Finding the 'holy ordinary' with environmental author Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams' work is not only notable for the way she captures the physical beauty of the natural world but also for how she invites the reader to deepen their spiritual understanding and connection to the environment.

In her latest work, "The Glorians: Visitation from the Holy Ordinary," she seems to walk alongside the reader, trying to make sense of the obscure meaning of moments in her life, from the personal to the universal.

Williams spoke with me about her work to capture what a dream dubbed the Glorians ahead of her tour stops in Washington. She'll be at Town Hall Seattle on Thursday, then she'll head out to Port Townsend for an event at Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on Friday.

Glorians, Williams decided or maybe realized, are ordinary, often overlooked presences in the world. They can be physical beings, like the horned lizard "with eyes that can squirt blood as a carnal warning" or a cat so beautiful it needs at least three names (Sappho Cricket Jade) or the Harvard Divinity Tree. But as Williams discovered in her efforts to document the Glorians, she also learned they can be far less solid, like the grief she felt when Harvard cut down that tree, a 150-year-old rad oak, or the wonder when she learned its wood had been used by a great craftsman who wanted it returned to its home.

I didn't grow up in the church, any church, but in "The Glorians," Williams captured the near-spiritual connection to nature that I was raised with. She observes nature in all its multitudinous glory, like she's observing a god.

(Forgive the lack of a page number in my reference. I actually listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Williams. I highly recommend it as it gives you that additional window into Williams, I think. Her soft, steady voice is simultaneously soothing and energizing, encouraging engagement with her ideas.)

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Williams' writing was disarmingly honest and open, human, and I was happy to find that was a genuine reflection of who she is as a person, not just a writer (the two can be quite different in some cases).

"We're all looking for hope," she said. "I'll be honest, it's not a word I love [hope]. I think it's attached to our desires."

Desires, perhaps, for a different outcome than what is before us.

She wrote about her frustration with hope in "The Glorians," too.

It's in passages like this when Williams' message becomes most powerful. There's an aggression, a righteous indignation in the words that feel amplified by her gentle delivery on the page and through her literal voice in the audiobook. She's not scolding, she's just being honest. And, honestly, she's afraid of the direction the world is going.

"In many ways, the violence that we are seeing in our country is coming out sideways because we haven't grieved," she said. "We haven't grieved our history, whether it's enslaved people, whether it's the cultural genocide of Native people, and we have not grieved the deaths of over a million citizens in our country [because of COVID-19], many of whom are our loved ones, friends, family."

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In the book, she asked herself whether a lament can be a Glorian. The answer is yes, because "grief is love."

There's a lot of grief in "The Glorians," reflecting as it does on the COVID-19 pandemic, on devastating wildfires in the summer of 2020, the loss of people and creatures close to Williams, and more.

But the book also vibrates with life. I really could've used it back in 2020, to read about her desert documentations while making my own (I lived in Phoenix at the time). Now's as good a time as any, though, to think about the flora and the fauna she describes, and the immediacy of their being.

"I've come to believe that there is something deeper than hope, and for me, that is engagement," she told me. "If we are present in this moment of radical change, we can engage in ways we didn't even imagine. The Glorians are inviting us to create a new way of being, to create a new way of seeing."

Williams offered some examples of how to do exactly that in our conversation, which you can listen to above or by listening to KUOW's "Meet Me Here" wherever you gets your podcasts.