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Since I was a kid, I have loved and admired Terry Tempest Williams as a writer and steward of nature, public lands, and community. I’ve been very fortunate to talk with her more than once, but this conversation was certainly a special one for me. Sorry in advance for the tears!
Terry and I talked about the concept behind her new book The Glorians, which Terry describes as moments of grace, when our focus is fused with another being. These are often overlooked, everyday moments. But when we do take note of them, there is so much beauty to be held.
Terry told me some truly beautiful stories, and I’m so grateful to be able to share them with you now…
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
I’m so curious about the process of this book, in part because I was like, okay, we’re back in COVID. And I don’t know, there’s something about your work that I feel like is always, when I engage with your books, it’s like a time capsule and also refuses the certainty of defining what’s just happened, which I think makes it really painful sometimes, Terry. I was thinking, I was looking back at my notes from The Glorians and this quote from Victoria Amelina. Am I saying her name correctly? Yeah. So Victoria Amelina, may her memory be a blessing, “believe the words you cannot bear to hear.” And I know in your work, people are always saying to you, “You live in sorrow.” It’s painful, right? I feel like you are a mirror for the rest of us about all the things that we don’t want to look at or see.
I feel that way. I have to prepare myself to engage with you on dwindling Great Salt Lake or whatever it is. You’re looking at all of the stuff that we don’t want to look at. Is that fair?
TERRY:
I don’t see it that way just because I live in my body and I honestly, that’s so fascinating to me because Elise, this feels like a joyous book to me. I feel like I haven’t held back. I feel that I just turned 70 and what’s the point? Who am I holding back for? Why am I holding back? How to say this? What am I afraid of?
ELISE:
Yeah.
TERRY:
At this point, I just want to tell it straight. And there’s humor in this book. And to me, humor is the most intimate form of engagement. And yes, there are some hard things in here because we’re in a really, really difficult time. And I think beginning with the pandemic, that was the birthing of this book because of the dream. I mean, it’s the only dream in my life that I can say I had it on Friday, May 20th, 2020, a week after lockdown. And I feel like I was given an assignment personally, more to the point I had forgotten a vow and this was now my commitment to remember that vow and follow it.
ELISE:
No, I think that’s beautiful. And one of the things that this quest for the glorians reveals, and also I think what you do so beautifully as well. I was looking back at my notes on erosion and that conversation with Tim, which I know he shows up in this book as well, is this way that I think we all become so scared and then certain that we’re the only person who’s noticing, we’re the only person who cares. We’re the only person who’s paying attention at the level to which we need to be attending to what’s unfolding. And I think that one of the things you always do so beautifully is look at all of the people actually who are paying attention and look who’s coming next. What do you think that is in us though, that human part of us that’s like, “Am I the only one who cares?
Am I the only one who’s seeing this?
TERRY:
“ Isolation.
In those times where I feel so overwhelmed or despondent or can’t get up in the morning, and there are a lot of those mornings. It’s because I’ve been alone and I need my solitude. I court my solitude. We live in a very remote place where that’s easy. You don’t even have to try. But when I get out in the world or talk to people, and especially my students, younger people, there is so much beauty that remains. And when you look at where we’ve been, I mean, I’m now old enough to remember when Great Salt Lake was flooding at its historic high at
4211.85, and now it’s trending to its all- time low again that we saw in 2022 of 4188. So it makes me laugh actually. A young person called a few years ago when Great Salt Lake was really making its mark and its retreat. And she said, “Is Ms. Williams there?” And I said, “This is she.” And she said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Great Salt Lake is in trouble and we heard that you were alive when it was full.” And they said, “Can you still speak? Would you be able to come and talk to us?” And I said, “I can sure try.” And I just love that the young people are taking this on and you realize how short history is and it expands with every year, but also this is a place to seen Lake. This is a remnant of a place to seen Lake.
It has known oscillations and I’m wondering what does retreat mean?
