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An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field
The acclaimed author of Refuge here weaves together a resonant and often rhapsodic manifesto on behalf of the landscapes she loves, combining the power of her observations in the field with her personal experience—as a woman, a Mormon, and a Westerner. Through the grace of her stories we come to see how a lack of intimacy with the natural world has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other.
Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O’Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book—one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.
Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O’Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book—one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
45 people are currently reading
1227 people want to read
About the author
Terry Tempest Williams
102 books1,448 followersTerry 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
March 16, 2011
terry tempest williams is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers.. and someone i would just LOVE to one day meet! this delightful book is a compilation of short stories.. quick and easy read.. each story is beautiful in its own way.. some tragic and made me cry, some had me laughing out loud, some were just plain old endearing for reasons i can not capture in words... i find her writing style to be very poetic and poignant and just bought and can not WAIT to read her most recent book, "finding beauty in a broken world" which essentially chronicles her pilgrimage to a very small town in italy to apprentice to a mosaic master... as a way of beginning a conversation with the complexities of the brokenness in our world and in ourselves.. and how we might begin to pick up the fragments to make something masterful and whole. highly recommend this author!
November 6, 2007
I read this book while on a 2 night, 3 day solo on a trip in Southern Utah my freshman summer of college. It was incredible. I sat on my little cliff in Canyonlands, looking at the snowcovered La Salle Mountains in the distance, and I read this book that is all centered in the southern utah area. I LOVED IT!!! It talks about how we all have certain landscapes in nature that we identify with naturally. It's neat and will make you feel more connected to your environment, as well as finding beauty in the mundane.
May 28, 2013
Williams often writes about things I care quite a bit about: Utah's natural beauty and/or quirky culture; environmental activism; birds; mythology; traveling; Edward Abbey; water & hiking & animals in the wild. She writes about the trails I walk on, the mountains I climb, the rivers I traverse.
"Home is the range of one's instincts. [P]atterns... awaken us to our surroundings. Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding the dependability of a place, we can anchor ourselves as trees."
She presents essays ranging from the pain of familial loss to leading a religious retreat from a spiritual null into a coyote-howling echoic chorus. She ties in environmentalism, the difficulties of governmental intervention and the strength of individuals in leaving a mark.
"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 if 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."
Her stories are many, and enjoyable all. Terry Tempest Williams sees beauty in life and the life in beauty all around.
"It will be a slow, steady river that braids our communities together."
"Home is the range of one's instincts. [P]atterns... awaken us to our surroundings. Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding the dependability of a place, we can anchor ourselves as trees."
She presents essays ranging from the pain of familial loss to leading a religious retreat from a spiritual null into a coyote-howling echoic chorus. She ties in environmentalism, the difficulties of governmental intervention and the strength of individuals in leaving a mark.
"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 if 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."
Her stories are many, and enjoyable all. Terry Tempest Williams sees beauty in life and the life in beauty all around.
"It will be a slow, steady river that braids our communities together."
August 5, 2011
I don’t quite understand my reluctance to embrace this kind of writing, even less so my kneejerk aversion. Example: “Echoes are real – not imaginary. We call out – and the land calls back. It is our interaction with the ecosystem; the Echo System.” I have no problem with living symbolically, but I think I object to the land being symbolic of anything. The land is. Nature is. It is not here to give us meaning or profundity or opportunities for clever wordplay. I don’t doubt her sincerity, but it seems like proselytizing in trying to open our eyes and hearts to something we’re already a part of.
Another offending passage: “I see a saguaro that looks like the Reverend Mother, her arms generously calling me toward her. I come; at her feet is an offering of gilded flicker feathers.” Anthropomorphizing nature seems the reverse of what I’m after: it seems backward to project human attributes onto the earth. Part of her message also seems to be that women need to be the ones to save the Earth, that we are “mysterious” and “emotional,” and in celebration of that we are the ones who understand nature. This makes me uneasy, too.
Another offending passage: “I see a saguaro that looks like the Reverend Mother, her arms generously calling me toward her. I come; at her feet is an offering of gilded flicker feathers.” Anthropomorphizing nature seems the reverse of what I’m after: it seems backward to project human attributes onto the earth. Part of her message also seems to be that women need to be the ones to save the Earth, that we are “mysterious” and “emotional,” and in celebration of that we are the ones who understand nature. This makes me uneasy, too.
May 8, 2023
I enjoy nature writing as long as it is not too poesy. Unfortunately, much of the writing in this one seemed a little too forced, resulting in a fair amount of head scratching on my part.
Some of the essays were pretty good -- especially the ones in which the author described various experiences in her life. But others were just meh.
I got a chuckle out of one major error (I hope it was just a typo and not what she actually said to Congress in her testimony) The sentence says that the fossil record places a certain specimen "within the Jurassic Era, 140 billion years ago." Of course, it should say "million" (with a "m", not a "b").
