832 Terry Tempest Williams: The Glorians

25:15And I don't do well with heat. I don't either. I'm in Seattle for good reason. Yeah. No, when you're in the Arctic or even Salt Lake City, you can always put on more clothes when you're cold. Unless you want to be perpetually naked, you have to adjust.

25:31Rick Steves:I love the way you embrace storms that are about to hit. Tell us a little bit about the storms with Brooke, your husband, in the arid backcountry of Utah. Maybe with a name like Tempest, I'm drawn to it. There you go, Terry Tempest Williams. Brooke and I took to putting bowls of water around our patio, because at that time, you know, 8 million acres in the American West were on fire. I think about the heat dome that Washington was experiencing during those months. and we would get mixed flocks of birds coming from California, coming from New Mexico, coming from all over, and they were parched, they were panting.

26:16And so when we would have these downpours, we would take out our bowls and they would be filled, and the birds would come, the deer would come. Even at night, the coyotes would come close. That's how parched it was. I mean, yes, the desert is very romantic in its essence. it's all so brutal and without water you die. It's interesting.

26:39Rick Steves:It's peaceful, it's brutal, it's arid, but it's full of life. It's the full range, which is why we love it. And it's in high contrast almost. All the time. Like when it rains, it rains. All the time. I've got to say, I've got this image, excuse me, but of you and your husband naked in a torrential downpour sudsing each other up. I don't know, tell me about it. You know. Most people when it's pouring down rain they run inside. I got, hey, Brooke, let's go outside. Well, you could call it madness, you know, with the heat and all and the isolation. But we just ran and got a bar of soap. We were so excited.

27:14And we did just start, you know, bathing.

27:18Rick Steves:Literally bathing because you could wash your hair literally in the rain. It was that wild and beautiful. Beautiful. You must just feel like in some fantasy, otherworldly paradise. It's the full range, Rick, because, you know, one day a friend came and we were out on the porch and I saw her turn red. You know, she started sweating. She goes, Terry, do you think we could go inside? You know, you kind of lose your mind. But when I walked her back to the car, I heard this flapping sound and I realized the soles of my sandals were delaminating. You know, it's searing. Oh, my goodness. But then I have to say, when we were having those flash floods, it was terrifying.

28:03And, you know, when Rilke says beauty is the beginning of terror, I think it's just the opposite in the desert. Terror is the beginning of beauty. And you know how you think about dumb deaths where you hear that someone just walked off a cliff? I almost had a dumb death because when the flash flood was coming, it was the fifth one. And I thought, I want to see this. Yeah, yeah. From beginning to end, you smell it before you hear it, you hear it before you see it, and when that wall of water turns the corner, it is like looking into the face of God and it is not human. And everything was collapsing around me in the arroyo.

28:41The water was rushing, and I thought, oh my God, I'm going to be next. I'm going to be swept away. And I ran. It's almost like you can't not look. And I think that's the gift of the desert for me, living there 30 years, is the desert has taught me not to look away, no matter how terrifying.

29:01Rick Steves:It grabs you by the lapels and says, this is me, I'm nature, you're part of it. And we are part of it. And I think that's the humbling aspect of being present. How many people have sensed a coming storm like an animal would? You know how animals flutter all the way. You did. You smelled it first, then you heard it, and then you felt it. And I think anyone who lives close to the land in the places they call home do experience that. And I think that is one of the spiritual implications of climate collapse. We cannot continue to center ourselves when we see everything that is happening around us.

29:42Rick Steves:And when you've experienced it as intimately and with abandon as you, you feel the pain of losing it more keenly than somebody who's always in shelter It's the same as travel. When you travel, you humanize the world. When you sense your environment, you become part of it. And it was mesmerizing for me to read about how you and Brooke would watch the weather. I mean, he would count the seconds from the crack of the lightning to the thunder, and then he'd do the arithmetic for him and say, Darling, that's five seconds, one mile. I think that is so cool. And then you'd watch the powerful weather sweeping over you, and it reminded me and again I have these diamond in the rough experiences like that when I'm traveling but it'll be in the context of I'm in Norway I'm at the head of a fjord sitting on a chair at the end of the fjord watching and feeling the weather rumble up the fjord the clouds and the waves rumbling together until they reach the end of the bay where I'm sitting or up high in the Swiss Alps in a valley that's just me and a few log cabins and suddenly it's a thunderstorm and I remember writing down, it feels like God's bowling alley.

30:52Rick Steves:I love that. God's bowling alley. And I thought, I know what this is, but 500 years ago, without science, what did the people who built these log cabins think? These are magic moments for me, and you get them without even leaving home. Well, I love what you say about sensing. It is, you know, if someone said, what do you do all day? And I get asked that a lot. I watch clouds. I saw clouds upon a mountain joy Joy is like a cloud Sometimes silver, sometimes gray Always one, not far away Joy is like a cloud When British author Robert McFarlane reviewed Terry Tempest Williams' latest book, he called The Glorians, a book like no other I've read.