ELISE:
If Great
TERRY:
Salt Lake is, as the Ute people tell us, our sacred Mother Lake, what does this say on her timeline? What does retreat really mean? Does it mean death or does it mean to withdraw for one’s own wellbeing? What is her retreat causing us as members of her ecosystem to really think about how are we using our water and to whose expense, 12 million birds, specifically the lives and future of Wilson’s fallope, which is the feminine. It’s the Wilson’s fallope where the female wears the colors, not the male. I mean, just those kinds of semblances are really interesting to me. And I always have a dictionary in hand where, what does the word retreat mean? And it’s powerful. It’s to sustain oneself. And so how do we sustain ourself in retreat and yet not become so isolated that we are the only one that feels this?
When in fact, the one truth I know is that which is most personal is most universal and to trust that.
ELISE:
Terry, that’s a beautiful way to conceive of it. And it reminds me of this moment in erosion where you write, what is real given what we know? I trust what I see in an erosional landscape such as this. Perhaps this is what is happening to us. We are being worn down to our essence as we are forced to change course and we won’t change, I guess, until the retreat is complete, until we really maybe see exactly what has been lost or what is not ours anymore, not so readily available. It’s a really hard pill. I really wish it feels like there were so many exits for us out of this cycle and it feels like maybe we’re being forced off at the very bottom of the spiral when maybe we would’ve had an option to get off a little earlier and make this a little less painful for ourselves.
It feels like we’re going all the way to the bottom, but are you more hopeful than that?
TERRY:
I don’t use hope very much. I think there’s something deeper than hope. I think hope is tied to our desires and so often my desires are not where I need to be. So I’m more interested in faith. And I remember my great-grandmother, Velate Romney saying, “Darling,” she was in her 80s, I think I was eight or nine, but I’ve never forgotten it. She just said, “Darling, faith without works is dead.” And that was a very standard old traditional Mormon value that you could have faith, but that was not a blind faith. You had to do the work. And I feel like that’s what’s deeper than hope. And I see the power of engagement. And I’ve had a struggle just in this week.
And it was my father who said, “Isn’t that what you wanted?” And here was the struggle. On one hand, it’s so ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s great news. On the other hand is I don’t know how to deal with it. Over the weekend, our president, Donald J. Trump, was in a tuxedo and proclaimed his devotion to Great Salt Lake and said, “Governor Cox and some Utahns came to me to talk to me about Great Salt Lake, its decline, why we need to save it, what we as a federal government can do. “ And he said, “I’m all on board.” This is a real environmental disaster, not my hairspray. And all of a sudden I just went, “Wait a minute. Great Salt Lake, Donald Trump and hairspray in the same 32nd real is this real?” And then he goes on to talk about his hairspray and the ozone level and how this is ridiculous because the Trump tower is sealed.
And I turned it off and I went, “Donald Trump, Great Salt Lake, a billion dollars. What’s wrong with that? “ And I called my
And said, “Dad, I can’t handle this. Now Donald Trump is supporting Great Salt Lake.” And he goes, “Isn’t that what you wanted?” And I thought, okay, if the last thing I wrote talked about all hands on deck, then that means the hands of Donald Trump too. And just today, a bill is being circulated in the Utah legislature asking the federal government, Donald Trump as a supporter for $1 billion. And it’s going to take that and much more to be the only saline lake on the planet be revived. The percentage of a saline lake being restored after it crosses a certain boundary, and we’re very close to that critical point is 0%.
ELISE:
So
TERRY:
All hands on deck means all hands on deck. And now I’m more comfortable with it. But I had to, with friends, sit down with salt in our hands and really just say, “What is the salt wanting us to know? “ Years ago, I wouldn’t have even talked about that, of listening to salt. But I think we are evolving and I think there is a consciousness that is rising. And although I can’t define it, at least in my dream time, I could name it, the glorious.
ELISE:
I think one, I completely understand the dissonance, how difficult it is to separate how could something good ... How could a ceasefire, how could anything good, right? The protection of the Great Salt Lake, which will then protect legions of birds, protect some part of our climate from collapsing.
TERRY:
And the whole ecosystem and 2.5 million people. I mean, the air is so toxic right now. We really are in this situation where we cannot breathe.
ELISE:
Yeah. I think we are going to continue to be surprised about who is who and what is what and where these things come from. We’ll continue to feel betrayed by those we assume are quote on our side and be confused by people who aren’t on our side, but suddenly show up with aid. It is this sort of nothing is as it appears moment, even as so much appears as it is, right?
