The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary

by Terry Tempest Williams

“I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world. She gives me something bigger than hope.”?Richard Powers, author of The Overstory

From the visionary New York Times bestselling author, a revelatory work of narrative nonfiction exploring beauty in the desert, climate change, and, transformative moments of power in a world beset by uncertainty

Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us. I am searching for grace.

In this time of political fragility, climate chaos, and seeking beauty wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. They are not distant deities, but the ordinary, often overlooked presences—animal, plant, memory, moment—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us—about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds—is immense.

Journeying through encounters with the Glorians in the red rock desert of Utah during the pandemic to Harvard University where she teaches in the Divinity School, Williams weaves a story of astonishing personal and societal insight. As she grapples with the unsettled state of the world, she turns not to despair but to deep reflection. She sees how the Glorians are calling us to attention, not as an army, but as fellow inhabitants of our sacred, threatened home. They remind us of the power of contact between species and the profound courage—and awareness—it will take to dream a more cohesive future into being.

Wise and lyrical, The Glorians is a testament to the power of witness, a field guide to finding grace in the unexpected, and a moving invitation to engage with one another and our surroundings with renewed intention. In a modern world filled with increasing noise and anxiety, Terry Tempest Williams offers honest sustenance for the mind and spirit and distinguishes herself again as a trusted voice to whom we can turn to more fully understand our times.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Essays, Memoir, Spirituality, Science, Environment

10 pages, Audible Audio

First published March 3, 2026

About the author

Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she was raised. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.

She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.

Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.

In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.

Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Reviews

[Book Riot Community]

Book Riot’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026:

As a fellow Utahn, I may be biased in my love for Terry Tempest Williams' nature essays. Her latest collection, in which she finds the sacred in ordinary moments, sounds especially needed. It speaks to the desire I and many others have to express spirituality, whether that's a connection to the divine or just something greater than themselves. By observing small beauties in nature, she finds hope to sustain her through a global sense of despair. —Andy Minshew

[Debbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essays, stories and musings. The writing is warm and intimate.; beautiful. This is Terry Tempest Williams at her best.
When she writes about nature she remembers we are part of the landscape. The Glorians are the divine essence, the spark she describes as the holy ordinary. The book is divided in sections. The first essays take place during the pandemic, they are not a medicalized account, what is in the forefront is what we lost and what we gained and what we've forgotten now that it is over.
My favorite section is Home where the author writes short essays on the creatures she shares her world with. There are Rattlesnakes, Black Widow spiders, horny toads, ladybugs and butterflies, All are given equal appreciation and attention.
The essential feeling here is hope in a chaotic, complex, confusing time. The book is an inspiration. Highly recommended.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an advance reader copy.

[Hannah Chadwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick disclaimer, this book is TOTALLY outside of my usual reading comfort zone, so take this review with a grain of salt.

I honestly have no idea how to rate this book. I feel like there were some really great tidbits in here. I had a physical copy that I annotated and I highlighted, tabbed, and noted quite a bit! There were also some really odd things that I was very…. off put by.
Some essays I would rate 5 stars, where others I just skipped because I was a bit uncomfy reading it.
This did feel very soapboxish but hey! It’s a nonfiction book of essays so idk what I was expecting.

I think if you are looking for something about climate change, divinity, and common humanity, this is a very excellent book!
If you are a regular Joe Shmoe (much like myself), who mostly reads for enjoyment, I probably wouldn’t recommend this.

I read this for a book club and I’m very interested to see what we talk about.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A Glorian is an encounter.
A Glorian is a meeting
with elan vital.
A Glorian is a moment of grace.”

“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

In her new collection of essays, Williams takes a deep look at the past six years- living through Covid and standing witness as climate change wreaks havoc around the world.
She still teaches at Harvard and the essays alternate between her life there and her beloved life with her husband in Utah. She also examines her own spirituality, along her close connection to the land. It also helps that she is such a fine, insightful writer. Highly recommended.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a contemporary book that aligns with the tradition of H. D. Thoreau's classic book, Walden, Tempest Williams's book is for you. Like Walden, it is an odd compendium of biography, nature writing, memoir, environmentalism, poetry, scripture, spirituality, and climate change (yes, HDT was a proto climate scientist, recording in his journals the dates when flowers bloomed that we use as evidence today of variation). She even invents a one-word book title, like Thoreau, who used a one-word place name for his title. She also takes her class to walk around Walden Pond and seek the spirit of the Nature Bard together (before an odd act of vandalism occurs).