Some of the essays were pretty good -- especially the ones in which the author described various experiences in her life. But others were just meh.
I got a chuckle out of one major error (I hope it was just a typo and not what she actually said to Congress in her testimony) The sentence says that the fossil record places a certain specimen "within the Jurassic Era, 140 billion years ago." Of course, it should say "million" (with a "m", not a "b").
October 27, 2016
Uninteresting. Labored style.
January 19, 2018
A series of essays and transcripts by the Utah environmental activist and conservationist, this book was originally published in 1994.
As I've often said, collections are tricky because there's usually some unevenness to the individual selections, either in the author's contributions or the reader's taste. TTW's writing is always rich with imagery and very specific details about the environment combined with almost mystical references to myth and legends, a kind of intricate braiding of disparate styles that usually works. In this collection, however, some of the beginning chapters felt over-embellished, as if she were trying too hard to be poignant. The pieces are still good, but they lacked the ease of phrasing that made Refuge and Red so readable. IMO, the best pieces are toward the end of the book, particularly "Water Songs," "Erosion," and "A Patriot's Journal." "Testimony," which is a transcript before a Congressional subcommittee regarding pending legislation was interesting to me because I had no clue where the active components of the drug Toxol came from (yew trees) or the gross negligence of the BLM in managing forestry stands where the yew trees grow. The amount of yew bark needed to treat one patient (at that time) is staggering, so to have the BLM basically destroy entire stands with little more than a "Oops, our bad" (if even that much) was unconscionable.
As I've often said, collections are tricky because there's usually some unevenness to the individual selections, either in the author's contributions or the reader's taste. TTW's writing is always rich with imagery and very specific details about the environment combined with almost mystical references to myth and legends, a kind of intricate braiding of disparate styles that usually works. In this collection, however, some of the beginning chapters felt over-embellished, as if she were trying too hard to be poignant. The pieces are still good, but they lacked the ease of phrasing that made Refuge and Red so readable. IMO, the best pieces are toward the end of the book, particularly "Water Songs," "Erosion," and "A Patriot's Journal." "Testimony," which is a transcript before a Congressional subcommittee regarding pending legislation was interesting to me because I had no clue where the active components of the drug Toxol came from (yew trees) or the gross negligence of the BLM in managing forestry stands where the yew trees grow. The amount of yew bark needed to treat one patient (at that time) is staggering, so to have the BLM basically destroy entire stands with little more than a "Oops, our bad" (if even that much) was unconscionable.
November 3, 2022
I just love her. Conservationist, poet, feminist, deep feeler. Nothing like a Terry book to get me deep into my emotions.
April 6, 2024
I want to read everything this woman has ever written
January 1, 2019
Officially my last book read in 2018, and it feels pretty fitting to end my year in books with Terry Tempest Williams. Good naturalist writing is my favorite thing to read, and what I most want to write.
It's what wakes me up in the middle of the night: These timely and timeless stories about places and species that are disappearing. These stories about places I know intimately because I know places just like them. Places that soothe and heal, places with power like electricity striking across a moody sky.
Reading TTW is always a reminder, a solidifying: We have so much to lose. We have so much to fight for.
[Five stars for dedicated conservation, impassioned pleas, and for being a timely read for me, one that resonates for all the work and wonder that undoubtedly lies in the year(s) ahead.]
--------------------------
Original review from my original read in 2016:
In the same week (this! week, as it were), I followed my first-ever Abbey (via Down the River) with my first-ever Terry Tempest Williams (via you guessed it: An Unspoken Hunger), and while they are certainly different in their conservationist approaches and conversations, these are two books, two collections, two voices, that weave together nicely. That complement each other the way a smattering of shells complement a stunning coast-line, or the way steep and jagged canyon walls complement a rushing river. In this particular collection Tempest Williams doesn't feel as focused as Abbey seemed in Down the River; her writing doesn't read as polished in thought and execution as Abbey's (and others' outdoor/naturalist) writing felt and feels to me (the number of times I thought one of her essays would have ended so much stronger had she not written that last sentence!).
She doesn't make me laugh the way Abbey does, but she makes me think like he did, especially when she's talking about other naturalists, when she's telling stories about her grandmother, and her uncle, and about the myriad other players in this global game of conservation - when she's talking about and eulogizing Abbey. When she's talking about the women who have come before her, the women who have beautifully and honestly shaped and molded her, and the state of conservation in the world today: That's when her writing is at its best and brightest. That's when I want to underline passages, and re-read them for strength and for sharing. That's when my eyes alight like one of her heralded Coyote Clan, and I want to hoot and holler and dance and howl at the moon in the middle of a torrential desert rainstorm.