TERRY:
I don’t know what is Saturday Night Live. I don’t know if I’m reading The Onion or the New York Times, and I just think that’s why there has to be humor. Are we completely mad?
ELISE:
Yeah, it is absurd. It’s an absurd time. Yeah.
TERRY:
How do we just keep opening our hearts? I mean, that’s what came through with Donald Trump, and I am not a nice person. I mean, you don’t have a name like Tempest without consequences, right? But I just had to say, how do I keep opening my heart and can I really come to love great Trump? And then I thought, we can change that.
ELISE:
Yeah, we can change it. It can all be changed. Yeah. Well, that’s wild. I miss that bit of news. I’m still stuck on what your grandmother said though, this idea about faith that’s not road tested and it having no value, because I think that’s also this moment that we find ourselves in, right? Where it’s enough keyboard worrying, enough chat GPTing your way to wisdom, enough sort of skim milk and how are you living, right? How is that embodied and how is it showing up in the contrails of your life that I think is a call for people? I think people are getting it. We’re seeing it too in Minneapolis as people are cohering, organizing, standing up for what they love, protecting what they love.
TERRY:
In the midst of such cruelty, we are seeing such profound love.
ELISE:
Yeah.
TERRY:
And all of a sudden you realize, are they siblings? Does one create the other? And what’s that center point? What’s the turning point? What’s the pulse of that? And
ELISE:
I think
TERRY:
Macapolis was so powerful for us to see boldly in real time and place what was happening. And then our government telling us just the opposite. And that’s where I do have faith. And they are doing the work, reminding us where all social change happens in our own hometowns. I mean, I realize when you say, how is this showing up in our own lives? Elise, my life is getting smaller and smaller in the sense that for the past 10 years, my life has been a circle of 15 students at the Harvard Divinity School, and that has been more than enough for me. It was all I could do to stay up with these brilliant students. Where do I see the wisdom for me personally? It’s right here in our small desert hamlet of 250 people in Castle Valley, that when we were confronted with five flash floods, my Mormon neighbors, my neighbors who were devoted to MAGA and myself, Brooke was gone, we became a family and was Charlene, who is a complete Trump supporter, we would, on paper, not agree too much.
She was the one in a town meeting that said after these five floods, it can no longer be about property rights and self-interest. It has to be how do we take care of each other? And now what we’re looking at as a community is walking the path of water. It was the Mormon patriarch, Richard Williams, who at a dinner party in our home, greeting new neighbors who didn’t know what this flood meant, said, “I have a question for the table.” And around this table, there were so many different minds, MAGA, Mormon, radical environmentalists that made me look conservative, a Flint napper, government workers. He said, “My question for the table is, where does the water want to go? “ And suddenly we cleared the table, the conversation shifted, and what came out of that was an invitation to the community. Do you want to walk the path of water together?
And we thought 12 people would show up with the 12 people around our dinner table. We’d have 24, 25. There were close to 70 people that came and it took three hours through very rugged terrain to walk that path of water and to see
What changes we had to make in order to be able to stay to live here in the midst of a 2,500 year old mega drought we haven’t seen the likes of in 2,500 years and climate collapse where we have 52 days of temperature over a hundred degrees rising to 116. That’s what I have faith in. That’s what I see that is deeper than hope when communities engage in the moment that they’re in together. And it’s not about ideologies, it’s about what binds us together rather than what tears us apart.
ELISE:
That is so beautiful.
TERRY:
That walk was a glorian. The question was a glorian. And then my father could say, “Terry, if you talk to you, you think everything is a glorian.” And he said, “What are you talking about? “ And I said, “Dad, I can’t define it. And it’s not my job to define it. I can only name it. In naming it, maybe there’s more clarity.” If you forced me, Elise, to say, “What is a glorian?” I think it’s whenever our focus is fused with another being. That moment you spoke of with Victoria, Amelina, in Ukraine, we met in Poland when she said, “Words are not enough for me anymore,” as a writer, as a poet, as a journalist. And she put her words to use and documented war crimes. And it was a war crime that took her life, a missile in the midst of an outdoor cafe in Ukraine when she was just getting ready to toast two Colombian writers who had committed to documenting war crimes with her.