Tempest Williams writes for our age, though. She channels creativity, respect, and love for our fellow beings. She writes of flash floods, snakes, black widow spiders, eclipses (note the cover), rivers, the Divinity Tree, her pets, and sunrises. She writes of painters, poets, medicine shamans, ancestors, teachers, and wood carvers. She writes of a Buddhist calligrapher, Native herbalists, Harvard professors, and her husband. She writes of prayer, meditation, and rituals for diverse religions. She's a pantheist and a spiritualist, a pilgrim and a teacher. And she writes damn good sentences!

Walden fans, this book is for you. Seekers, this book is for you, too.

[Rickie Poole · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is going to stay with me forever. i need to go buy a copy immediately and reread it.

“Can a lament be a Glorian? What if grief is a presence, its own being particular to a moment, something or someone we would recognize with encompassing awe?”

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

we have been living a myth. we have constructed a dream. we have cajoled and seduced ourselves into believing we are the center of all things: with plants, and other sentient beings from ants to lizards to coyotes to grizzly bears, subservient to our desires and needs. this is a lethal lie that will be seen by future generations as a grave, and a grave moral sin committed and buried in the name of ignorance and arrogance.

terry tempest williams writes so beautifully, so openly, so thoughtfully. amidst anguish, finding awe — and always perspective. the glorians shifts largely between williams' beloved desert southwest and her time teaching at harvard divinity school, blending nature writing and memoir. the tiny and the tremendous, the horror and the hope: wherever williams seems to turn her focus and care, she uncovers and reflects and connects the personal and the profound. at once a balm and a bulwark.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

give me all the TTW books. she’s an absolute favorite and this book was no exception. everything she writes makes me fall more in love with the desert, and particularly the Southwest, and nature and all beings. read this book.

[Valorie Hallinan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always welcome writing by Terry Tempest Williams. This one is a bit of a slog, though. Seems as though it needs a more substantial theme to tie the essays together. Written in a journal or memoir style, it partly takes place during the pandemic. Given what has transpired since, the state of our environment and future outlook has gotten much worse, and there are few optimistic threads here to hang on to. Not that I need optimism, but there is a bleakness here that I struggled with, and no solid premise for the book. The Glorians' theme seemed slight. Further, I don’t have an interest in Harvard Divinity School, where she teaches and serves as a writer in residence. One essay was about a series of presentations for a climate/environmental-related event at Harvard, and it was reported in a rather flat way. Second-hand accounts of who presented and what they said in the rarefied Harvard scene did not hold my interest. Seems as though she had the book contract, and that publishers tend to publish whatever their big-name authors write. I would suggest readers try some of her earlier, well-known books, which are truly transcendent.

[Jennifer]

Wow.

I began this with such high hopes and was instantly grateful I’d found it. Now, I just feel like a Mean Girl. Williams, at first, oozes the same meditative, loving reverence for all beings of Robin Wall Kimmerer… until she runs roughshod through sanity like a newly released tradwife on a bucking bronco in a seedy country bar on dollar shot night. What on earth did I just read?

I bailed after the nauseating divinity tree story. A tree being cut down elicits the same despair she felt in losing her brother to suicide, yet she did nothing to intervene on the tree’s behalf but weep, wail, and worship it. In fact, she gave more airtime to her intimate love of this tree than her brother.

