An American Prophet of the Natural World

The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams; Grove Atlantic, 336 pp., $28.00

In the early months of 1836, a 33-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson sat in the Old Manse in Concord, gazing down the hill to the Concord River where the Old North Bridge had been swept away by a storm. It was there that he drafted Nature, an essay he hoped would be a spiritual “shot heard round the world.” Concord had been the birthplace of the American Revolution. Emerson’s intent in Nature was to initiate an ongoing revolution of the spirit by attending to the ever-present Divinity of the natural world.

Today, I call Concord home and live down the street from the Manse, which reminds me, on a near-daily basis, to search for a modern companion to Emerson’s initial salvo. I have found one in Terry Tempest Williams’s new book, The Glorians. It is a book that insists we improve, as Henry David Thoreau suggested, “the nick of time,” before the sun sets on our lives and our species. Like Emerson, Williams has established herself as our nation’s cartographer of the wild edges of consciousness, and in The Glorians, she turns her gaze toward the “Holy Ordinary”—the small, often-overlooked encounters that anchor us when the world feels as though it is coming loose from its moorings.

The book was born from a pandemic-induced dream in which a professor asked Williams if she remembered the vow she had made “to create the Epic Documentation of the Glorians.” When Williams awoke, the dictionary offered no clarity, leaving her to define Glorian through her own Emersonian inquiry into lived experience. Williams ultimately defines a Glorian as an encounter with élan vital (“vital momentum”)—a meeting with grace, like witnessing an ant transporting a magenta blossom across the desert floor. How does one attend to something so small? With a degree of attention both uncommon and sorely needed in this age. With a faith that one can still attend to the unseen. “At night, my mind remains focused, watchful, alert,” Williams writes, maintaining that even in the densest of shadows, we can surprise ourselves when trying to “see in the dark.”

The narrative arc of The Glorians follows Williams as she oscillates between the “great quieting” of her home in Castle Valley, Utah, and the institutional bustle of Harvard Divinity School, where she has served the past eight years as a writer-in-residence. In the Utah desert, she finds “the golden thread” that her grandmother taught her to look for—the natural and spiritual throughline that connects the greatest to the smallest, the sublime to the pointedly ordinary. This thread manifests in the unlikeliest of places: a great blue heron spearing a trout in a toxic river, the eye shine of a deer in the summer dark, the prickly pear that survives a flood. These are Williams’s “Glorians”: moments of beauty that are “unexpected, undeserved, and freely given.” Her prose is at its most moving when she is “ground truthing” the Southwest. She writes of the effects of global warming and the resulting “hot drought” with the precision of a scientist and the unapologetic lamentation of a prophet: “If this sounds like biblical terms, it is because these are biblical times.” The chapters on the recurring flash floods of 2024 are particularly arresting. She describes the “frothing, red-sanded bloodbath of detritus” as the “wrath of what we have sown.” Standing in a newly carved arroyo, she realizes that “terror is nothing but the beginning of beauty”—a reversal of Rilke that captures the brutal, transformative energy of the desert.

The heart of the book lies in Williams’s reflections on what it means to be a “holy fool,” one who is able see the world more clearly because of her distance from its distracting, ego-driven cultural mainstream.  Drawing on an unpublished manuscript by her hero bell hooks, Williams explores the freedom of letting go of a desire for status, fame, and power. Her exile from the University of Utah—a painful chapter involving a clash with the fossil fuel industry—becomes her liberation. At Harvard, she finds she is in the borderlands and, at the urging of the poet and painter Etel Adnan, she chooses to stay.

There is a sense of commencement in these pages, not just for the students she teaches, but for Williams herself. For example, she is learning to pray again—not to a singular, gendered god, but to the “multitudinous, mysterious, and infinite” gods she recognizes in the fins, furs, and spores of the world. Her “Epic Documentation” ultimately reveals that the Glorians are not just celestial beings or desert miracles; they are also the next generation of “young visionaries, artists, and advocates” who are finding their voices in the shadow of the Ivory Tower.

Two years after publishing Nature, Emerson was invited to give a lecture known today as the Divinity School Address; it remains one of the most scathing critiques of institutional religion in modern times. Emerson chastised his listeners for their feigned piety, their parroted values, and their neglect of the divinity of ordinary experience. The response to his lecture was overwhelmingly negative. Emerson was banned from speaking at Harvard for 30 years. 181 years later, Williams witnesses the felling of a 150-year-old red oak, seated at the center of the Divinity School, to make way for a LEED-certified renovation. The irony was lost on no one, especially Williams: an institution dedicated to the divine destroying a living manifestation of it in the name of sustainability.

Williams writes with careful candor of this incident not just as a loss but as a murder, expressed in counterpoint to the jarring suicide of her brother, Dan. Her intent throughout The Glorians is to bridge the ecological and the personal: The dismemberment of the Divinity Tree is, for Williams, akin to the clear-cutting of every forest on the planet—and to our most personal griefs. Heavy-handed? Perhaps, but Williams has never been one for subtlety when the stakes are existential.

The felling of the Divinity Tree was a kind of sacrilege, yet for Williams, and thankfully for us, it finds new life in the form of beetle-carved benches and a round table in a “room of grace.” A five-foot sapling, nurtured from the original tree’s acorns by the university arboretum, also now stands on the Commons as a descendant, proving, in Williams’s words, that “life follows life.” Without being trite or cliché, The Glorians succeeds in catching sight of the sublime and beautiful amid a people seemingly hell-bent on self-destruction. Williams promises that destruction is never just destruction. Surveying flood damage, she writes, “I no longer use the word devastation because it is untrue. Life was reinstating itself without a pause.”

It took me a very long time to understand Emerson’s seemingly callous comment, that “the only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.” This outlook—that life continues without pause, despite our protests to the contrary— is more hopeful than I am used to being. In our moment of political and environmental razing, it is very easy to ask, “What remains?” and I feel grateful to find that Williams provides an adequate answer. Even in absence, there will be a presence.

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