That is glory and focused attention, a moment of grace.
ELISE:
Yeah. Feels like it’s also in those moments where we choose something larger than ourselves, something more enduring than our own lives or our own creature comforts.
TERRY:
I
ELISE:
Know. I have four. So I relate to you. I mean, not part of your book crushed me, but I want to talk about that. I know. I’ve
TERRY:
Seen your feline members.
ELISE:
Yeah. Just tales, just slapping me in the face. I think you actually taught me this etymology of care, which is so beautiful, which is to grieve. And I feel like that’s something that is being sparked in us that can’t really come until you lose something. It’s the worst part of life and the most beautiful, right? We don’t know what we care about until we don’t have it anymore or risk losing it.
TERRY:
And I think what we have lost from the pandemic, over a million citizens, neighbors, friends, family, relatives died and we have not properly grieved their deaths as a country. And what happens if we forego our grief? It comes out sideways. I mean, my first thought when we were watching in Real Time and Real Place, January 6th, I thought this is what unresolved grief looks like. It becomes a violence personally and collectively. And I think it’s never too late, but that’s something I think we have not grieved. We’ve not grieved our history with the genocide of Native people, of enslaved people. We’re starting to. But I think ceremonies matter. And I think collective rituals that honor grief are transformative because as you and I have spoken, grief is love. Again, they’re siblings.
ELISE:
Francis Weller, I don’t know if you’ve encountered him, but he talks about how trauma is not solely, but that it’s what happens when absent a culture that has rituals, it’s when the person can’t return, essentially. There’s no mechanism for them to come and bring it back and have it integrated. And he cites research, this is sort of a tangent, but he cites research too of, I don’t know exactly which war this was, but essentially indigenous soldiers who had communities that had these containers for processing experiences, that the PTSD was dramatically lower and that it worked when they would take some of those rituals to other soldiers, they could create the same container even if they didn’t have the same community as a way of resolving it. So I agree. I mean, you think about our culture now, and I’m sure historians in 50 years or 100 years will look at this post- COVID period and just diagnosis with mass psychosis, right?
Or just I think it will all make sense in a rear view mirror many of the symptoms of today, right?
TERRY:
And it’s interesting, I’ve been teaching throughout this period and only now are my students beginning to write about what happened in the pandemic, what they experienced, the loss of their loves, the loss of this moment of when everything seemed possible, suddenly it was shut down, only now. And I think that’s so fascinating that five, six years later, now we can talk about it. Where when we were in the middle of it, we were too close or we were out of it, so to speak, no one wanted to discuss it. We just wanted to get on with our lives. So it takes time and time is something I think we don’t know how to embrace.
And I think the more present we are, I mean, this is what I think the gift of the desert is where everything is exposed. In the desert, all you have is time, deep time, geologic time exposed. And what happens when time is eroded, the beauty that appears, what is revealed? And I think for me, when I feel those moments of despair, depression, however we want to name it, I know that it’s because I’m moving too fast in the world. It takes time to process things. It takes time to see things, to be with rather than to run away.
ELISE:
Yeah. And I think I was just talking to a therapist, not my therapist, but a therapist the other day and I was saying, “You know what I never really understood too is I’m cognitively very fast and I feel like I can process things on an intellectual or mental level quickly.” My feelings are so slow, Terry. I will have a conversation and not realize sometimes for weeks that I’m furious, I don’t diagnose it. And so I think we assume that we have this ability to process things and in truth, they’re just stored mostly for us to think about or move through ourselves later. So yeah, I think we’re in a deeply frozen ... I don’t even know how to think about it. And you think about what’s happening to us right now, and it’s how can anyone even think about, contemplate, process what’s happening at this speed and at the scale at which it’s hitting our transoms?
TERRY:
I agree. And again, on one hand, yes. On the other hand, yes. How do we bring these two arms hands together in prayer? I’m looking out the window as we speak and there’s so much beauty that remains. I think about public lands. Senator Lee from Utah wants to sell them again and again and again. And this is not new. This has been happening ever since. I’ve been fighting for and loving public lands all my life. And the first rally, I think I was 18 or 19, and I’m not alone, but something shifted. Something has shifted now. It used to be people didn’t even know what public lands were. And I think because of traditional knowledge, because of tribal generosity, I look at bears ears where Dine, Navajo, Hopi, the Pueblos, the Pueblos and the Ute nations came together and said, “These are sacred lands and they’re public lands.