[Three-point-five stars for the pieces of her stories that will stick to my bones, and for the pages and ways in which she seeks to embolden women naturalists the world over.]
It's what wakes me up in the middle of the night: These timely and timeless stories about places and species that are disappearing. These stories about places I know intimately because I know places just like them. Places that soothe and heal, places with power like electricity striking across a moody sky.
Reading TTW is always a reminder, a solidifying: We have so much to lose. We have so much to fight for.
[Five stars for dedicated conservation, impassioned pleas, and for being a timely read for me, one that resonates for all the work and wonder that undoubtedly lies in the year(s) ahead.]
--------------------------
Original review from my original read in 2016:
In the same week (this! week, as it were), I followed my first-ever Abbey (via Down the River) with my first-ever Terry Tempest Williams (via you guessed it: An Unspoken Hunger), and while they are certainly different in their conservationist approaches and conversations, these are two books, two collections, two voices, that weave together nicely. That complement each other the way a smattering of shells complement a stunning coast-line, or the way steep and jagged canyon walls complement a rushing river. In this particular collection Tempest Williams doesn't feel as focused as Abbey seemed in Down the River; her writing doesn't read as polished in thought and execution as Abbey's (and others' outdoor/naturalist) writing felt and feels to me (the number of times I thought one of her essays would have ended so much stronger had she not written that last sentence!).
She doesn't make me laugh the way Abbey does, but she makes me think like he did, especially when she's talking about other naturalists, when she's telling stories about her grandmother, and her uncle, and about the myriad other players in this global game of conservation - when she's talking about and eulogizing Abbey. When she's talking about the women who have come before her, the women who have beautifully and honestly shaped and molded her, and the state of conservation in the world today: That's when her writing is at its best and brightest. That's when I want to underline passages, and re-read them for strength and for sharing. That's when my eyes alight like one of her heralded Coyote Clan, and I want to hoot and holler and dance and howl at the moon in the middle of a torrential desert rainstorm.
[Three-point-five stars for the pieces of her stories that will stick to my bones, and for the pages and ways in which she seeks to embolden women naturalists the world over.]
January 5, 2009
As the title of one of Terry Tempest Williams' essays states... this collection of immersions into spirit and place are "The Erotics of Place." That is, not just a bodily immersion into her subject, but one of totality. Williams accomplishes that sinking into her well-worded ideas that leaves only the tips of her hair floating on the surface, a faint rippling of the water where she stepped in, and nothing more - she is submerged. And that is a thing of quality.
The essays in this short collection touch on lives of people as well as life force of place. Williams writes about Georgia O'Keefe in "In Cahoots with Coyote" with evident love for the woman, the artist, the landscape: "What O'Keefe saw was what O'Keefe felt - in her own bones. Her brush strokes remind us again and again, nothing is as it appears: roads that seem to stand in the air like charmed snakes; a pelvis bone that becomes a gateway to the sky; another that is rendered like an angel; and 'music translated into something for the eye.'" The essay concludes with Williams, O'Keefe, and coyotes in the canyons of southern Utah howling in harmony.
Williams writes a eulogy for Edward Abbey, another spirit polished by desert sand. She sees Abbey as the leader of a growing Clan, a clan of human coyotes reclaiming their land, "...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... 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 harder than anyone on the planet..."
This is that total immersion Williams renders so well. Her people essays blend seamlessly with her place essays; they are the same, as they should be, she reminds us, the same. "We call its name," she writes of the earth around her, "and the land calls back."
Williams makes political statements in her work. It is her coyote howl to call together an awareness of the destruction of land all around us. She addresses nuclear testing not only as a naturalist, but as a woman born in a family riddled with breast and ovarian cancer. She addresses conservation as a necessity for continued life on earth, not merely as a question of quality of life. Her call is not militant - it is one of lyrical love for the preservation of the gift we have been given, the natural world that sustains us.
The essays in this short collection touch on lives of people as well as life force of place. Williams writes about Georgia O'Keefe in "In Cahoots with Coyote" with evident love for the woman, the artist, the landscape: "What O'Keefe saw was what O'Keefe felt - in her own bones. Her brush strokes remind us again and again, nothing is as it appears: roads that seem to stand in the air like charmed snakes; a pelvis bone that becomes a gateway to the sky; another that is rendered like an angel; and 'music translated into something for the eye.'" The essay concludes with Williams, O'Keefe, and coyotes in the canyons of southern Utah howling in harmony.
Williams writes a eulogy for Edward Abbey, another spirit polished by desert sand. She sees Abbey as the leader of a growing Clan, a clan of human coyotes reclaiming their land, "...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... 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 harder than anyone on the planet..."
This is that total immersion Williams renders so well. Her people essays blend seamlessly with her place essays; they are the same, as they should be, she reminds us, the same. "We call its name," she writes of the earth around her, "and the land calls back."