After deciding I’d had enough, I began reading reviews to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind. Oh-ho-ho! Thinly veiled sexual fantasies of lying with buffaloes and all the cat stories (where was her reverence and responsible love for her cat while it was alive?) have, at least, soothed my conscience for feeling such mean-spirited revulsion. Rather than a sign of meanness, it sounds like my radar was right on the money.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just want to be wherever she is and to see the world the way she does. And yet: How does she not get that the east coast is literally on the coast. How many times did she lament being far from the ocean when Harvard is not even 10 miles from the ocean. This really pissed me off. She lives in Utah without tides or horizons FFS. Throughout the book she lamented climate change and the catastrophic consequences of human emissions yet had 20 people travel from Boston to Utah for a field trip. And it is absolutely animal abuse to let cats roam a desert. FYou, no longer a favorite author. I am kicking myself for having preordered copies for 3 friends just because she wrote it. One lives in Boston, another in Annapolis, and all share their lives with cats.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love her earlier works, including her book about her relationship to the National Parks. The parts of this book centered around her home were special, but the dwelling at Harvard was tedious and did not speak to me of any Gloriana. The tale of the Divinity Tree is interesting, but other than some quiet protest; it does not appear that anyone, either student or professor dared risk anything to save the tree. Although Williams often speaks in metaphors, her tale of wanting to lie down with buffalo ( which is hard to read as anything other than actually having sex with an animal) was too much for me. I did finish the book, after that bit; but the entirety of the book was slow, scattered. The last straw was her story about losing her beloved??? Cat to an outdoor predator, when she and her husband did little to protect that poor cat. Allowing cats to wander outside for a walk about in any area with predators is irresponsible. She can write all the ‘letters from my cat to sooth my guilt’ she wants to, but they set the stage for this to happen. So, a 3 star from me; and probably no more purchases of her books.

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 2 out of 5]

There’s a bizarre, almost perverse, form of empathy and compassion and spirituality that bends so far towards the nonhuman and the mysterious that it disregards immediate and obvious human suffering. The author talks seriously about lynching trees, about simple organisms as people, and doesn’t have words for her husband, while she has hours worth of a letter for her new cat who died: these are poetic uses of words that might stand up in the right context but they are treated as matter of fact and used in an expansive way that ignores what’s left behind. There’s none of the needed nuance toward the tradeoffs of using language in this way that diminishes humans—who are the only ones truly capable of conceiving of and experiencing suffering (the metacognition and conscious awareness of loss).

The author does have beautiful and interesting descriptions of nature. But these reflections are scattered and don’t tie in enough to a central theme of the Glorians (which is itself pretty vague and dreamlike) or anything else.

Could not finish.

[Grace Sanchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

To all the preciousness of every single thing everywhere she bids us to pay attention and to begin with love.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

For fans of Terry Tempest Williams, she has a new book out called The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. The title is from a dream the author had during the early days of the pandemic in which the author finds herself at Harvard, where she is a writer-in-residence in real life. In the dream she is climbing a tower. Reaching the top, she sees a female colleague, whom she approaches.

“Do you remember the vow you made to us?” the professor asks.
“Remind me,” William says.
“Your vow is to create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians,” the professor says.

And with that the author wakes up. But wait, what is a Glorian?

For Williams, like for all of us, the pandemic was a “great quieting.” It’s hard to believe, but that was the first time I ever heard the sound of baby birds singing in a nest. They were baby juncos. And I’d never been in a quiet enough place to actually hear them chirping like crickets.

Everything is so loud in Southern California. There are always planes streaking over head and so many police helicopters — and the constant sound of the leaf blowers and relentless construction noise. But during the pandemic, the world got so quiet, especially during the beginning of the lockdown. I remember the startle of hearing a huge grapefruit falling off the tree and hitting the ground with a thud in our backyard. How had I never been present for that before?

For Terry Tempest Williams, her dream haunts her. What is a Glorian? No matter how hard she looks, she comes up empty… until one day, she is transfixed watching an ant carry a magenta flower from a blooming coyote willow tree across a long stretch of her backyard… And she is startled by the magnificence of the world.

That is a Glorian, she says.

And so she defines a Glorian as an encounter with élan vital (“vital momentum”)—a meeting with grace. It is the “holy ordinary” in the book’s title, something I’ve always referred to as Wonderworld —from Melville’s "the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open” in Moby Dick.

I love it when she is talking about Utah ad the Great Salt Lake... love when she describes her husband and those dragonflies... She makes me wonder about the difference between noticing versus witnessing...

