t hunt any more. “For the men in my family, their grief has become their
compassion.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 251
“I realize months afterward that my grief is much larger than I could ever have imagined.
The headless snake without its rattles, the slaughtered birds, even the pumped lake and the
flooded desert, become extensions of my family. Grief dares us to love once more.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 252
In Mexico on the Day of the Dead. “Songs were sung. More prayers were offered. And
slowly my individual sorrow was absorbed into a sea of collective tears. We all wept.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 277
393
SOUND
…
Unspoken Hunger
shells: “they held the voice of the sea, a primal sound imprinted on me as a baby.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 14
394
SOURCE
“I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful
of the animals that we are . . . an animal who understands a sense of humility when
watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs . . . an animal
who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes . . . an animal who has not forgotten
what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the
source of all true visions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187
Quote from another “When a boy is beaten for an inappropriate act, the boy falls to the
ground and clutches a handful of grass. His elder takes this gesture as a sign of humility.
The child remembers where the source of his power lies.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 12
395
SPEAK
Power may be a game of power and money to those who have it, but for those of us who
don’t, politics is the public vehicle by which we exercise our voices within a democratic
society.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
At the end of Camus’s essay, he states, “He who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool,
he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only
honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more
powerful than munitions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
To commence. To begin.
To comment. To discuss.
To commend. To praise and entrust.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
To commit to the open space of democracy is to begin to make room for conversations
that can move us toward a personal diplomacy. By personal diplomacy, I mean a fleshand-blood encounter with public process that is not an abstraction but grounded in real
time and space with people we have to face in our own hometowns. It’s not altogether
pleasant and there is no guarantee as to the outcome. Boos and cheers come in equal
measure.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 25
Democracy depends on engagement, a firsthand accounting of what one sees, what one
feels, and what one thinks, followed by the artful practice of expressing the truth of our
times through our own talents, gifts, and vocations.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
Question. Stand. Speak. Act.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
SPEAK
396
SPIRIT, SOUL
Red
“reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our
psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“There was a woman who left the city, her family, her children, left everything behind to
retrieve her soul.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Bowl,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 32
List of wilderness areas. “What do these places . . . have to say to us about the erosion and
uplift of our souls and imagination?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 68
“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of
mirages because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life
is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have
moved on.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
“Wilderness courts our souls.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77
“For those of us who so love these lands in Utah, who recognize America’s Redrock
Wilderness as a sanctuary for the preservation of our souls, Senate Bill 884, the Utah
Public Lands Management Act of 1995, is the beginning of this forgetting, a forgetting we
may never reclaim.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“The redrock desert of southern Utah teaches me over and over again: red endures. Let it
not be my rage or anger that endures, but a passion for the bloodroot country of my
burning soul that survives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 138
“Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I
believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between
revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to
sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk
parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of
southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work,
work that matters to the soul of the community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 140
“Wind is spirit made manifest.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wind,” Red, 151
397
“The wide-open vistas that sustain our souls, the depth of silence that pushes us toward
sanity, return us to a kind of equilibrium. We stand steady on Earth. The external space I
see is the internal space I feel.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158
Refuge
“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of
mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life
is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as testament of spirits that have
moved on.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 148
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ When I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
“I am reminded that what I adore, admire, and draw from Mother is inherent in the Earth.
My Mother’s spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of
mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, her warmth, and her breath, even her arms
around me—are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 214
“In my heart I say, “Let go . . . let go . . . follow the light . . .” There is a crescendo of
movement, like walking up a pyramid of light. And it is sexual, the concentration of love,
of being fully present. Pure feeling. Pure color. I can feel her spirit rising through the top
of her head. Her eyes focus on mine with total joy—a fullness that transcends words.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 231
Unspoken Hunger
“Anticipation is another gift for travelers in unfamiliar territory. It quickens the spirit. The
contemplation of the unseen world; imagination piqued in consideration of animals.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 6
O’Keefe: “she was a woman painter among men. Although she resisted the call of gender
separation and in many ways embodied an androgynous soul, she was not without political
savvy and humor on the subject. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 20
“I find myself being mentored by the land once again, as two great blue herons fly over
me. Their wingbeats are slow, so slow they remind me that, all around, energy is being
conserved. I too can bring my breath down to dwell in a deeper place where my blood-soul
restores to my body what society has drained and dredged away.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 62
398
STORY
Red
How are we to find our way toward conversation [about conservation issues]?
For me, the answer has always been through story. Story bypasses rhetoric and
pierces the heart. Story offers a wash of images and emotion that returns us to our highest
and deepest selves, where we remember what it means to be human, living in place with
our neighbors.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 3
Navajo: “The stories they told animated the country, made the landscape palpable and the
people accountable to the health of the land. . . .”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“What stories do we tell that evoke a sense of place?”
“How do the stories we tell about ourselves in relationship to place shape our perceptions
of place? Is there room for retelling our own creation stories, even Genesis?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 4
“These astonishing formations invite a new mythology for desert goers, one that
acknowledges the power of story and ritual yet lies within the integrity of our own
cultures. . . . It is the story, always the story, that precedes and follows the journey.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 24
Refuge
John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The
experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community.”
I think of my family stories—Mother’s in particular—how much I need them now,
how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds
die with them.
The same could be said of each passing whale.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 175
Unspoken Hunger
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“We are capable of harboring both these response to life in the relentless power of
our love. As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are
wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and
fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words
grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems.
399
By allowing ourselves to undress, expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit
our vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage—the courage that allows us to write on behalf
of the earth, on behalf of ourselves.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 59
Pieces of White Shell
“But there are major differences, primarily in the stories we tell and the way in which we
walk upon the earth. It is here that I am most aware of leaving my own culture and entering
another. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot. There are risks, I know. My feet have been
cut many times, but I am learning to pay attention.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
> symbol of engagement, or entering
“Navajo stories have been my guides across the desert. I have trusted them because I could
find no others. They are rooted in native soil. To these people they are sacred. Truth. To
me, they are beacons in a nation suspicious of nature.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
“A story grows from the inside out and the inside of Navajoland is something I know little
of. But I do know myself and if I begin traveling with an awareness of my own ignorance,
trusting my instincts, I can look for my own stories embedded in the landscapes I travel
through.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 3
> symbol of engagement, or entering
“A story allows us to envision the possibility of things. It draws on the powers of memory
and imagination. It awakens us to our surroundings. . . . It is here, by our own participation
in nature, that we pick up clues to an awareness of what a story is.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 4
“Storytelling is the oldest form of education.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 4
“I am not suggesting we emulate Native Peoples—in this case, the Navajo. We can’t. We
are not Navajo. Besides, their traditional stories don’t work for us. It’s like drinking
another man’s medicine. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can
teach us what is possible. We must create and find our own stories, our own myths, with
symbols that will bind us to the world as we see it today. In so doing, we will better know
how to live our lives in the midst of change.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 5
“I offer you a sampling of the Navajo voice, of my voice, and the voice of the land that
moves us. We are told a story and then we tell our own. Each us harbors a homeland. The
stories that are rooted there push themselves up like native grasses and crack the
sidewalks.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 8
“Stories. Everyone, everything carries a story. A story brings life and definition to the
mundane. It animates and enthralls.”
400
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 14
“Oral tradition reminds one of community and community in the Native American sense
encompasses all life forms: people, land, and creatures. Barry Lopez extends this notion
when he says, ‘The correspondence between the interior landscape and exterior landscape
is story.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell, 135
Others
All sound requires patience; not just the ability to hear, but the capacity to listen, the
awareness of mind to discern a story. A magpie flies toward me and disappears in the oak
thicket. He is relentless in his cries. What does he know that I do not? What story is he
telling? I love these birds, their long iridescent tail feathers, their undulations in flight. Two
more magpies join him. I sit on a flat boulder to rest, pick up two stones and begin striking
edges.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Listening Days”
Interviews
TL: One of your early books, Pieces of Whiteshell, is set in the Navajo nation. What did
you learn from the Navajo? How did your experience with them influence your direction as
a writer?