Williams makes political statements in her work. It is her coyote howl to call together an awareness of the destruction of land all around us. She addresses nuclear testing not only as a naturalist, but as a woman born in a family riddled with breast and ovarian cancer. She addresses conservation as a necessity for continued life on earth, not merely as a question of quality of life. Her call is not militant - it is one of lyrical love for the preservation of the gift we have been given, the natural world that sustains us.
February 13, 2009
The title alone grabbed me, “An Unspoken Hunger.” Wow. And then I noticed the author’s name was “Tempest.” Another “Wow.”
Tempest. That's perfect. This is a book filled with passion: passion for the land, passion for life, passion for the natural world and our place in it. Sensual, peaceful, yet, full of strength. As the jacket copy states, “Through the grace of her stories we come to see how a lack of intimacy with the natural world has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other.”
In her essay “Undressing the Bear,” in this case, the bear represents “the wisdom of the wild,” Tempest writes:
“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.
By undressing, exposing and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our authentic selves.”
Yet, another, “Wow.”
Tempest. That's perfect. This is a book filled with passion: passion for the land, passion for life, passion for the natural world and our place in it. Sensual, peaceful, yet, full of strength. As the jacket copy states, “Through the grace of her stories we come to see how a lack of intimacy with the natural world has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other.”
In her essay “Undressing the Bear,” in this case, the bear represents “the wisdom of the wild,” Tempest writes:
“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.
By undressing, exposing and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our authentic selves.”
Yet, another, “Wow.”
February 27, 2012
This collection reminds me of a scattering of small stones, each with its own kind of beauty, to be appreciated for their individual character rather than as part of a larger pattern. Like Williams' masterpiece Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger is centered in the landscape of the American west and in Williams' fierce feminist environmentalism, which she sees as continuous with her heritage as a Mormon woman. These essays range more widely, however, from the Serengeti to the marshlands of the Bronx and the United Nations building, where Williams demonstrated against nuclear testing on the eve of the first Gulf War. She includes tributes to environmentalist heroes, and personal friends, Edward Abbey and Mardy Murie, and prose-poems on the erotics of the land. She's particularly moving writing about the figure of Coyote, who she places at the head of a new clan dedicated to truly living on the land. If you haven't read Williams before and don't want to commit to Refuge, this is a good place to start.
February 13, 2014
I just found this book in a box in my basement. So glad I did! Williams is a great writer and I couldn't put the book down. She talks a lot about her relationships with other naturalists and travels into different parts of the world. Her accounts are usually riveting. Sometimes I found the book a little fruity... like when she talks about the erotic relationship between the wild feminine and the untamed bear. Huh? I mean, I get what she is trying to say but at times I felt like her arguments about the importance of wildness and connection to place were a bit over the top. I guess I am not a "howl with the coyotes" type of person but I do share a love of the outdoors and sense of sadness that as a society we are rapidly losing a connection to place. Definitely a great read though... and has inspired me to look in my boxes downstairs for books by other great naturalists!
November 10, 2008
I know I'm in the hands of a wonderful writer when I feel compelled to read their words aloud, to test them on the lips and tongue and feel them take shape in sound. Shakespeare compels me in this way. Muriel Spark has. And now I've discovered Terry Tempest Williams. What took me so long? This collection of essays was published in book form in 1994. So many years of not reading her wasted.
So my advice: Get Tempest Williams and get reading. Then get yourself to the desert parks of Utah. Aaahhhh.
So my advice: Get Tempest Williams and get reading. Then get yourself to the desert parks of Utah. Aaahhhh.
June 12, 2014
Her writing doesn't resonate with me the way it does for others. I liked the story about her uncle, and the end brought tears to my eyes. I didn't realize she was a Mormon, and since I am uncomfortable with much of their doctrine, this got in the way when she would bring it up. Obviously, faith is important and it isn't something I would expect someone to leave out, but it was jarring and felt out of place in many of the essays. Overall, it was a forgettable book, sadly.
April 24, 2014
I enjoyed this little book. I like reading about people's experiencing of nature whether spiritual or just plain physical. Each chapter is an individual essay, so you can read one, put it down and then go back later and read another. I enjoyed the author's chatty writing. I felt like she was just sitting across from me and visiting with me.
April 3, 2015
I have started this book so many times but have gotten distracted after the first essay. Finally, I stayed on track. Thank goodness. This collection of essays is both beautiful and wise. The environment, nature, justice, paying attention. Important topics. Beautifully spoken.
July 14, 2015
not my favorite TTW, but even not my favorite of hers is still pretty great. though i usually love short essays like this, i think in the case of her writing, i prefer the deeper dive of her long-form works, like refuge.