Like the author, I also thought covid would be a great awakening--a moment when there could have been a serious reset... During covid, I kept thinking that if anything good could come out of the tragedy of all the suffering, it would be if Americans could do a big reset. Maybe start working together to consume less, pollute less, try and go a little lighter on the planet. Quiet down, perhaps look back to a time when the turning of seasons was marked collectively, when certain days were set apart from other days, when the rhythms of a community's life together created something like punctuation in time.

But before we knew it, we were back to business as usual. Or dare I say it, the spinning world was back with a vengeance!

Wonderful book. Like all her books.

[Sherry Sharpnack · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is a "Glorian?" What is a "holy ordinary?"
According to Harvard Divinity School's (HDS) writer-in-residence, Terry Tempest Williams, A "holy ordinary" is anything that creates a coherence (co-here-ence - as in two places at once) between two halves of a binary. [paraphrase, p. 207] For Ms. Williams, this occurs to her as she travels back and forth between her home in the red desert of southeastern Utah and her job at HDS.
"Holy ordinaries" help her define a "Glorian" for her. She defines a Glorian as:
"A Glorian is an encounter.
A Glorian is a meeting with élan vital.
A Glorian is a moment of grace." p. 14.
"A Glorian jolts you from an unconscious state of mind to a conscious place of mind. A Glorian is where fear and awe join hands. Lightning flashes accompanies by thunderclaps. It is easy to believe the gods still exist in this place." p. 175.

The rest of the book is Ms. Williams trying to attach meaning to a dream, in which she must ascend a tower, but does she choose the straight staircase, or the spiral one? She chooses the spiral one, and when she gets to the top, she realizes she is standing atop the ruins of Cassandra's tower. (Remember Cassandra? The prophetess who had the temerity to deny Apollo her sexual favors after he gave her the gift of prophecy? He couldn't revoke his gift, so he cursed her with no one believing her prophecies.) At the top of the tower, Ms. Williams sees that a fellow teacher has ascended the straight staircase with a group of students, but they can't reach each other because of a locked door.

The rest of the book is autobiographical reminiscences of how Ms. Williams attempts to unlock the door at the top of the tower. We readers begin to see that she identifies with Cassandra; in her case, she is decrying the existential threat of climate change with the larger world not listening at all. She is anguished over the devastation of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and loss of life, as well as the slow destruction of her beloved red desert from a years-long drought and devastating flash flooding when the rains do come. I was particularly touched by her anguished chapters about the removal of the HDS Divinity Tree, a red oak that stood in the yard of the school for 200+ years. But it had to come down to make way for a new wing on the HDS - "progress." Hmph. What a metaphor for what we humans are doing to the earth!!
But... the Divinity Tree can (will?) live again. So the book ends on a note of hope.
This is a quiet book, and not a quick read, although the chapters are short enough to put down the book to digest a deep thought for a bit. 4 stars.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a book that shows us how to cope with our times. Terry Tempest Williams calls everything and everyone who brings us insight and connection and love a Glorían.

We are dreamers. The lesson is “We can reweave the world anew not from the places of fear and doubt, but from intimate spaces of belonging. We are meant to engage, not withdraw.”

I love this book and how it flows. The chapters are not essays. Nothing is firmly concluded or logically analyzed. These are pictures of thinking and actions.

One of my favorite chapters is “The Call” in which Terry gets a note from bell hooks asking her to call her. She never calls her but she doesn’t know why. It is simply inexplicable. Why do some things happen? We don’t know. Why do we seek a reason or the conclusion for things?

If we look for or look at people, animals, things that happen as Glorians it is a way of finding our way through these dark times. Inspiration, something deeper than hope.

“The ant carrying the coyote blossom across the desert is a Glorian.
A Glorian is an encounter.
A Glorian is a meeting with élan vital.
A Glorian is a moment of grace.”

[Deidra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay I think my ratings for each of her books have gone down with each one I’ve read. Maybe that’s my sign to stop? I think Utah >>>> Harvard though, and this had lotttsss of Harvard. Also the bison thing was a bit out of left field.

[Eliza]

I fear this is giving substack book

[Maria Klondike]

Regret. Intrigue. Annoyance. Feelings I felt getting through the first sixty pages.

Memoirs and I don’t get on, usually. I don’t like people who insist upon themselves, which a memoir often does. I’m irked by grandstanding pronouncements of fairly straightforward ideas and experiences. I hold a particular disdain for philosophy for people who don’t think.