TTW: One of the things I learned from the Dine when I taught on the Navajo Reservation
was the power of stories inherent in the land. It made me wonder as Anglos, what stories
we tell that evoke a sense of place, of landscape and community. Again, we have much to
learn from Indian people and the long-time Hispanic families who have inhabited these
regions in the West for centuries about what it means to live in place.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
I can tell you that in Refuge the question that was burning in me was, How do we find
refuge in change? Everything around me that was familiar had been turned inside out with
my mother's diagnosis of ovarian cancer and with the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge
being flooded. With Pieces of White Shell, it was, What stories do we tell that evoke a
sense of place? With An Unspoken Hunger it was really, How do we engage in
community? Am I an artist or am I an activist? So it was, How does a poetics of place
translate into a politics of place? And in A Desert Quartet the question that was burning
inside me was a very private one: How might we make love to the land?
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1-2
“Story is the umbilical cord between the past, present, and future; it keeps things known.
Story becomes the conscience of the community, it belongs to everyone.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Bartkevicius & Hussmann interview, 21
“the essential element of legacy is story, the umbilical cord that connects the past, present,
and future. When you tell a story it’s as though a third person has entered the room, and
you become accountable for that sacred knowledge. Story binds us to community. Part of
the reason I could write Refuge, which is so intensely personal, is my belief that inside
story the personal is transformed into the general, the universal. Story becomes the
conscience of our communities.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 122-123
401
SUFFERING
……….
It occurred to me, over the many weeks that it took me to respond to Senator Bennett's
letter, that what mattered most to me was not what I was willing to die for, but what I was
willing to give my life to. In war, death by belief is centered on principles both activated
and extinguished in the drama of a random moment. Heroes are buried. A legacy of
freedom is maintained through pain. Life by belief is centered on the day-to-day
decisions we make that are largely unseen. One produces martyrs born out of violence. The
other produces quiet citizens born out of personal commitments toward social change.
Both dwell in the hallowed ground of sacrifice.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 23
Suffering comes, we do not have to create it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
SUFFERING
402
TERRORISM
If we only see the West as a place where there's money to be made, a place to subdivide, to
drill for oil and gas, we will lose the very thing that makes us westerners and Americans.
We have forgotten the option of restraint, whether we're talking about our response to
terrorism, or about growth and development.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: Do you feel hopeful that we might learn something at this terrible time?
TTW: It is no longer the survival of the fittest but the survival of compassion -- to extend
our humanity to include honor and respect for plants, animals, rocks, rivers and air.
It feels like we're awake as a nation for the first time in a long time. We haven't been
awake, not conscious of our connection to the world. There's an exquisite tenderness right
now, and that is a gift.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: Why the need for wilderness?
TTW: Wild country is so essential to our psychology. The context of our lives has shifted.
We're feeling things, seeing things differently. My first impulse when I got home from
Washington, when I saw the Wasatch mountains, I just burst into tears. My husband and I
got into the car and drove up to the Tetons. We went on this trail that we've hiked for 20
years. The sound of sirens that were screaming in my psyche were replaced by bugling elk.
It was so powerful to understand what sustains us in time of terror and times of calm as
well. Wild lands remind us what it means to be human, what it means to be connected to
something larger than ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: What priority do we assign conservation of wild lands given the current emphasis on
international affairs and national defense?
TTW: I think wild lands have never been more important than they are now. They are also
more threatened as a result of the events of Sept. 11. Just today, a senator from Arkansas
was trying to tie the President's energy bill to the bill for the war effort. America's Red
Rock Wilderness is threatened by the urgency to dig for gas and oil. Right now, right on
the boundary of Canyonlands, there are huge machines, trucks with massive tires,
thumping the land to test it for gas preserves. There are assumptions that we are now at
war and environmental and ecological integrity no longer matters. We're going to have to
be very strong, very smart, very certain in our cause.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: Just how serious is the threat to designated wilderness posed by the Bush
administration?
TTW: I think it's an enormous threat. When you look at the oil and gas interests that
fueled Bush's campaign, it's a whole different orientation to what we saw in the Clinton
administration. They have a viewpoint about how the land should be used, and that
translates to exploitation of natural resources to fuel the economy. The agenda of the Bush
administration, set prior to Sept. 11, has just been accentuated in the name of patriotism.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: What can we do to raise the issue to a level of national importance?
403
TTW: We need to remember that there are other definitions of natural resources, like
courage and beauty. Those of us who believe in the value of wilderness are going to have
to get stronger and stronger. There will be a time when speaking out about the environment
is going to be seen as anti-patriotic. Maybe we will have to create a new vocabulary. It's
not them and us, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals; it's all of us
trying to survive and live together on Earth.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: Yes, there's been so much talk about freedom and our shared values, but very little
talk about the greatness of the land.
TTW: Talk about symbols of freedom! Unagitated landscapes! I think it's going to become
even more powerful to us now, when we realize what kind of police state we're likely to
become. I'm hopeful, though, and I am constantly amazed. I find that some of the most
interesting things in the newspaper post-Sept. 11 are the post scripts, the asides. The other
day there was a statement by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, whose policies I
normally don't agree with. But she made a point of saying to the American people that the
national parks and the wildlife refuges were now open to the public. She pointed out that
they are powerful symbols of freedom for this nation and urged people to visit the national
parks at this dark time. Then there was a little piece about a group of lobbyists from Alaska
stranded in Washington. They were saying that the conservation community in Alaska
were trying not to refer to the wildlife refuge as Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or
AFWR. They only refer to it as the refuge. I think these are the kinds of small things that
we can do to change the discussion, to turn it into a slightly different discussion. We need
to talk about how wildness, wilderness is a deeply held value in America. Look at the
effect of the American landscape on literature. Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea;
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The power of landscape looms large when you look at
the American tradition in literature, for example.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 4-5
404
TIME
Red
Desert as teacher.
Desert as mirage.
Desert as illusion, largely our own.
What you come to see on the surface is not what you come to know. Emptiness in
the desert is the fullness of space, a fullness of space that eliminates time. The desert is
time, exposed time, geologic time. One needs time in the desert to see.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 5-6
To move through wild country in the desert or in the woods is to engage in a
walking meditation, a clearing of the mind, where we remember what we have so easily
lost.
Time.
Time and space.
The shape of time and space are different in wilderness. Time is something
encountered through the senses not imposed upon the mind. We walk, we sit, we eat, we
sleep, we look, we smell, we touch, we hear, we taste our own feral nature. What we know
in a wild place is largely translated through the body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185-186
“I dissolve. I am water. Only my face is exposed like an apparition over ripples. Playing
with water. Do I dare? My legs open. The rushing water turns my body and touches me
with a fast finger that does not tire. I receive without apology. Time. Nothing to rush, only
to feel. I feel time in me. It is endless pleasure in the current. No control. No thought.