31:47Rick Steves:It has the fierceness and strangeness of light returning after an eclipse. Terry helps us look at the night in a new light as we continue our conversation in just a minute on Travel with Rick Steves. For Terry Tempest-Williams, a glorium can be something ordinary, often overlooked, inviting us to dream a new world into being. It's also the title of her latest book, as Terry helps us find the beauty, mystery, and sense of what's sacred in our world. Today on Travel with Rick Steves. Terry, another thing I was fascinated by in your book is how when it comes to sensing our existence on this planet and our connection with nature, the night.

32:30Rick Steves:You seem to thrive at night. Now, as a tour guide, I'm always looking for magic moments. Many of them are after bedtime. Talk about the brilliance of a nighttime sky in rural Utah. You know, I didn't appreciate that we are a dark sky community. I also didn't realize that southern Utah is one of the darkest places on the planet. That surprised me. And when on a new moon, which is no moon, the moon is hidden, darkened, you stand under the Milky Way, and it's not just a sweep of stars, liquefied like milk. It becomes dimensional. It's like a hologram, and you literally felt you were part of the universe.

33:17Rick Steves:Now, you mentioned just earlier international dark sky community. I didn't even know this existed, but apparently, what, there's 43 of these in the world and 30 of them are in Utah? It's really astonishing, and it does... And this means it's a society that realizes, hey, there is a thing called light pollution, and if you're going to have a light in this community, you have to put a hood on it so it doesn't mess up other people's darkness. And again, we have a lot of different political viewpoints, spiritual viewpoints in the valley where we live. This is the unifying factor. People love the night sky of stars, and they are protecting it, preserving it.

33:52Rick Steves:So do you have a relationship with any stars or constellations? Because as kids, you know, we all have our favorite one we find. When you look up in the sky with a Milky Way that is a blanket like probably 2 % of us have ever really seen, what's your relationship with all that? You know, I love when Orion's Belt appears. I know that the fall is coming. I love the time of year when the Big Dipper stands on its ladle. Yeah. And it's like it's standing there on top of just above Castleton Tower. Yeah. I love the Pleiades. I love Cygnus. You know, Arnie Ness, who was one of the founders of Deep Ecology, used to say, city lights are a conspiracy against higher thoughts.

34:36Rick Steves:I like that. I even wrote that down. and sea lights are a conspiracy against higher thoughts. That's a cool thing. And I remember taking my niece to the planetarium in New York City, and I screamed. My niece was so embarrassed. The narrator said, this is what the night sky used to look like. And without thinking, I screamed. It still does. You know, it still does. There's a self-defeating attitude right there, isn't it? Like it's gone. No, it's not gone. It's like what we forget. And I think to our listeners, find that night sky of stars and watch that hologram embrace you. You wrote that stars say yes, they invite us to dream.

35:15I feel that. You know, they're like eyes. It's also where I feel my ancestors. You know, when my mother passed in 1987 from ovarian cancer, I was with her in that last breath. Our family was. I remember leaving her body and looking up at the full moon. And forever, that full moon is the illumination of her face. When Brooke and I fell in love, it was one line. And you know, when you fall in love, it's all sappy and wonderful. But we were under a night sky in the desert. And Brooke said, you know, it's not the stars. It's the spaces between the stars. And that was the moment I fell in love with him.

35:58Rick Steves:Wow. You know, I was jealous when you wrote about walking with your grandmother at night because I wanted to do that. I wasn't that clued in to do that, but I could have. She had so much to share. And then you said, now she's an ancestor. You made a point, and you did it again. You did it in the book, but you just did it in our conversation. I feel the closest to my ancestors at night. I also... But the word ancestor, I mean, departed loved ones. They really are ancestors. You're seeing it in a bigger sweep of things. And my brothers who have passed are new ancestors. But I think that we have the capacity, each of us, to develop a night vision.

36:40The longer we're out in the darkness, the more we see. Suddenly what looks like just silhouettes, you can see a deep red-blue appear. The eye shine of animals. Coyote's eyes are red. Deer's eyes are blue. I wonder what human eyes are to them.

36:58Rick Steves:Do you know the term UFO? But did you know there's something called UES? I did not. What is it? Well, I learned it from you, but I just gave it the initials. Unidentified Eyeshine. No, it's true. And the desert comes alive at night. You even make a point of that. You go outside and, just like somebody lets a glass of wine breathe, you wait for your eyes to dilate. I do. And then you wrote you can even see colors that you wouldn't see otherwise. And that's what I think awaits us. That awaits us if we are tuned in enough to realize that it is a door we can open and go through. Yes. This is Travel with Rick Steves.