Ta da.

Glorian is a made up word. But it means something like “a moment of grace”. Or wonder. Or inspiration. She says “it’s impossible to define.”

Sure. So the “holy ordinary” part of this title means nothing? No? You’re going to write a series of essays about lived experiences from your time in the desert during the pandemic?

I’m a pretty spiritual person but man! It bugged the hell out of me, hearing her talk about the privilege of living in the desert during the pandemic and getting to go outside to commune with nature all the time- but knowing full well people are dying and talking about the virus giving her the chance to “re-inhabit” her home? I get meditation in solitude and what nots but this felt tone deaf. Why even write about it? Ugh, nope, not for me.

As for the Glorians, I’m an observant person obsessed with nature and my place in it. I understand the feeling of being subsumed in a moment, of being at one in the world around you. So I really don’t need an essay explaining it to me, nor a book of them.

This book definitely is something I agree with but not something I can stand to read. I’m too much like Williams and just different enough to be pissed.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

It pains me to give a Terry Tempest Williams book two stars, but the overall experience fell flat, even if I still really enjoyed some of the essays. Perhaps it was listening to it on audio, but there wasn't much structure. Except for a few extended essays, which I thought were the strongest sections, the rest of the book was mostly shorter vignettes that didn't have a strong connecting thread. This is probably because Glorians is a made-up word (one reviewer called it ill-defined and I agree) and, in my opinion, the essays don't come cohesively around a definition or thesis to make it all pull together.

[Lisa Munoz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much, it carried me through frightening weeks of a heat crisis here where it seemed that our global eco-crisis had descended to kill our beloved trees, birds, plant life and everything right outside our front door.
Woven as an interpretation of a powerful dream that she experienced along with personal memoir, extraordinarily beautiful descriptions of nature and places where she lives and works, and an accounting of working at Harvard Divinity School during the recent expansion and the removal of the historical Divinity Tree. Creating the term “Glorians” to describe these moments of perception of divinity in our daily life is genius. I’m inspired to look for, identify, and revel in the beauty and love of the Glorians here in my home environment.
This is a deeply moving and beautiful work.

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is difficult for me to review this book. I lived for many years in Utah and I first “discovered” her writing through Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. She writes incredibly beautifully, with such passion and powers of observation. Yet, this book made me immensely sad. TTW and I are of the same generation and thus have lived through the many changes - environmental, political, social, etc- taking place in our world. I admire her optimism, hope and seeking of a new language to move humanity forward. Unfortunately, I do not share her optimism although I do believe in the power of the “holy ordinary “. I hope she is right and that “whatever future may be collapsing before our eyes, we can dream a new world into being” (p. 306).

[Ashley Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is TTWs attempt at putting words to her spiritual journey over the last few years. I love her concept of the Holy Ordinary.

This would probably have been a 5 star book for me if it weren’t for the pandemic fatigue that makes even reading about those years in hindsight feel insufferable. Luckily that was only a few chapters in this book. Though I do appreciate how impactful those years were on TTWs spiritual journey.

[Lydia Freier · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books where you want to underline every other sentence…feels sacred, so aligned with how i’ve been feeling, what i needed to hear. grateful i found this

[Jordan McC · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hug while sitting in the hospital waiting room. Needed this reflection on life, love, and the current moment.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every night after reading chapters of this book, I would lay awake thinking about them. What a mind and soul!

[Ren]

DNFd after two chapters. Just not my cup of tea. I don't want to read about COVID and I can't take mystical dreams and healing rocks seriously.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Glorians, Terry Tempest Williams writes into the long quiet left by a global pandemic. Not a story in the usual sense. Fragments. Observations. A life measured in small reckonings. A tree cut down. The water rising. A people rising. A cat gone missing into the wider world.

Tempest does not force meaning. Lets it come slow. What is lost is not always named outright but it is there in the margins. The land endures. The mind circles back. What remains is attention. And in intention, something like healing, though it does not claim it.

[Rebecca Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read most everything this author has published. Her connection to the Southwest moves me deeply. As a Unitarian Universalist I appreciate her embracing of all religions. I especially appreciate her connection to nature.