April 12, 2013
Probably should have read Refuge first - to get to know her better. But the essays were interesting and imbued with her sense of wonder and curiosity about the natural world.
February 1, 2017
Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.
My unspoken hunger was awakened and named when I was living in New York, on the island of Manhattan and I stumbled across Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I worked nights and struggled with insomnia during my time off, so would often rise early and walk over to Central Park, and even in this concrete city, I could find a little of what Dillard found, and it created a hunger in me for more, greed for more water and sky and forests and mountains. The second time the unspoken hunger was lit in me was my travels to southern Utah, and the red rocks, and that continues, as a hunger for a landscape I had never known, but that felt like home.
I really appreciate Williams as a author, feminist, and activist. Her voice is clear and strong, and her subjects far ranging and important. Whether she is writing about our beloved Utah, or the Bronx, or the Tetons, she has a fine Dillard-esque eye and broadens her reach, again, to activism, which is so inspirational. The only parts that don't ring true for me are her essays on the erotic. I believe that our sense are fully engaged by the landscape, and land, and that there are times when you are absorbed in your senses in nature, the ocean, a hot spring, feeling the sun on your skin, cushioned on a forest floor, and I also believe the euphoria of an exhilarating hike or vista, can combine to "feel erotic" or stir something primal in you that leads to arousal, but I am precise about language sometimes, and I think words like sensual or erotic are not exactly right. It is where words fail us. Is there a word for erotic/spiritual/mystical that could satisfy us both?
The Village Watchman sits on top of his totem with Wolf and Salmon—it is beginning to rain in the forest. I find it curious that this spot in southeast Alaska has brought me back into relation with my uncle, this man of sole-birth who came into the world feet first. 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.
n 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.
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.
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.
“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 rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.…” 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.
Sweat poured off my forehead and I savored the salt on my lips. The dry heat reverberated off the canyon’s narrow walls. I relished the sensation of being baked. I walked even more slowly, aware of the cicadas, their drone that held the pulse of the desert. An evening primrose bloomed. I knelt down and peeked inside yellow petals. The pistil and stamens resembled stars. My index finger brushed them, gently, and I inhaled pollen. No act seemed too extravagant in these extreme temperatures. Even the canyon wren’s joyous anthem, each falling note, was slow, full, and luxurious. In this heat, nothing was rushed.
Wallace Stegner, in his book The Sound of Mountain Water, says, “In this country you cannot raise your eyes without looking a hundred miles. You can hear coyotes who have somehow escaped the air-dropped poison baits designed to exterminate them. You can see in every sandy pocket the pug tracks of wildcats, and every water pocket in the rock will give you a look backward into geologic time, for every such hole swarms with triangular crablike creatures locally called tadpoles but actually first cousins to the trilobites who left their fossil skeletons in the Paleozoic.”
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. Pagans? Perhaps.
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.
According to the National Cancer Institute, the yew tree grows so slowly that it takes the bark of three hundred-year-old trees to treat a single cancer patient. Sixty yew trees divided by three—we are talking twenty women who could have been treated with taxol. My mother? My grandmothers? My aunts? Your mother? Your wife? Twenty women. Sixty trees lying dead on top of the clearcut with limbs and needles still intact.
The poet W. S. Merwin says, “I want to tell what the forests were like. I will have to speak a forgotten language.” I am asking you as members of this subcommittee, as my lawmakers, my guardians of justice, for one favor. Will you please go visit the trees? See them for yourself—these beautiful healing trees growing wildly, mysteriously, in the draws of our ancient forests, and then go visit the adjacent clearcuts, walk among the wreckage, the slash piles, forage through the debris, and look again for the Pacific yew. Think about health. Think about the women you love—our bodies, the land—and think about what was once rich and dense and green with standing. Think about how our sacred texts may be found in the forest as well as in the Psalms, and then, my dear lawmakers, I ask you to make your decision with your heart, what you felt in the forest in the presence of a forgotten language. And if you cannot make a decision from this place of heart, from this place of compassionate intelligence, we may have to face as a people the horror of this nation, that our government and its leaders are heartless.
My unspoken hunger was awakened and named when I was living in New York, on the island of Manhattan and I stumbled across Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I worked nights and struggled with insomnia during my time off, so would often rise early and walk over to Central Park, and even in this concrete city, I could find a little of what Dillard found, and it created a hunger in me for more, greed for more water and sky and forests and mountains. The second time the unspoken hunger was lit in me was my travels to southern Utah, and the red rocks, and that continues, as a hunger for a landscape I had never known, but that felt like home.