Simply, here. . . . my body mixes with the body of the water like jazz, the currents like
jazz. I too am free to improvise.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 201-202
Refuge
“I am suspended between the past and future, held by a spider’s filament stretched across
a river.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 161
“From one until four in the afternoon, we sat near her. A meditation. Her breaths could
now be heard as moans. Her eyes were haunting, open, and clear. Time was suspended like
watching a fire. Gradually, Mother’s breaths became a mantra and the death mask we
feared was removed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 229
Others
Love is nurtured through time. Time is what we lack. On the Canning River, time is all we
have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44b
405
TRANQUILITY, PEACE, SERENITY, CALM
Red
“my spirit is shrinking in direct proportion to the shrinking landscape and vista. As
wildness disappears, so does my peace of mind. I can no longer live here in joy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” 118
“I love sitting by the river. A deep calm washes over me in the face of this fluid continuity
where it always appears the same, yet I know each moment of the Rio Colorado is new.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 148
Refuge
“I know the solitude my mother speaks of. It is what sustains me and protects me from my
mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There
are other languages being spoke by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to
consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see
ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no
more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My
serenity surfaces in my solitude.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 29
“We drifted for hours. Merging with salt water and sky so completely, we were resolved,
dissolved, in peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 78
Letter from Mother to Terry: “More and more, I am realizing the natural world is my
connection to myself. Landscape brings me simplicity. . . . I find my peace, my solitude, in
the time I am alone in nature. . . . The natural world is a third party in our marriage. It
holds us close and lets us revel in the intimacy of all that is real.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 86-87
“Each of us must face our own Siberia,” she says. “We must come to peace within our own
isolation. No one can rescue us. My cancer is my Siberia.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 93
Unspoken Hunger
“Night in the Cabeza restores silence to the desert, that holy, intuitive silence. . . . . I
wonder how it is that in the midst of wild serenity we as a species choose to shatter it again
and again. Silence is our national security, our civil defense. By destroying silence, the
legacy of our deserts, we leave no room for peace, the deep peace that elevates and stirs
our souls. It is silence that rocks and awakens us to the truth of our dreams.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 124
Open Space of Democracy
It is difficult to find peace. I am torn between my anger and my empathy. And then I go
for a walk. My balance returns. I calm down, breathe, and allow for deep listening to
occur.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 24
406
As the Brooks Range recedes behind us, I am mindful that Mardy is approaching 101 years
of age. She has never shed her optimism for wild Alaska. I am half her age and my niece,
Abby, is half of mine. We share her passion for this order of quiet freedom. America's
wildlands are vulnerable and they will always be assailable as long as what we value in
this nation is measured in monetary terms, not spiritual ones.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
In the open space of democracy, we engage the qualities of inquiry, intuition, and love as
we become a dynamic citizenry, unafraid to exercise our shared knowledge and power.
We can dissent. We can vote. We can step forward in times of terror with a confounding
calm that will shatter fear and complacency.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57b
Interviews
“there is a place of peace—even if it’s a square foot of an empty lot, a garden, or the sky at
night. There is something beyond which will hold us in all of life’s ambiguity. I choose to
court the mysteries. I don’t think there is such a thing as security, but I know my home and
I know my land, and as long as I live, I will stand my ground in the places I love.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
“To be able to have that core of serenity in the middle of huge oscillations; to be present in
those waves and emotional tides, but to possess a solidarity of soul. That’s what I would
like to hold for myself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 314
“The natural world has become a practice, a teaching, the place where I can make peace
with my own contradictory nature, the place where we all can make peace with our own
contradictory natures.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 43
407
TRANSCENDENTALISM
Lives change at this university. Mine did. I remember the moment. The class was
American Romanticism. The professor was Dr. William Mulder. He introduced us to
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson. It was in this
course, I realized, "Yes, I am a Mormon, but I am really a Transcendentalist."
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 20b
TRANSCENDENTALISM
408
TRANSFORMATION, CHANGE IN OURSELVES
I do not believe we can look for leadership beyond ourselves. I do not believe we can wait
for someone or something to save us from our global predicaments and obligations. I need
to look in the mirror and ask this of myself: If I am committed to seeing the direction of
our country change, how must I change myself?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 58a-b
This is what our community is in need of now. Fire. Fire that wakes us up. Fire that
transforms where we are. Fire to see our way through the dark. Fire as illumination. We
witness from the front porches of our homes the exhilaration of pushing an idea over the
edge until it ignites a community, and we can never look at Parriott Mesa again without
remembering the way it was sold, the way a sign disappeared and reappeared in Arches
National Park, the way the community bought the land back through the gift of
anonymity, and the breathing space it now holds as the red rock cornerstone of Castle
Valley.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
TRANSFORMATION, CHANGE IN OURSELVES
409
TRUTH
GROUND TRUTHING: The use of a ground survey to confirm findings of aerial imagery or to
calibrate quantitative aerial observations; validation and verification techniques used on
the ground to support maps; walking the ground to see for oneself if what one has been
told is true; near surface discoveries.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 38
TRUTH
410
UNCERTAINTY
Democracy is built upon the right to be insecure. We are vulnerable. And we are
vulnerable together.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others.
This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be
loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is
all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the
presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
On this magical night, we watch in wonder and awe as young people climb, carrying wood
on their backs, and lay down their burdens, striking the match, blowing on embers, fanning
the flames with great faith and joy. Fire. Fire in freefall, over the cliff, reminding us all
what is primal and fleeting. We cannot know what lies ahead. We may be unsure how to
bring our prayers forward. But on this night in the desert, we celebrate this cascading river
of beauty.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 59b
UNCERTAINTY
411
VIGILANCE
These lands “will not remain ecologically intake without our own vigilance, without our
willingness to protect what is wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“May you recall the transformative power of wildness and remember it survives only
through vigilance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
On Stone Creek Woman: “But in the solitude of that side canyon where I swam at her feet,
she reminds me we must stand vigilant.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 72
Mardy Murie: “You know somebody has to be alert all the time. We must watch Congress
daily.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mardy Murie,” Unspoken Hunger, 91
412
VISION
“individuals who care for the rocks will find openings—large openings—that become
passageways into the unseen world, where music is heard through doves’ wings and
wisdom is gleaned in the tails of lizards.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25
“Is it possible to make a living by simply watching light? Monet did. Vermeer did. I
believe Vincent did too. They painted light in order to witness the dance between
revelation and concealment, exposure and darkness. Perhaps this is what I desire most, to
sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone or simply to walk
parallel with a path of liquid light called the Colorado River. In the canyon country of
southern Utah, these acts of attention are not merely the pastimes of artists, but daily work,
work that matters to the soul of the community.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 140
“Boredom could catch up with me. But it never does, only the music, river music, the
continual improvisation of water. Perhaps the difference between repetition and boredom
lies in our willingness to believe in surprise, the subtle shifts of form that loom large in a
trained and patient eye.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “River Music,” Red, 149
Let me tease another word from the heart of a nation: sacrifice. Not to bear children
may be its own form of sacrifice. How do I explain my love of children, yet our decision
not to give birth to a child? Perhaps it is about sharing. I recall watching my niece, Diane,
nine years old, on her stomach, eye to eye with a lizard; neither moved while
contemplating the other. In the sweetness of that moment, I felt the curvature of my heart
become the curvature of Earth, the circle of family complete. Diane bears the name of my
mother and wears my DNA as closely as my daughter would.
Must the act of birth be seen only as a replacement for ourselves? Can we not also
conceive of birth as an act of the imagination, giving body to a new way of seeing? Do
children need to be our own to be loved as our own?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 158-159
413
VOICE OF THE LAND, LISTEN TO THE LAND, DIALOGUE WITH THE LAND
…..
Open Space of Democracy
The land speaks to us through gestures. What we share as human being is so much more
than what separates us.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 39b
If we listen to the land, we will know what to do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 39b
Out of our shock, anger, and affection for each other, the Castle Rock Collaboration (CRC)
was formed. We had no money. We had no power. We had only our shared love of home
and a desire for dialogue with the open spaces that defined our town.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 53a
The Castle Rock Collaboration is an exercise in bedrock democracy. We are dedicated to
the process of listening to the land and each other, exploring what we want our future to
be, working together to minimize the pressures of growth, ensuring the health and majesty
of this pocket of peace we call home.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 53a
If we listen to the land, we will know what to do.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
VOICE OF THE LAND, LISTEN TO THE LAND, DIALOGUE WITH THE LAND
414
VULNERABILITY, INSECURE
Democracy is built upon the right to be insecure. We are vulnerable. And we are
vulnerable together.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Commencement,” 22
“We are vulnerable, and we are vulnerable together”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Online journal 24 October 2004
As the Brooks Range recedes behind us, I am mindful that Mardy is approaching 101 years
of age. She has never shed her optimism for wild Alaska. I am half her age and my niece,
Abby, is half of mine. We share her passion for this order of quiet freedom. America's
wildlands are vulnerable and they will always be assailable as long as what we value in
this nation is measured in monetary terms, not spiritual ones.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
The heart is the house of empathy whose door opens when we receive the pain of others.