We understand what you’re saying, but can we join together and say Bear’s ears belongs to all of us?” And everything shifted for conservationists in Utah and in the Southwest. Suddenly we had leadership we’d never known before and that was traditional knowledge generation after generation. And I think that has had a huge impact on public lands, sacred lands. Also, the anglers, the hunters, the
ELISE:
Recreationists.
TERRY:
Again, it’s coming together. It’s everyone is holding a piece of the mosaic and now we’re seeing a broader picture. Do I feel hopeful? I have faith in that so many different constituents now being led by the tribes, by being exposed and invited to embrace what they have always known, what traditional people have always known, that we are earth. This is community, both human and wild. And I think, again, this consciousness is shifting.
ELISE:
Yeah. I feel like this is always shocking to people. I mean, you write about this in the Glorians, but it was Nixon who first put forward this legislation to protect the environment. Being from Montana, we both understand that Western, your Southwestern obviously conservationist mind, the hunters, the anglers, the people that I grew up with in Montana who might not support Trump, but are conservative and might support Trump. But land conservation is part of being a conservative in their minds, access to those lands, protecting watersheds. They are, in many ways, incredible stewards of the environment, even though we wouldn’t necessarily identify them. So there’s just so much I think that we have in common ... Yeah, go ahead.
TERRY:
Again, it takes time. I grew up when the wilderness movement, it was all about pristine wilderness that take out the humans. The humans were never here. Leave it alone.
ELISE:
And
TERRY:
So I’ve watched my own mind change and that’s I think being in community with the women of Bears Ears, with living in Utah adjacent to tribal nations. So I think we’re all growing and we are changing our minds. And this consciousness shift has been happening for a very, very long time. I just think right now we’re starting to see it break open because we’ve never been here before, whether it’s climate, whether it’s the authoritarianism that we’re seeing, whether it’s ice literally melting our communities, we are now standing up saying No. And yes, and we’re doing this together. And I think that’s another definition of the glorians to me is the element of surprise. What can we not imagine? And when we see it, we drop to our knees and we are altered. Again, I didn’t realize this, but I think in many ways the Glorians is a book about grace.
I was not raised with any concept of grace except for my mother. She held grace through her own strength and suffering, I think, and showing us what it meant to live in the midst of dying. And thinking about grace, it came to the fore when suddenly in that dream I was told, “Your vow is the epic documentation of the glorians.” Glorians are unearned, unbidden, freely given. And to me, that’s also what grace is. Those moments of grace that we didn’t anticipate, we didn’t deserve, we couldn’t have imagined, and here they are. And I think that’s another element that is deeper than hope. And do we recognize grace when it comes in all its different manifestations?
ELISE:
Yeah. One of the things that, and maybe we can start, you mentioned this idea of public lands and you write a bit about this in a lot of your work about how you and Brooke, your husband bought these oil and gas leases, which invariably led to you being exiled from the University of Utah and then ending up at the divinity school. And just that story as an example of something that’s clearly was very painful and a death of some type that bird something new. And so much of the book, even in the most ... I mean, I cried a lot at the end of the book. And are we giving things away? I don’t think so, but the story of the divinity tree, the story of I’m going to call your cat safo. Oh, Terry, that idea, this channeling where your cat essentially says, “I was consumed.
I became something else. While I was hunting in the desert, something was hunting me. I burned in the body of another. This is what oneness looks like. Oh, I’m going to cry again.” But this idea too that as we say goodbye to these things that we cherish and hold very dear and care so deeply about, it’s only in that process that something new is fed or something new is created in a different form. And oh, it’s so heavy because I think that all we want to do is preserve the status quo.
We want to keep everything that we love exactly as it is preserved in time and we’re just not allowed to do that. And so that felt, oh, I absolutely understand what this book is about, including the emergence of these glorians who will replace you and me and hopefully do it all so much better or in a different version.