I really appreciate Williams as a author, feminist, and activist. Her voice is clear and strong, and her subjects far ranging and important. Whether she is writing about our beloved Utah, or the Bronx, or the Tetons, she has a fine Dillard-esque eye and broadens her reach, again, to activism, which is so inspirational. The only parts that don't ring true for me are her essays on the erotic. I believe that our sense are fully engaged by the landscape, and land, and that there are times when you are absorbed in your senses in nature, the ocean, a hot spring, feeling the sun on your skin, cushioned on a forest floor, and I also believe the euphoria of an exhilarating hike or vista, can combine to "feel erotic" or stir something primal in you that leads to arousal, but I am precise about language sometimes, and I think words like sensual or erotic are not exactly right. It is where words fail us. Is there a word for erotic/spiritual/mystical that could satisfy us both?
The Village Watchman sits on top of his totem with Wolf and Salmon—it is beginning to rain in the forest. I find it curious that this spot in southeast Alaska has brought me back into relation with my uncle, this man of sole-birth who came into the world feet first. 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.
n 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.
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.
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.
“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 rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.…” 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.
Sweat poured off my forehead and I savored the salt on my lips. The dry heat reverberated off the canyon’s narrow walls. I relished the sensation of being baked. I walked even more slowly, aware of the cicadas, their drone that held the pulse of the desert. An evening primrose bloomed. I knelt down and peeked inside yellow petals. The pistil and stamens resembled stars. My index finger brushed them, gently, and I inhaled pollen. No act seemed too extravagant in these extreme temperatures. Even the canyon wren’s joyous anthem, each falling note, was slow, full, and luxurious. In this heat, nothing was rushed.
Wallace Stegner, in his book The Sound of Mountain Water, says, “In this country you cannot raise your eyes without looking a hundred miles. You can hear coyotes who have somehow escaped the air-dropped poison baits designed to exterminate them. You can see in every sandy pocket the pug tracks of wildcats, and every water pocket in the rock will give you a look backward into geologic time, for every such hole swarms with triangular crablike creatures locally called tadpoles but actually first cousins to the trilobites who left their fossil skeletons in the Paleozoic.”
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. Pagans? Perhaps.
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.
According to the National Cancer Institute, the yew tree grows so slowly that it takes the bark of three hundred-year-old trees to treat a single cancer patient. Sixty yew trees divided by three—we are talking twenty women who could have been treated with taxol. My mother? My grandmothers? My aunts? Your mother? Your wife? Twenty women. Sixty trees lying dead on top of the clearcut with limbs and needles still intact.
The poet W. S. Merwin says, “I want to tell what the forests were like. I will have to speak a forgotten language.” I am asking you as members of this subcommittee, as my lawmakers, my guardians of justice, for one favor. Will you please go visit the trees? See them for yourself—these beautiful healing trees growing wildly, mysteriously, in the draws of our ancient forests, and then go visit the adjacent clearcuts, walk among the wreckage, the slash piles, forage through the debris, and look again for the Pacific yew. Think about health. Think about the women you love—our bodies, the land—and think about what was once rich and dense and green with standing. Think about how our sacred texts may be found in the forest as well as in the Psalms, and then, my dear lawmakers, I ask you to make your decision with your heart, what you felt in the forest in the presence of a forgotten language. And if you cannot make a decision from this place of heart, from this place of compassionate intelligence, we may have to face as a people the horror of this nation, that our government and its leaders are heartless.
August 20, 2022
While I believe political activism with the goal of salvaging the health of the natural world (and by extension the health and survival of humanity) laudable and necessary, this book is too black and white. It's a bit too nostalgic about an untouched Nature that once existed, that humans once lived with harmoniously; one she thinks we are destroying with pollution, war and nuclear energy. Not much hope or path forward except anger and political demonstration. I like the approach of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer who finds that nature is always regenerating, always finding ways to prevail, always connecting with humanity in subtle ways. I don't find depression and anger motivating. I also don't find holding Nature or indigenous cultures on a pedestal to be productive. It is romanticizing and idealizing and, in my opinion, not realistic. Humans have always manipulated Nature to our own means. The question is how to do it sustainably. What I would have liked to see is more solutions, more hope, and more celebration of the gains we have made and continue to make in our collaboration with with natural world.
For example, in the scene where Williams is exploring the wetlands in the South Bronx, she doesn't mask her disgust with the polluted environment and the intrusion into the natural world by human-built high rises. There's a sense of disdain for the city, a looking down upon it and pitying it. Why couldn't she see how nature continues to prevail at the side of human intervention in the form of the wetland? That the creatures of the wetlands continue to exist and thrive despite the pollution. A change in perspective would have been welcome here. After all, living in urban areas is better for the environment than populating as yet "untouched" areas. Rather, Williams criticizes the city for its "separation" from Nature and flees back to the more untouched regions where she can find a preserved natural world that she prefers.
