| Terry Tempest Williams is known as a passionate and poetic advocate for the wilderness and ecology that surround her home in the Utah desert. She has written numerous books that artfully blend personal and family memoir with natural history, and has long worked to raise awareness about ecological conservation and human health.
In Refuge: AnUnnatural History of Family and Place, she drew a connection between the high incidence of cancer in her family with the aboveground nuclear testing conducted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and ’60s.
In her newest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Williams follows one revelatory word, “mosaic,” through a three-part journey that takes her from Ravenna , Italy, to the plateaus of Utah's Bryce Canyon, to a Rwandan village. Through it all, she pieces together a vision of beauty wrought from the multitude of human intentions.
In a recent interview for COMMON GROUND magazine, Williams had this to say about her new book:
“The whole journey really began in Maine in the context of September 11th, when I chose to speak out. I found myself saying that there are many forms of terrorism, and environmental degradation is one of those. In a New York Times op-ed piece I had written about how secretive the energy policy in Washington is with Dick Cheney and his energy task force meeting behind closed doors, but here in Utah, their federal oil and gas exploration is an earth-shaking experience you can see and feel. Their 50,000-pound thumper trucks roar across the desert without an environmental impact statement, totally trampling the land. Amidst this, desperate to retrieve a sense of poetry, I went down to the ocean shore in Maine and I asked for one wild word from the ocean to follow. And the word that came back to me was “mosaic.” I thought mosaic was a craft — where you take your grandmother’s broken plates and piece them together into pictures. I realized quickly that mosaic is not a craft, but an art — an art of integration.
In fact, I was really transformed by it, and I became obsessed with the art form as a metaphor. I suddenly saw the prairie dogs in Utah I had been studying not as a grassland community, but as an ecological mosaic. And I was interested in other mosaic artists around the world. Lilly Yeh has done art in some of the roughest parts of Philadelphia, and I made a pilgrimage to meet her. We talked about all of these semblances and correspondences between art and ecology and we were asking, “How do we live a meaningful life?” My brother had just passed away from cancer, and she said, “Will you come to Rwanda with me where we’re creating this genocide memorial for survivors? Will you be our scribe?” At first I said no, I don’t want to be around more death, but then I heard myself saying yes, because to say no would be saying no to my own spiritual development.
Little would I have known that in 2002 when I was on my knees asking the ocean for one word, that it would lead me to a genocide memorial in Rwanda where we were creating mosaics out of the rubble of war. In many ways, it is a book about how we trust the truth of our own lives, how do we fail and how do we find beauty in a broken world.”
Who else but Terry Tempest Williams can take the art of mosaic, a prairie dog community and a small town in Rwanda and give us insight into natural beauty, tumult and peace.
Humans and animals have instincts to work, create, destroy and survive---broken pieces can come together to form a strong community, family and place. This is a beautifully written book by one of the best caretakers of our environment and our soul.
Barbara Theroux is the manager of Fact & Fiction, now part of the Bookstore at the University of Montana.
|