TERRY:
Intergenerationally, I think we need each other. The book is dedicated to my students at the Harvard Divinity School and they have been my teachers at a time when I really needed that. I needed them. I needed their wisdom, their bright lights and their imaginations. I felt that the same with the students I had at the University of Utah, which is why it was so painful to leave.
But what I’ve come to see is that I remember years ago, a great educator, Deborah Myers. I’m thinking this for the first time, my mother came to visit me. I was working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Deborah Myers was a brilliant principal in East Harlem. And for my rent, I could teach. And I was teaching the elementary school there. That was the trade. And my mother came to visit me and she was very upset about my brother, her son, his depression, how he didn’t want to live and she was fighting to live. And I will never forget around Deborah’s breakfast table, she looked at my mother and she said, “Diane, you’re in the middle of the
Story.” And my mother started breathing again. And I think what I can say now when I was so ... I mean, I felt like I’d been evicted from my tribe when the consequences of purchasing the oil and gas pieces led to being fired or quit, it was both, is that I was in the middle of the story. And I’m not talking about, “Oh, great.” I was fired from the University of Utah. I ended up at Harvard Divinity School. Not that at all. It was what I learned in the process. And what did I learn in the process? I know where I belong, long home, and I’m now in the process of coming home, but I’m coming home a different person, far more humbled. I realize how much I don’t know. I’m so willing to work in ways I couldn’t have imagined in my own home state at a time of crisis.
And what I was given at the divinity school, and it wasn’t what I thought I would learn. And I remember again, sitting at a meal with scholars of the highest order, and they were talking about how the fourth century was the most influential, consequential century for religion. Most of them were men around the table. And I said, “What happened in the fourth century?” And you could have heard a pin drop, as they say. They all looked at each other, and one of the scholars said, “If you don’t know what happened in the fourth century, you have no business being at the divinity school.” And they never did tell me what happened.
ELISE:
Well, I’m like, “Is it the council of Nicia?”
TERRY:
It’s a compilation of a lot of things. I had to go look it up, including the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, but what did I know?
And so I went home and I got a piece of paper out, lit a candle and wrote, “What do I know? “ Underlined it. And without thinking, I realized I had taken the last 15, 20 minutes to write down all the names of birds and I thought that’s what I know. I know their names. I don’t know them. I’m learning about them. I know them as a species and not as individuals, but all of a sudden I realized, okay, what do I know? And I’ll begin there. And that’s what I began every class with, bird song. And I also learned so much just by way of spirit, what to trust, what not to trust, the divinity tree, what to hear, what to know wasn’t my voice, but the tree’s voice even the night before it was killed or murdered as Robin Walkimer would say when she visited the tree, I didn’t have the courage to say that.
I got locked out of what we called God’s Motel, which was the Center for the Study of World Religions. And it was two in the morning, my phone was dead, I lost my keys. I thought, “I’m dressed warm enough. I can go sleep with the tree.”
And so I slept with the tree, my head on the tree’s roots wrapped in my coat and shawl, and I put my hand on the red oaks trunk. And what I heard from the tree to my own body into my heart, which as a writer, I know my vocabulary, and this was not mine, I will be okay. My absence will be my presence. And that turned out to be true. The horror of watching in four and a half hours destroy what took 200 plus years to create was heartbreaking. We were in the middle of the story. If you would’ve told me, and this is at the end of the book, that I would’ve received a call from a man named John Monks who said, “My name is John Monks. I have the body of the divinity tree. I wouldn’t have believed.” That’s the moment of grace.
And when he brought back this round table made from two pieces of the wood that the donor, Susan Schwartz, made possible, it was the funding from that family that created the situation where the tree was felt. It was also Susan’s courage to say, “We can remember these difficult histories and we can sit around this table, literally a round table and see where we thought the tree would die soon. Here were the carpenter ants. Here’s their design.” And those of us who said the tree had another hundred years, another century to live, you could see those expanding lines that two opposing narratives can be held at once. That becomes a glorian. The divinity tree was a glorian. The table that was returned, the body of the tree, now used in and placed in what we call the tree room where the canopy of the tree was, where students can write and create poetry scholarship and have their hard conversations.
Does that replace the tree? No. But is it an ongoing story of how we move together as community in forgiveness and grace and understanding? Yes.