The book opens with her exploring the African savannah, and remarking at the way the Maasai have lived in harmony with Nature for millennia. But how is this nostalgia helpful? The knowledge the Maasai possess is so out of reach for so many of us, it's defeatist. Why not recognize some baby steps that we could take in reacclimatizing to our own local environments? A recognition that the Nature that surrounds us, even in cities, is worth understanding and connecting with.
For example, in the scene where Williams is exploring the wetlands in the South Bronx, she doesn't mask her disgust with the polluted environment and the intrusion into the natural world by human-built high rises. There's a sense of disdain for the city, a looking down upon it and pitying it. Why couldn't she see how nature continues to prevail at the side of human intervention in the form of the wetland? That the creatures of the wetlands continue to exist and thrive despite the pollution. A change in perspective would have been welcome here. After all, living in urban areas is better for the environment than populating as yet "untouched" areas. Rather, Williams criticizes the city for its "separation" from Nature and flees back to the more untouched regions where she can find a preserved natural world that she prefers.
The book opens with her exploring the African savannah, and remarking at the way the Maasai have lived in harmony with Nature for millennia. But how is this nostalgia helpful? The knowledge the Maasai possess is so out of reach for so many of us, it's defeatist. Why not recognize some baby steps that we could take in reacclimatizing to our own local environments? A recognition that the Nature that surrounds us, even in cities, is worth understanding and connecting with.
December 23, 2022
Just finished! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The wisdom in this book is magnificent. If you are a Nature lover and Spiritualist this is for you. Highly recommend for people interested in Animism and the well being of the Earth.
Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O’Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book—one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.
Amazon.com Review
Terry Tempest Williams makes it clear that we lose an essential part of ourselves when we neglect the earth, but this collection of essays does not offer a soapbox delivery of tired manifestoes; rather, it uses poetic and insightful inspiration to urge the reader to become aware, assess the damage, and begin to heal broken bonds. In her essay "Yellowstone: The Erotics of Place," Williams writes, "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."
A native of Utah, Williams is best known for her reflections on the American West, but the first essay in this book takes us to Africa's Serengeti Plain: "Morning comes quickly near the equator. There is little delineation of dawn. On the Serengeti, it is either day or night. A peculiar lull occurs just before sunrise. The world is cool and still. Gradually, the sun climbs the ladder of clouds until the sky mirrors the nacreous hues of abalone."
Through these readings you'll discover that Williams's "unspoken hunger" is for us to live lives with greater intent and accountability and in greater intimacy with the natural world. --Kathryn True
Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O’Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book—one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.
Amazon.com Review
Terry Tempest Williams makes it clear that we lose an essential part of ourselves when we neglect the earth, but this collection of essays does not offer a soapbox delivery of tired manifestoes; rather, it uses poetic and insightful inspiration to urge the reader to become aware, assess the damage, and begin to heal broken bonds. In her essay "Yellowstone: The Erotics of Place," Williams writes, "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."
A native of Utah, Williams is best known for her reflections on the American West, but the first essay in this book takes us to Africa's Serengeti Plain: "Morning comes quickly near the equator. There is little delineation of dawn. On the Serengeti, it is either day or night. A peculiar lull occurs just before sunrise. The world is cool and still. Gradually, the sun climbs the ladder of clouds until the sky mirrors the nacreous hues of abalone."
Through these readings you'll discover that Williams's "unspoken hunger" is for us to live lives with greater intent and accountability and in greater intimacy with the natural world. --Kathryn True
March 4, 2019
This collection of short essays by Terry Tempest Williams is rich, powerful, and provocative. Williams' ability to connect the environment to some of our deepest human struggles is unique, and leaves the reader aching to spend more time outside. From the Serengeti to Alaska to the Grand Canyon, Williams invites us in these meditations to consider what is means to have a sense of place, and how the sacred spaces of wilderness can soften, inspire, and comfort us, even in the midst of giant cities.
My favorite essay was the one called "Water Songs," in which Williams describes her experience with a woman named Lee Milner, who shows Williams Pelham Bay Park on the north edge of the Bronx. After a day spent with Lee, Williams notes: "Walking home on 77th Street, I became melancholy. I wasn't sure why. I kept thinking about Lee, who responds to Pelham Bay Park as a lover, who rejects this open space as a wicked edge for undesirables, a dumping ground for toxins or occasional bodies. Pelham Bay is her home, the landscape she naturally comprehends, a sanctuary she holds inside her unguarded heart. 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."
To me, Williams captures wilderness perfectly. There are absolutely places I treat like a lover, and which are sanctuaries for my unguarded heart. Williams gives me the language I need to keep fighting to protect these places.