This is where bravery lives, where we find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be
loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is
all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the
presence of power. Our power lies in our love of our homelands.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
Democracy is an insecure landscape and today it feels more so. . . . I was looking
forward to addressing the students in the spirit of conversation and discussion what
engagement within a vibrant democracy means.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” opening
sentence in a letter to President Merwin
We are vulnerable, and we are vulnerable together.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Open Space of Democracy Tour Online Journal,” 24 October
2004,
VULNERABILITY
415
WALKING
“Walking in wilderness becomes a meditation. . . . I walked intuitively.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 55
416
WHOLE
What do we wish for?
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human,
what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 75
“They had sung themselves back to hozho, where the world is balanced and whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Lion’s Eyes, Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 31
“To be in relation to everything around us, above us, below us, earth, sky, bones, blood,
flesh, is to see the world whole, even holy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
“My connection to the natural world is my connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and
whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“She is a woman who has exhibited—through her marriage, her children, her writing, and
her activism—that a whole life is possible.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mardy Murie,” Unspoken Hunger, 90
When I ask Carol to describe the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in one word, she doesn't
hesitate. "Wholeness," she says. I am in the back of the boat with her as she steers us
ahead to our last camp.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46a
Within the refuge, if I rotate slowly in place, what I see is a circumference of continuity.
What I feel is a spiritual cohesion born out of wholeness. It is organic, cellular. I am at
home in the peace of an intact world. The open space of democracy is not interested in
hierarchies but in networks and systems where power is circular, not linear; a power
reserved not for an entitled few, but shared and maintained by many. Public lands are
our public commons and they belong to everyone. We enter these sacred lands soulfully
and remember what it is we have forgotten -- the gift of time and space. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge is the literal open space of democracy. The privilege of being
here is met with the responsibility I feel to experience and express its compounding grace.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions.
Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just
our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough
resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up -- ever -trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living
democracy?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 57a
WHOLENESS
417
WILD, WILDERNESS
Red
“reminding us through its blood red grandeur just how essential wild country is to our
psychology, how precious the desert is to the soul of America.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“May you recall the transformative power of wildness and remember it survives only
through vigilance.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 17
And there are those who are saying, very thoughtfully, that it will only be by
eliminating our desire to set land aside as ‘wilderness’ that we can begin to regard all
landscapes with respect and dignity.
I understand these points of discussion. In an ideal world, a world we might well
inhabit one day, we may not need to ‘designate’ wilderness, so evolved will be our
collective land ethic, our compassion for all manner of life, so responsive and whole. . . . I
pray there will indeed come a time, when our lives regarding the domestic and the wild
will be seamless.
But we are not there yet.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 18
Coyote “knows that sunburned flesh is better than a tanned hide, that days spent in the
desert are days soaking up strength. . . . Coyote knows that it is the days spent in wildness
that counts in urbane savvy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25
“The next thing we’ll hear is that the locals want to preserve the wilderness for its poetry.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Buried Poems,” Red, 42
“These wildlands are alive.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 69
“The Colorado Plateau is wild. There is still wilderness here, big wilderness. Wilderness
holds an original presence giving expression to that which we lack, the losses we long to
recover, the absences we seek to fill. Wilderness revises the memory of unity. Through its
protection, we can find faith in our humanity.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 69
What do we wish for?
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human,
what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 75
“Wilderness is both the bedrock lands of southern Utah and a metaphor of ‘unlimited
possibility.’ The question must be asked, ‘How can we cut ourselves off from the very
source of our creation?’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 75
418
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ walking in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ And when I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 77-78
“Without a philosophy of wildness and the recognition of its inherent spiritual values, we
will, as E. O. Wilson reminds us, ‘descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how
much the natural world means to us.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Statement,” Red, 78
“We raise clenched fists to the wind. We are still afraid of wildness: wild places, wild acts,
wild thoughts.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Wild Act,” Red, 103
There is an image of woman in the desert, her back arched as her hands lift her body up
from black rocks. Naked. She spreads her legs over a boulder etched by the Ancient Ones;
a line of white lightning zigzags from her mons pubis. She if perfectly in place, engaged,
ecstatic, and wild. This is Judy Dater’s photograph “Self-Portrait with Petroglyphs.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Erotic Landscape,” Red, 104
“I write as a bow to wilderness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 113
“my spirit is shrinking in direct proportion to the shrinking landscape and vista. As
wildness disappears, so does my peace of mind. I can no longer live here in joy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 118
Essay: “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 174ff
There are those within the academy who have recently criticized ‘the wilderness
idea’ as a holdover from our colonial past, a remnant of Calvinist tradition that separates
human beings from the natural world and ignores concerns of indigenous people. They
suggest that wilderness advocates are deceiving themselves, that they are merely holding
on to a piece of America’s past, that they are devoted to an illusory and ‘static past,’ that
they are apt to ‘adopt too high a standard for what counts as ‘natural.”’ These scholars see
themselves as one who ‘have inherited the wilderness idea’ and are responding as ‘EuroAmerican men’ within a ‘cultural legacy . . . patriarchal Western civilization in its current
postcolonial, globally hegemonic form.’
I hardly know what that means.
If wilderness is a ‘human construct,’ how do we take it out of the abstract, and into
the real? How do we begin to extend our notion of community to include all life-forms so
that these political boundaries will no longer be necessary? How can that which nurtures
evolution, synonymous with adaptation and change, be considered static? Whom do we
trust in matters of compassion and reverence for life?
I believe that consideration of wilderness as an idea and wilderness as a place must
begin with conscience.
419
I come back to Leopold’s notion of ‘intellectual humility,’ We are not alone on this
planet, even though our behavior at times suggests otherwise. Our minds are meaningless
in the face of one perfect avalanche or flash flood or forest fire. Our desires are put to rest
when we surrender to a grizzly bear, a rattlesnake, or goshawk defending its nest. To step
aside is an act of submission, to turn back an act of admission, that other beings can and
will take precedence when we meet them on their own wild terms. The manic pace of our
modern lives can be brought into balance by simply giving in to the silence of the desert,
the pounding of a Pacific surf, the darkness and brilliance of a night sky far away from a
city.
Wilderness is a place of humility.
Humility is a place of wilderness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
179-181
After defeat of dam on Green River: “The preservation and protection of wilderness
became part of our sacred responsibility, a responsibility that each generation will carry.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red, 182
“These wildlands matter. Call them places of Original Mind where an authentic sensibility
can evolve. Wild country offers us perspective and gravity, even in an erosional landscape
like the Colorado Plateau.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185
To move through wild country in the desert or in the woods is to engage in a
walking meditation, a clearing of the mind, where we remember what we have so easily
lost.
Time.
Time and space.
The shape of time and space are different in wilderness. Time is something
encountered through the senses not imposed upon the mind. We walk, we sit, we eat, we
sleep, we look, we smell, we touch, we hear, we taste our own feral nature. What we know
in a wild place is largely translated through the body.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 185-186
“I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful
of the animals that we are . . . an animal who understands a sense of humility when
watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs . . . an animal
who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes . . . an animal who has not forgotten
what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the
source of all true visions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187
“Wildness is a deeply American value.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 188
“We, too, can humbly raise our hands with those who have gone before and those who will
follow. Hand on rock. We remember what we have forgotten, what we can reclaim in
wildness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 188
420
“To protect the wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause
between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness
lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wild Mercy,” Red, 215
"The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our
own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we
might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect
what is gentle. Perhaps the wildness we fear is the pause between our heartbeats, the silent
space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy in
our hands."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 215
Refuge
“And if the natural world was assigned spiritual values, then those days spent in wildness
were sacred. We learned at an early age that God can be found wherever you are,
especially outside.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 14
I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of
Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it
won’t matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined.
Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, “I am not what you
see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions.”
We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me
experience is all we have.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 92
“Wilderness courts our souls. When I sat in church throughout my growing years, I
listened to teachings about Christ in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights,
reclaiming his strength, where he was able to say to Satan, ‘Get thee hence.’ When I
imagined Joseph Smith kneeling in a grove of trees as he received his vision to create a
new religion, I believed their sojourns into nature were sacred. Are ours any less?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 149
Once out at the lake, I am free. Native. Wind and waves are like African drums
driving the rhythm home. I am spun, supported, and possessed by the spirit who dwells
here. Great Salt Lake is a spiritual magnet that will not let me go. Dogma doesn’t hold me.
Wildness does. A spiral of emotion. It is ecstasy without adrenaline. My hair is tossed,
curls are blown across my face and eyes, much like the whitecaps cresting over the waves.
Wind and waves. Wind and waves. The smell of brine is burning my lungs. I can
taste it on my lips. I want more brine, more salt. Wet hands. I lick my fingers, until I am
sucking them dry. I close my eyes. The smell and taste combined reminds me of making
love in the Basin; flesh slippery with sweat in the heat of the desert. Wind and waves. A
sigh and a surge.
I pull away from the lake, pause, and rest easily in the sanctuary of sage.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 240
421
“A blank spot on the map is an invitation to encounter the natural world, where one’s
character will be shaped by the landscape. To enter wilderness is to court risk, and risk
favors the senses, enabling one to live well.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 244
“How do you place a value on inspiration. How do you quantify the wildness of birds,
when for the most part, they lead secret and anonymous lives?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 265
Unspoken Hunger
Woman at Bronx wetlands: “And suddenly, the water songs of the red-winged blackbirds
returned to me, the songs that keep her attentive in a city that has little memory of
wildness.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 48
“Walking in wilderness becomes a meditation. . . . I walked intuitively.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 55
“Marian Engle, in her novel Bear, portrays a woman and a bear in an erotics of place. It
doesn’t matter whether the bear is seen as male or female. The relationship between the
two is sensual, wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“In these moments, I felt innocent and wild, privy to secrets and gifts exchanged only in
nature. I was the tree, split open by change. I was the flood, bursting through grief. I was
the rainbow at night, dancing in darkness. Hands on the earth, I closed my eyes and
remembered where the source of my power lies. My connection to the natural world is my
connection to self—erotic, mysterious, and whole.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 56
“We stood strong and resolute as neighbors, friends, and family witnessed the release of a
red-tailed hawk. Wounded, now healed, we caught a glimpse of our own wild nature
soaring above willows.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 63
“Eight hundred acres of wetlands. It is nothing. It is everything. We are a tribe of fractured
individuals who can now only celebrate remnants or wildness. One red-tailed hawk. Two
great blue herons.
Wildlands and wildlives’ oppression lies in our desire to control and our desire to
control has robbed us of feeling. Our rib cages have been broken and our hearts cut out.
The knives of our priests are bloody. We, the people. Our own hands are bloody.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 65
“There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness.
Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty,
raw and sensual. Through an eroitcs of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
422
“Who is witness to this full-bodied beauty? Who can withstand the recondite wisdom and
sonorous silence of wildness?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 120
“We can try and kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit
howls and wildness endures.
Anticipate resurrection.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 144
Open Space of Democracy
What are we willing to give our lives to if not the perpetuation of the sacred? Can we
continue to stand together in our collective wisdom and say, these particular lands are
inviolable, deserving protection by law and the inalienable right of safe passage for all
beings that dwell here? Wilderness designation is the promise of this hope held in trust.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 44a
"It's not just the refuge or ANWR, the 1002, the National Petroleum Reserve Area, or any
of the other throwaway names that are being bantered about in Washington," she explains,
"but the entire region of what lives and breathes in the shadow of the Brooks Range with
all its peaks and valleys, braided rivers, and coastlines. It's this layered sense of
wilderness, the uninterrupted vistas without man's hand on it.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46a
You cannot afford to make careless mistakes, like meditating in the presence of wolves, or
topping your boots in the river, or losing a glove, or not securing your tent down properly.
Death is a daily occurrence in the wild, not noticed, not respected, not mourned. In the
Arctic, I've learned ego is as useless as money.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 46b
I think of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place of Original Mind, where the
ongoing natural processes of life can continue without interference. Our evolutionary past
and our future are secured here. This is a place where the press of humanity can be lifted in
the name of restraint and where our species’ magnanimous nature can be practiced. The
Arctic becomes a breathing space. In the company of wild nature, we experience our own
humble core of dependency on the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a
I hear Walt Whitman’s voice once again. “The quality of Being . . . is the lesson of nature.”
Raw, wild beauty is a deeply held American value. It is its own declaration of
independence. Equality is experienced through humility. Liberty is expressed through the
simple act of wandering.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ground Truthing,” Orion, 47a-b
Others
“Call it sacred rage, a rage grounded in the understanding that all life is intertwined. And
we can come to know and continue to learn from the grace of wild things as they hold an
organic wisdom that sustains peace.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
423
A peach orchard in the desert is not wilderness, nor is it an alternative to the protection of
wild, pristine landscapes. But it is a critical piece of the mosaic of land preservation and a
conservation strategy that includes open space, an organic bridge between a cultivated
meadow and a native one. It is a pause in the mania to develop everything in sight in the
Colorado Plateau, be it resorts or subdivisions or convenience stores.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
Slowly, we are coming to realize, one acre at a time, that the spirit of a place preserved
enters our own. We are transformed by wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
There is the same hope and promise here inside the Mayberry Preserve. With the
Colorado River on its northern boundary, Fisher Towers and the Negro Bill Wilderness
Study Areas east and west of the orchard and the town of Castle Valley directly to the
south, it is a place where human history and natural history converge.
I believe we are capable of creating a world that can accommodate the tamed and
untamed life, that we can in fact see ourselves as part of a larger biological community,
that it is not at odds with a sense of deep democracy but compatible with it. Call it a new
patriotism: red rocks, white clouds, blue sky. Is not the wild imagination of open spaces
simply an expansion of our pledge of allegiance?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Peach in the Wilderness”
To bear testimony is to bear witness; we speak from the truth of our lives. How doe we put
our love for the land into action? This book is one model, an act of faith by writers who
believe in the power of story, a bedrock reminder of how wild nature continues to inform,
inspire, and sustain us.
--Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, Testimony, 3.
Interviews
Indy: Why the need for wilderness?
TTW: Wild country is so essential to our psychology. The context of our lives has shifted.
We're feeling things, seeing things differently. My first impulse when I got home from
Washington, when I saw the Wasatch mountains, I just burst into tears. My husband and I
got into the car and drove up to the Tetons. We went on this trail that we've hiked for 20
years. The sound of sirens that were screaming in my psyche were replaced by bugling elk.
It was so powerful to understand what sustains us in time of terror and times of calm as
well. Wild lands remind us what it means to be human, what it means to be connected to
something larger than ourselves.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: What priority do we assign conservation of wild lands given the current emphasis on
international affairs and national defense?
TTW: I think wild lands have never been more important than they are now. They are also
more threatened as a result of the events of Sept. 11. Just today, a senator from Arkansas
was trying to tie the President's energy bill to the bill for the war effort. America's Red
Rock Wilderness is threatened by the urgency to dig for gas and oil. Right now, right on
the boundary of Canyonlands, there are huge machines, trucks with massive tires,
thumping the land to test it for gas preserves. There are assumptions that we are now at
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war and environmental and ecological integrity no longer matters. We're going to have to
be very strong, very smart, very certain in our cause.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 2
Indy: What's the current status of the Redrock Wilderness Act?