ELISE:
Oh, it’s so beautiful. That just leveled me when I read those pages and also that John Monk heard the tree, right? Asking him to take it home.
TERRY:
And the first thing he said after he said, “I have the body of the divinity tree is, I want you to know I’m a normal person.” And I think this is what I’m saying. I’m not holding back anymore. This is available to all of us. Why wouldn’t other beings speak to us? Why wouldn’t we impact other species? We know we are, but largely in the negative, but we know this through our animal kin, whether it’s safo, whether it’s your four cats, it’s this interconnected, interrelated space that is cohesive, that does allow us to use your word to cohere and live more fully, more bravely, more openly, whether we’re grieving, whether we’re loving, whether we’re laughing, whether we’re crying, it’s that we are alive. And I think in the pandemic, we did freeze and now we’re beginning to unthaw. And I love that what is bringing us together in this country is ice because maybe that’s what we see, what we saw in our own darkest shadows.
ELISE:
Terry, that feels like a mic drop. And I just have one more thing to say, which is, speaking of this idea of being in the middle of the story, which I think is just so helpful for anyone, for all of us, as we feel somewhat stuck or like we’re holding this tension of the opposites and we feel torn apart, is that what makes the Divinity Tree story that bookends the glory and so stunning is that it would’ve been so easy to write the full story and to say, “Okay, so this tree is coming down and let’s commemorate it. Let’s take the wood.” And yet that’s not at all what happened, right? It’s the magical part of it that was entirely in many ways unpredictable, unplanned, unforeseen that makes it so powerful and so untidy. Yeah.
TERRY:
And acts of courage that the worker, the man who was told to take the trunk of the tree was a huge tree, huge red oak. In the back of his truck, we saw him take that. We saw the tree loaded in that truck and we were told it was going to be taken to Maine to be used for firewood. Somewhere along the line, this worker, this man, I wish I knew his name, made a decision that he was not going to take that wood to where he said he would, where he was ordered to take it. He made a detour to Vermont, to John Monk’s front lawn under the cover of darkness and left a note. “This is the divinity tree.
Make something beautiful.” It was the dean who made the decision that the tree had to go, who he and his wife while the tree was alive, privately, quietly, gathered a hundred acorns and took them to the Harvard Arboretum. Those trees were planted, and it was one of the maintenance workers that took those when they were ready and planted them in the Harvard Commons of the divinity school and tended them. One survived. It’s now six feet tall, five foot eight. And I didn’t know it was there until we saw each other after the pandemic. I mean, this was last year. We hadn’t seen each other in five years, and we just hugged each other. And I said, “I’ve never forgotten your tears, Robert.” And he said, “You’ve seen it, right?” And I said, “Saw what? “ And he said, “Look.” And he looked out, he showed me out of the beautiful Gothic windows.
There it is, the descendant. We’ve been taking care of this tree. It was planted beneath the sister oak beneath the other nurse trees. Those are the things that you can’t make up. Those are acts of faith and action taken and made whole by courage. All these different people in all these different times, including many different generations of students at the divinity school, that happened over six years. And so again, we’re used to having things happen immediately, and that’s the grace. Can we be present enough in the moment so that we’ll know what to do? Can we trust that there is something dreaming us? The glorians right now are reaching out to us, inviting us to engage, saying another world is possible, that we can create a new way of being, a new way of seeing, and we can break set with the old traditional ways.
I want to close with one story. I know our time is going, but I want to share this with you and I’ve not shared this publicly because you have four cats and they’re one just weird. She or he, they are a glorian. So this is amazing. And to me, this is as a writer, from one writer to another. I mentioned to my editor at Grove whom I love, love. And she was so patient with me and tough that I write at the end, that I can write through the years. It took seven years with this book. I missed five deadlines, but I can’t get it. There’s so many things going on that I really don’t see it until the very end, so it’s after the copy edit. And I said, “I’m just warning you. “ And she said, “Good to know. “ After the second copy editor, she called me and she said, “We’re done.
That’s it. Nothing else. Not one sentence, not one phrase, not one word change.” And I said, “Will you just let me have one more night?” And she said, “One more night. That’s it. Just done.” And I said to my psyche, my dream self, “What’s missing?” I knew something was missing. And I went to sleep, I woke up without opening my eyes to retrieve what’s missing. What came into my mind was safo, cricket, Jade.