My favorite essay was the one called "Water Songs," in which Williams describes her experience with a woman named Lee Milner, who shows Williams Pelham Bay Park on the north edge of the Bronx. After a day spent with Lee, Williams notes: "Walking home on 77th Street, I became melancholy. I wasn't sure why. I kept thinking about Lee, who responds to Pelham Bay Park as a lover, who rejects this open space as a wicked edge for undesirables, a dumping ground for toxins or occasional bodies. Pelham Bay is her home, the landscape she naturally comprehends, a sanctuary she holds inside her unguarded heart. 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."
To me, Williams captures wilderness perfectly. There are absolutely places I treat like a lover, and which are sanctuaries for my unguarded heart. Williams gives me the language I need to keep fighting to protect these places.
March 22, 2025
This book, written more than thirty years ago, is a book from another time. TTW writes about war, meaning the Gulf War. We have had several wars since then. Environmental concerns are no longer part of the conversation. We have had a steady drumbeat of our need to drill, baby, drill, and as I write this in Spring, 2025, there has never been a greater risk to the planet. Climate change is proceeding, and accelerating; species such as the polar bear are going extinct; while we grow enough food to feed the world, foreign food aide has been canceled by the current administration. Real estate developers and professional trolls fill important government positions. The concerns of the time in the book seem so far in the distance; the battle has been lost.
There is a moving elegy in the book, from Mardy Murie. It reads as follows.
“There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization in our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?
Thirty years on, we have the answer, and it is “No.”
There is a moving elegy in the book, from Mardy Murie. It reads as follows.
“There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization in our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?
Thirty years on, we have the answer, and it is “No.”
Read
October 30, 2019There is so much of Terry Tempest Williams's spirit and wisdom to gather from this quick read of a book. I shall remember to recommend this to people as a good introduction to her writing if they're not ready to take on "Refuge" or "When Women Were Birds." For me it helped to have read some of her other books previously to have the picture of her life and family in my mind, so maybe I'm wrong... Anyway, I'll also tell them that there are some sort of journalistic interludes about the Gulf War. (if "interlude" is the right word? I mean that in a positive way. It is very journal-like, written in the era and giving a perspective I would have been too young to understand back then.) It is an environmental perspective that will be saved as long as this book (and other writing like it, assuming there are any) is around.
I read this in less than a day, which with my attention span is really saying something! I was staying at a friend's house and asked to borrow it so I can jot down some things--or, heck, I'll buy my own copy so I can take a highlighter to it. There are some paragraphs I read over and over and wished to remember & take into my consciousness.
I read this in less than a day, which with my attention span is really saying something! I was staying at a friend's house and asked to borrow it so I can jot down some things--or, heck, I'll buy my own copy so I can take a highlighter to it. There are some paragraphs I read over and over and wished to remember & take into my consciousness.
June 17, 2019
Read this for book club, I had not heard of the author before. This collection of previously published individual essays is not connected other than being by the same author, but her writing style and expression are similar enough that the pieces weave together without being about the same subject. It can easily be read in short spurts, one essay at a time, or pretty quickly in a longer run.
I found it enjoyable if a little abstract and artistically philosophical; I like a good hike and being out in a variety of natural settings, but I have no strong desire to howl with coyotes or leave behind modern comforts for extended periods of time.
I was the only Mormon in the group so the others asked what I thought about her being an "outside of the box" Mormon woman. Her passion for the natural seems more extreme than most expectations of a traditional Mormon woman stereotype (or, tbh, women in general). I found it mostly refreshing; there are all kinds of Mormon women just like there are all kinds other types of women.
I found it enjoyable if a little abstract and artistically philosophical; I like a good hike and being out in a variety of natural settings, but I have no strong desire to howl with coyotes or leave behind modern comforts for extended periods of time.
I was the only Mormon in the group so the others asked what I thought about her being an "outside of the box" Mormon woman. Her passion for the natural seems more extreme than most expectations of a traditional Mormon woman stereotype (or, tbh, women in general). I found it mostly refreshing; there are all kinds of Mormon women just like there are all kinds other types of women.
July 4, 2025
This was a nonfiction beautiful collection of short stories exploring what it means to be a naturalist in today’s world. I really loved her poetic writing style, it’s refreshing to see scientists write about the world in such a romantic and mystical way. There is one particular story where she compares women to bears “undressing the bear” that really resonated with me. One quote from that chapter I loved: “ 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 the 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 myself—erotic, mysterious, and whole”.
October 11, 2017
This is a short collection of essays. I do love TTW's writing, yet this wasn't my favorite. That said, there were some great thoughts and quotes...
"Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees."
"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."
"Virga: rain evaporating in midair, creating gray-blue streamers that wave back an forth, never touching the ground." (I see this in Utah often.)
"Anticipate resurrection."
"Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend. By understanding the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees."
"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."
"Virga: rain evaporating in midair, creating gray-blue streamers that wave back an forth, never touching the ground." (I see this in Utah often.)
"Anticipate resurrection."
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