TTW: The Redrock Wilderness Bill currently before Congress, in some ways has never
had more support. But it also has never had such strong opposition. The Bush and Cheney
agenda is an energy agenda, and they'll take the wild lands for that purpose unless we are a
vigilant, responsible citizenry. All I'm asking for is a healthy, conscious discussion.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 3
Indy: In the book you say: "When one us says [regarding wilderness], 'Look, there's
nothing out there,' what we are really saying is, 'I cannot see.'" How do you teach people to
see, especially a generation of children raised blind to wilderness?
TTW: It requires exposure. And slowing down. There's a chapter in Red, "Ode to
Slowness," that talks about the pace of our lives. Our lives are so insane, in terms of the
pace with which we carry on, we can't see, taste, hear or smell beyond our own mania.
Education is critical. I'm heartened by our children. I look at my nieces, and they're more
environmentally savvy than I was at the same age. It's important for kids to get outside. We
need to be asking the question: Can we read the landscape alongside the pages of a book?
I've been working on a school project in Moab where 6th graders have been keeping
journals of weather studies. They've learned the names of 25 species of plants, animals and
birds. By writing this specific information down, I've noticed their writing in general
becomes more specific. Their lives, it seems, have taken on an added richness simply by
learning the names of things.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 4
Indy: How do we reconcile the need to conserve wilderness when government is clamoring
to divide and conquer the land?
TTW: We need to view conservation as an act of democracy. As locals tied to the
exploitive susceptibility of the land we live on, we wind up thanking our federal
government for saving us from ourselves when they act to preserve wilderness. I know this
sounds like a completely idealistic statement, but I believe that a nation's appetite for
beauty transcends a state's hunger for greed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Eastburn Interview, 5
TL: You have been a strong supporter of the preservation of wilderness in Utah. Can you
briefly explain why?
TTW: I have been a strong supporter of wilderness preservation in Utah because it feels
like these lands deserve protection from the continued rape of the West. That is not to say
that I do not have respect for the extractive industry in my state, I do. But I believe some
lands are truly special, say the word, "sacred," even--that because of their importance
biologically speaking to the migration corridors of animals, the habitat necessary for
threatened and delicate species of plants, and the spiritual values they hold for society and
inspire: silence, awe, beauty, majesty--that these lands have their own sovereignty that
deserves to be honored and defended by the law.
I know it is very popular these days in some parts of the Academy to say that
"wilderness" is simply a human construct, that wilderness has become irrelevant before it
has become resolved. We do not have language that adequately conveys what wildness
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means, but I do not believe we can "deconstruct" nature. This notion strikes me as a form
of intellectual arrogance. Personally, I feel grateful to the national park ideal, places of
pilgrimage within North America that allow the public to engage with the natural world. I
am grateful to those who enacted the 1964 Wilderness Act and the other pieces of
legislation that try to maintain a possible integrity of clean air and water.
Wilderness reminds us of restraint, that is a difficult and contentious idea for our
society that defines itself on growth and consumption. There is no question this is "an
American idea" but until we can come to sustainable vision where we do not exploit
everything in sight, it's the best we can do-- Our challenge is how to create sustainable
lives and sustainable communities in a dance with wildness. I believe that is what we are
working toward in the American West and it is not easy. In fact, it is a long and arduous
and at times, difficult process, one that requires a good deal of listening and patience and
compassion. I keep thinking of Stegner when he said, "We need a society to match the
scenery."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
TL: I recall hearing you read from a manuscript version of Desert Quartet: An Erotic
Landscape at a conference in Salt Lake City a few years back. At the time, you seemed
nervous about writing frankly about the erotics of landscape. It seems a risky thing to write
about. Has the reaction to the book justified your nervousness, or has it been favorably
received? Why did you choose to write about this topic?
TTW: You ask about Desert Quartet and why I wrote that book. I think every writer
struggles with various questions and tries to make peace with those questions, those
longings through their art, their craft. I am interested in the notion of love and why we are
so fearful of intimacy, with each other and with the land. I wanted to explore the idea of
the erotic, not as it is defined by my culture as pornographic and exploitive, but rather what
it might mean to engage in a relationship of reciprocity. I wanted to try and write out of the
body, not out of the head. I wanted to create a circular text, not a linear one. I wanted to
play with the elemental movements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, and bow to the desert, a
landscape I love. I wanted to see if I could create on the page a dialogue with the heartopen wildness.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 4
“Our culture of consumerism tells us what we need, what we want, and what we deserve. It
is the economics of entitlement. And I believe it is an illusion. I believe our needs are more
basic: home; family; community; health; the health of the land which includes all life
forms, plants, animals, and human beings. We need open country, open spaces, a wildness
that offers us deliverance from inauthentic lives.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pearlman interview, Listen to their Voices, 132
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
426
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: “the minute I cross that line where it says ‘Lone Peak
Wilderness’ I feel as though I am stepping into sacred ground, that this is an area of sacred
land that my culture has deemed important enough to leave alone. Let it be for its own
sake. It has a life. It’s an organism unto itself. I know I am safe there.
ROBERT FINCH: Safe from what?
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: From encroachment. From public harassment. From the
pressures of urban life that would deprive us of an authenticity of spirit.
FINCH: But then it’s an escape. It’s a refuge. It’s not a place where you live. And I think
what we have to do is to find a way to like the place where we live.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: It’s where my heart lives. Yes, it’s where I go for refuge. But
it’s where I can see the pattern that connects. . . . I can be alone to contemplate, to
remember where the source of my power lies—in the earth. I am renewed. Brought back to
center.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 57
FINCH: Let me play devil’s advocate a minute. Aren’t you sort of being an aesthetic elitist?
I mean you simply don’t want to see the signs of civilization that you depend on. . . . you
want something different from where it is you have to live.
WILLIAMS: See, I don’t think it is elitist. I think what’s elitist is private land. Wilderness is
public land in the most profound sense. It’s there for everyone.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 58
When I’m in wilderness, I don’t feel it’s an institution. There is no ceiling or limitations.
No human expectations that dictate its direction. When I’m in wilderness, I don’t feel that
it’s contrived. It’s what it is. And it’s okay if we escape. I mean, yes, I am myself a
dichotomy. I live in the city, and I go to the land to be refreshed. I think people have
always done that on some level or another, in terms of that aesthetic need to be fed, to be
still, to be calm, to be nourished – that whole idea of Mother Earth, if you want to get
cosmic, Ed.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Writing Natural History, 59
427
WISDOM
…
“The tension tortoise inspires calls for wisdom.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “To Be Taken,” Red, 91
“Political courage means caring enough to explain what is perceived at the time as
madness and staying with an idea long enough, being rooted in a place deep enough, and
telling the story widely enough to those who will listen, until it is recognized as wisdom—
wisdom reflected back to society through the rejuvenation and well-being of the next
generation who can still find wild country to walk in.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Wilderness and Intellectual Humility: Aldo Leopold, Red,
181-182
“Who is witness to this full-bodied beauty? Who can withstand the recondite wisdom and
sonorous silence of wildness?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 120
428
WITNESS (generic)
No, I have never created a child, but I have created a life. I see now, we can give
birth to ourselves, not an indulgence but another form of survival.
We can navigate ourselves out of the current.
We can pull ourselves out of the river.
We can witness the power of erosion as a re-creation of the world we live in and
stand upright in the truth of our own decisions.
We can begin to live differently.
We can give birth to deep changed, creating a commitment of compassion toward
all living things. Our human-centered point of view can evolve into an Earth-centered one.