And I thought, no, no, no. Because after she had disappeared and died, and I blamed Brooke, as you know in the book, I went home. I was beside myself. She was my companion always. That next morning, I woke up and I had to know what happened to her. And this is what I’m saying when I’m not holding back. I picked up my computer. I usually always write long hand. I just grabbed my computer in bed, sat up, and 6:30, I saw the clock. I just typed and I just tuned in and literally channeled Jade, Safo, her three names. And when I looked up from the keyboard, it was 11:30. So that’s five hours of just trance. I’d never read it. I didn’t know if I still had it. And what my dream self said, my morning mind said, “That’s what’s missing.” I found it, I read it, I was stunned.
That’s what was missing.
And I called my editor and I said, “I just have one more thing to add.” And she said, “No.” And she said, “No.” And she said, “What is it? “ And I said, “I sent it to you. “ And she said, “I’ll call you right back.” And she called me back and she goes, “No, absolutely no. You cannot end the book by channeling your cat.” No, no, you cannot. And I said, “Will you just sleep on it? You gave me a night. Will you just sleep on it? “ And she said, “Terry, I will sleep on it, but no, no, no, no.” She calls me the next morning and she said, “I do not know what happened between yesterday and today, but yes, it belongs there.” And I said, “But I thought about it too, and maybe it’s not the last part of the book, maybe it’s the second to the last, but that’s how that’s in there.
And I think it’s essential to our understanding of what you just referenced earlier. And I really want to thank you. And I love that your cat ... Tell me your cat’s name that made the
ELISE:
Appearance. This is Pebbles. Pebbles is my shadow. She is on me at all times. And then I’ve got Bandit on the bed and my three-legged cat, August over there. There’s only one who is somewhere else in this house.
TERRY:
And Basho and Issa are here with me as well. And Safo, bless her. But I think this is the world we live in. If we dare to stay present, if we dare to walk into the shadows, if we dare to listen to our dreams and to one another.
ELISE:
Oh, Terry. Well, tell your editor that Safo’s part brought me to my knees and I have also, I’ve channeled a horse that I had as a child where I really needed closure. So I relate. We’re drinking from the same fountain, Terry.
TERRY:
I love you and every conversation I remember and cherish. Oh,
ELISE:
Thank you. Let’s do this again soon. I know. I know. It’s hard to pin you down, but I’m going to try.
TERRY:
And just thank you for your wisdom that you are giving us every single day. That’s of the web and it really does bind us all together. So blessings, thank you. And thank you to your listeners.
ELISE:
If you read one thing in The Glorians, read what she channeled from her cat. It’s so beautiful and I would honestly read it to you now, but I don’t think I can do it without crying. But like Terry, it’s just profound and wise. And I think I want to wrap up this conversation, which I found so moving. And Terry Tempest Williams for me growing up in Montana was just my writer. I feel like she spoke at the University of Montana when I was a kid and I got to see her. She might’ve been one of the first living, breathing authors, and she writes about nature. And I don’t know, there was just a shared language there, which I recognized as a kid. And I’ve had the chance to interview her and talk to her over the years, and I just love her. At the end, she talks about going to her first divinity commencement, and she had stayed away previously, and she listened to Tohr Ryman.
I hope I’m getting his name correct. Give one of the student narrations. And she knew him because he was a double major in religion and environmental studies, and had hopes for becoming an environmental attorney. And I shouldn’t be speaking about him in the past tense because I’m going to guess that he is alive and well. But in his talk that he gave, I’m going to read this part of the book because it’s so beautiful. In his talk Tor quotes, Emily Dickinson’s poem, This World is Not Conclusion and says, “This ongoing process of veritas is worth defending.” He reminds us that Harvard has led the way through chaos before and that during the American Revolution, these halls sheltered troops as we imagined a new democracy. He pauses. “The world that comes out of this will be a better one. You can try and shirk this charge of service, but it will chase you down. This is not conclusion. This is commencement.” Boy, they. All right, friends. I just need to go and have a good cry. I think we all need that these days. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you cherish this conversation as much as I did, and I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.
Thanks again, friends.