Is this too much to dream? Who imposes restraint on our imagination?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Labor,” Red, 163
“We are witnesses to this opening of time, vertical and horizontal at once. Between these
crossbars of geology is a silent sermon on how the world was formed.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Desert Quartet: Water,” Red, 202
This is my place. It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay
home. What does that mean to finally commit to a place, to a people, to a community?
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it does mean you can live with patience, because
you’re not going to go away. It also means making a commitment to bear witness, and
engaging in ‘casserole diplomacy’ by sharing food among neighbors, by playing with the
children and mending feuds and caring for the sick. These kinds of commitments are real.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 322-323
429
WITNESS TO BEAUTY AND VALUE
Red
I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is
destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate
participation by those who saw what was coming.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 19
“individuals who care for the rocks will find openings—large openings—that become
passageways into the unseen world, where music is heard through doves’ wings and
wisdom is gleaned in the tails of lizards.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, ““The Coyote Clan,” Coyote’s Canyon, Red, 25
“This country’s wisdom still resides in its populace, in the pragmatic and generous spirits
of everyday citizens who have not forgotten their kinship with nature. They are individuals
who will forever hold the standard of the wild high, knowing in their hearts that natural
engagement is not an interlude but a daily practice, a commitment each generation must
renew in the name of the land.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “America’s Redrock Wilderness,” Red, 70
I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white. . . . I write to imagine
things differently and in imaging things differently perhaps the world will change. . . . I
write against power and for democracy.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112
“I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 114
“The only thing that stops the pain is when I walk up Little Tree Hill, sit on its summit and
feel the strength that still remains in rock, roots, and the hearty plants that will survive.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” 118
This living would include becoming a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of
stillness, a listener of wind where each dialect is not only heard but understood.
Can we imagine such a livelihood?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Ode to Slowness,” Red, 141
“Where I live, the open space of desire is red. The desert before me is red is rose is pink is
scarlet is magenta is salmon. The colors are swimming in light as it changes constantly,
with cloud cover with rain with wind with light, delectable light, delicious light. The
palette of erosion is red, is running red water, red river, my own blood flowing downriver;
my desire is red. This landscape can be read. A flight of birds. A flight of words. Redwinged blackbirds are flocking the river in spring. In cattails, they sing and sing; on the
riverbank, they glisten.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Red,” Red, 136
“I believe we need wilderness in order to be more complete human beings, to not be fearful
of the animals that we are . . . an animal who understands a sense of humility when
watching a grizzly overturn a stump with its front paw to forage for grubs . . . an animal
430
who weeps over the sheer beauty of migrating cranes . . . an animal who has not forgotten
what it means to pray before the unfurled blossom of the sacred datura, remembering the
source of all true visions.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Prayer for a Wild Millennium,” Red, 187
Refuge
Unspoken Hunger
Shells: “They remind me of my natural history, that I was tutored by a woman who courted
solitude and made pilgrimages to the edges of our continent in the name of her own
pleasure, that beauty, awe, and curiosity were values illuminated in our own house.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 15
O’Keefe: “I can’t help it—it’s all so beautiful!”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 23
“She spoke with sadness about being misunderstood, how people outside the Bronx did not
recognize the beauty. I wasn’t sure I did.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 40
“the beauty inherent in marshes as systems of regeneration.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 41
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
“There is no defense against an open heart and a supple body in dialogue with wildness.
Internal strength is an absorption of the external landscape. We are informed by beauty,
raw and sensual. Through an eroitcs of place our sensitivity becomes our sensibility.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Yellowstone: Erotics of Place,” Unspoken Hunger, 86
Mardy Murie: “Beauty is a resource in and of itself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Mardy Murie,” Unspoken Hunger, 90
“Who is witness to this full-bodied beauty? Who can withstand the recondite wisdom and
sonorous silence of wildness?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 120
“The dark aircraft bank. . . . I am taken in by their beauty, their aerial finesse.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “All That Is Hidden,” Unspoken Hunger, 121
Others
I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine.
431
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
Interviews
TL: You have been a strong supporter of the preservation of wilderness in Utah. Can you
briefly explain why?
TTW: I have been a strong supporter of wilderness preservation in Utah because it feels
like these lands deserve protection from the continued rape of the West. That is not to say
that I do not have respect for the extractive industry in my state, I do. But I believe some
lands are truly special, say the word, "sacred," even--that because of their importance
biologically speaking to the migration corridors of animals, the habitat necessary for
threatened and delicate species of plants, and the spiritual values they hold for society and
inspire: silence, awe, beauty, majesty--that these lands have their own sovereignty that
deserves to be honored and defended by the law.
I know it is very popular these days in some parts of the Academy to say that
"wilderness" is simply a human construct, that wilderness has become irrelevant before it
has become resolved. We do not have language that adequately conveys what wildness
means, but I do not believe we can "deconstruct" nature. This notion strikes me as a form
of intellectual arrogance. Personally, I feel grateful to the national park ideal, places of
pilgrimage within North America that allow the public to engage with the natural world. I
am grateful to those who enacted the 1964 Wilderness Act and the other pieces of
legislation that try to maintain a possible integrity of clean air and water.
Wilderness reminds us of restraint, that is a difficult and contentious idea for our
society that defines itself on growth and consumption. There is no question this is "an
American idea" but until we can come to sustainable vision where we do not exploit
everything in sight, it's the best we can do-- Our challenge is how to create sustainable
lives and sustainable communities in a dance with wildness. I believe that is what we are
working toward in the American West and it is not easy. In fact, it is a long and arduous
and at times, difficult process, one that requires a good deal of listening and patience and
compassion. I keep thinking of Stegner when he said, "We need a society to match the
scenery."
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 3
I think about Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a
writer, I believe that it is our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social
injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that
capacity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 1
I know the struggle from the inside out and I would never be so bold as to call myself a
writer. I think that is what other people call you. But I consider myself a member of a
community in Salt Lake City, in Utah, in the American West, in this country. And writing
is what I do. That is the tool out of which I can express my love. My activism is a result of
my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing
about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse -- to try to make sense of the world, to try
to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries
of what is acceptable.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 2
432
London: Camus said that beauty can drive us to despair. Rilke also said something about
that; he spoke of beauty as the "beginning of terror." What is it that is so terrifying about
beauty -- especially the kind we find in nature?
Williams: Scott, that is such a powerful point. You know, that Rilke quote -- "Beauty is
the beginning of terror" -- I think about that a lot. I remember, Brooke and I were in Sagres
in Portugal. In your travels, if you look at Portugal and Spain and Spain is the hair and
Portugal is the face, Sagres is the chin. We were right there on this point and Brooke had
gone in another direction and I was literally perched with the fishermen on this
unbelievably steep precipice as they were throwing these lines of light down into the sea,
hundreds of feet, and pulling up these fish for their families. It was so beautiful. I stayed
there all day long. I had to fight to not leap off. It was not a suicidal response, it was not
out of despair. It was out of this sheer desire to merge. That was terrifying to me, because I
thought, "I am going to leap." I finally had to remove myself. And Brooke said, "Let's go
on a walk tonight," and I just said, "I'm too afraid, because I have no control over the
impulses I feel on the edge of that cliff."
It was at that moment that I realized what Rilke was talking about: beauty as the
beginning of terror. It's that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our
capacity to relate to the beauty of things. So, again, that paradox. My life meant so little at
that moment. It was just much more important to be part of the sea.
--Terry Tempest Williams, London Interview, 7
“I’ve been thinking about what it means to bear witness. The past ten years I’ve been
bearing witness to death, bearing witness to women I love, and bearing witness to the
testing going on in the Nevada desert. . . . And I’ve been bearing witness to beauty, beauty
that strikes a chord so deep you can’t stop the tears flowing. . . . Bearing witness to both
the beauty and the pain of our world is a task I want to be part of. As a writer, this is my
work. By bearing witness, the story that is told can provide a healing ground. Through the
art of language, the art of story, alchemy can occur. And if we choose to turn our backs,
we’ve walked away from what it means to be human.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320-321
433
WITNESS TO LOSS
Red
These lands “will not remain ecologically intake without our own vigilance, without our
willingness to protect what is wild.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 6
“I have added to this mix of essays, congressional testimony, newspaper clippings, and
journals entries, to create both a chronology and collage for the reader, to feel the swell of
a community trying to speak on behalf of wild places that are threatened by development
or legislation in the United States Congress.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Home Work,” Red, 9
“I write to record what I love in the face of loss.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 112-113
“I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Letter to Deb Clow,” Red, 114
“”The view before me, all around Little Tree Hill, has become too painful. Everywhere I
look I see cuts in the landscapes, open wounds, gashes. I hear the roar and gnashing teeth
of back-hoes digging another hole in the ground for habitation. Wherever I walk on the
streets of Salt Lake City, I am seeing changes I can no longer bear. Too many cars, too
many people, too many diversions beneath a ceiling of brown smog. In winter, we call it
inversion, our inability to see the sky. We have become used to it, consider it part of our
residency along the Wasatch Front. Never mind the depression that follows, that we fail to
make the connection between a lack of sunlight and a lack of joy. As urban dwellers, we
simply get up every morning and go to work.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 116
“I watched every tree that was being torn out of Little Tree Hill, every thicket ripped apart
and tossed into a scrap pile. With each tear in the mountain’s side, I felt part of my belly
being ripped open.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” Red, 117
“my spirit is shrinking in direct proportion to the shrinking landscape and vista. As
wildness disappears, so does my peace of mind. I can no longer live here in joy.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Changing Constellations,” 118
We are eroding.
We are evolving.
We are conserving the land and we are destroying it. We are living more simply
and we are living more extravagantly. We are trying to live within the limits of arid
country and we are living beyond the limits of available water. We live with a sense of
humility and we live with a sense of entitlement. I hold these oppositions within myself.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Promise of Parrots,” Red, 129
434
Refuge
Mrs. Allen at a town meeting: “I thought if my testimony could help in any way so this
wouldn’t happen again to any of the generation coming up after us . . . I am happy to be
here this day to bear testimony of this.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 284-285
“but one by one, I have watched the women in my family die common, heroic deaths. . . .
In the end, I witnessed their last peaceful breaths, becoming a midwife to the rebirth of
their souls.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge, 285-286
Unspoken Hunger
“I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we
remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness
born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or
feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us
beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57
Essay “Testimony,” Unspoken Hunger,
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Testimony,” Unspoken Hunger, 125ff
“I believe the idea of the Home Stand Act could incorporate this kind of community care
and awareness, because it has everything to do with home rule: standing our ground in the
places we love. This is the wild card we hold, and if we choose to adopt a Home Stand
Act, nothing will escape our green eyes.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 136
“Olga Owens Huckins bore witness. Rachel Carson responded.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger, 138
Marilynne Robinson: “ My greatest hope, which is a slender one, is that we will at last find
the courage to make ourselves rational and morally autonomous adults, secure enough in
the faith that life is good and to be preserved, to recognize the grosser forms of evil and
name them and confront them. Who will do it for us?”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “The Wild Card,” Unspoken Hunger,
One Patriot
“Rachel Carson did not turn her back on the ongoing chronicle of the natural history of the
dead. She bore witness. ‘It was time,’ Carson said, ‘that human beings admit their kinship
with other forms of life. If we cannot accept this moral ethic, then we too are complicit in
the killing.’”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 44
“We can never forget the power of impassioned, informed individuals sharing their stories
of place, bearing witness, speaking out on behalf of the land they call home.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 48
435
“Her witness had been equal to her vision.”
--Linda Lear, quoted in Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 52
Do we have the moral courage to step forward and openly question every law,
person, and practice that denies justice toward nature?
Do we have the strength and will to continue in this American tradition of bearing
witness to beauty and terror which is its own form of advocacy?
And do we have the imagination to rediscover an authentic patriotism that inspires
empathy and reflection over pride and nationalism?
--Terry Tempest Williams, “One Patriot,” 58
Others
I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Why I Write”
We have within us our own natural resources, a renewable energy for the wild fueled by
the power of our hearts. There is no crisis here. We can gather together and stand, a million
or more, as witnesses for the wild. We can raise our arms high above our heads, gently
curve our elbows and bow, bow to the caribou, in the name of love.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “A Bow to Caribou,” Wilderness, October 2001
Interviews
TL: Your work is part of what seems to be a renaissance in the genre of nature writing.
Why do you think this renaissance is occurring, if you think it is?
TTW: I think there has always been a strong tradition in American letters of place-based
literature, literature that sees landscape as character. Look at Melville, Thoreau, Emerson,
Dickinson, Whitman of the nineteenth century and in this century, Mary Austin writing
about the desert, Willa Cather writing about the prairies, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck
honoring the land in their novels and short stories. The list goes on and on, poets, too. W.S.
Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver. Is this to be called "Nature Writing?" If there is a
"renaissance" in the genre as you suggest with contemporary writers particularly in the
American West, perhaps it is because we are chronicling the losses of the exploitation we
are seeing, that we are trying to grapple with "an ethic of place" and what that means to our
communities in all their diversity.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Lynch Interview, 2
Traditionally, Christianity has made a distinction, a spiritual separation between
human beings and other creatures, be they plants or animals. We have dominion over the
Earth. This philosophy within the Judeo-Christian mind has wreaked havoc on the planet.
We have abused our natural resources and given little thought to the notion of
sustainability.
I believe this is changing as we witness what the devastating effects of our
irresponsible actions have created in terms of environmental degradation, be it global
warming or deforestation or quite simply, the loss of open space within our cities and
towns. We are slowly learning what it means to be good stewards, to enter into a dialogue
with the land.
--Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon Interview (Leap), 6
436
She lists changes in the West. “all these lands are at risk . . . and that’s one of the things
that fuels my work as a writer. Not so much as a polemic, I hope, but writing out of a sense
of loss, a sense of grief and a sense of joy, because I think passion encompasses that full
spectrum of joy and sorrow. That passion creates engagement. And I think that all we can
ask as writers if for engagement in our life and on the page.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Siporin Interview, WAL, 101
“I’ve been thinking about what it means to bear witness. The past ten years I’ve been
bearing witness to death, bearing witness to women I love, and bearing witness to the
testing going on in the Nevada desert. . . . And I’ve been bearing witness to beauty, beauty
that strikes a chord so deep you can’t stop the tears flowing. . . . Bearing witness to both
the beauty and the pain of our world is a task I want to be part of. As a writer, this is my
work. By bearing witness, the story that is told can provide a healing ground. Through the
art of language, the art of story, alchemy can occur. And if we choose to turn our backs,
we’ve walked away from what it means to be human.”
--Terry Tempest Williams, Jensen interview, Listening to the Land, 320-321
“Bearing Witness” (all)
437
WORDLESS
There is a particular juniper tree, not so far from our house, that I sit under frequently. This
tree shelters my thoughts and brings harmony to mind. I consult this tree by simply
seeking its company. No words are spoken. Sensations come into my body and I
recognize this cellular awakening as an organic form of listening, the spiritual cohesion
one feels in places like the Arctic on such a grand scale. A throbbing intelligence passes
from this tree into my bloodstream and I remember my animal body that has evolved
alongside my consciousness as a human being. This form of engagement reveals familial
ties and I honor this tree’s standing in the community. We share a pact of survival. I
used to be embarrassed to speak of these things, my private correspondences with trees
and birds and deer, for fear of seeming mad. But now, its seems mad not to speak of these
things—our unspoken intimacies with Other.
--Terry Tempest Williams, “Engagement,” Orion, 55a
WORDLESS
438
YELLOW
“Coyote’s yellow eyes burned like flames as he danced around the cow carcass with a
femur in each hand. “
--Terry Tempest Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 18
439