37:39Rick Steves:We're talking with Terry Tempest-Williams. Her book is The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. So, Terry, we're talking a lot about Utah, but to me, this is a wonderful two sides of the same coin for the teaching dynamo and the inspiring writer of Terry Tempest Williams. So you're gaining experience and you're embracing nature and you're being spiritual with your husband, Brooke, in Utah. And then you jet back to Boston and you are the professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Let's talk about your course. You teach a course called Finding Beauty in a Broken World. You're dealing with contemporary problems.

38:21Rick Steves:You're training the leaders of the future. What are some moments that you're proud of or challenged by as a teacher? It's a great question, and I should say I'm writer-in-residence. They would not say that I'm a professor. Oh, okay, writer-in-residence. I'm on the outside. You'd be my professor in a heartbeat. I love the students, and they really have been my teachers. And I think early on, my one dream was to bring them west, to bring 20 students to America's public lands. Go west, young leaders. You know, to see what the open space of democracy looked like. Conversely, after some tough years at Harvard politically, the students came to me and said, will you co-create a class on grief with us?

39:07And I absolutely said yes. with the idea that finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find, to develop the capacity to not look away, to be present. And so we had a year class about Great Salt Lake. The idea was we would have the intellectual underpinnings in the fall. We would go to Great Salt Lake for 10 days in the spring. 20 students arrive in Great Salt Lake. We had the czar of Great Salt Lake, a conservative gentleman, come speak to us. And they had already seen the Wilson's phalarope, a bird that is absolutely dependent on brine shrimp. We were wanting to list it, and it has been listed as a threatened species.

39:53And one of the students said to the czar, talk to us about what you think of the Endangered Species Act. And he stood up, we're all in our launchers, you know, out on the salt flats, and he says, the Endangered Species Act has never made a difference with any species. And just then, we literally heard the ground thundering, shaking under our feet. We all stood up, and there on the horizon were 600 bison in a full-blown stampede heading our direction. And the last word before we all scattered was, I stand corrected. He said that? Yes. And it was this beautiful moment of politics merging with awe.

40:36Rick Steves:Sort of the bovine equivalent of being struck down by lightning. Exactly. And we watched all these bison stampeding around us, and I just thought there is a God, and it is a Glorian, and it is the American bison. It was so beautiful. Twenty students on a field trip with Terry Tempest Williams going from Boston and Harvard to the Utah arid desert and marveling at the power of nature and a hands-on example. Yes, and when you think about what Donald Trump is doing in this administration to America's public lands, to sacred lands, to withdrawing the agreements on salmon in the Pacific Northwest, whether it's mining the Chaco Canyon, 2 ,000 years of civilization, or the boundary waters, again, for international interests, or what's happening in Utah with Grand Staircase-Escalante.

41:30This is not acceptable. And I think what the students saw was the open space of democracy must remain open. It was no longer an abstraction. It was no longer an intellectual exercise. What they thought they would experience at Great Salt Lake that quote-unquote is dying was not grief. It was joy. Joy in the sense that they felt alive. An inspiration that there's hope. And that they wanted to be part of that. And that, to me, is what hands-on pedagogy can be.

42:07Rick Steves:That's practical education. That's good for the economy, even though it's not STEM. And I think to think of the economy, right now we've deluded ourselves into thinking what's good for a short-term economy is good for the economy, but it's not. We've got to factor in sustainability in a livable environment and long-term profits. Everything's got to go through the litmus test of is it good in the arena of capitalism? And I think that's the point. We have replaced capitalism for democracy and they're very different. And in the long term, democracy is better for capitalism. That's the odd thing to me.

42:47Yes.

42:48Rick Steves:Which leads me to think about climate change because you're all about our environment and now environmental activists are actually being reframed by conservative think tanks. You're looking at an environmental terrorist across from you. You're a climate extremist. You're a domestic terrorist if you're challenging short-term economic gain for a vital and sustainable environment. And who benefits when we're called terrorists? You know, who benefits? Again, it goes back to that notion, if we're present, we will know what to do. You know, and I think in this time of such deep uncertainty, the land, nature, the places we call home, when we pay attention, show us how to be in uncertain times.

43:36I remember after the flood, the last one, I walked the path of water the next day. The prickly pear were as green as I've ever seen them. There were signatures in the sand of coyote, badger, even great blue heron, lizards. And then when I was walking back up, I thought, I've never seen that shadow before. We've lived there 30 years and realized this was a newly formed canyon, 30 feet long, 10 feet high, 12 feet wide. Rick, have you ever experienced floaters? You know how you think in your eyes? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought, oh, my God, my retina is detaching. I'm seeing these floaters. I stood up, and I realized they weren't floaters at all.

44:16That 10-foot high wall, newly exposed, was an ant colony. They were literally throwing out their dead. That's what I thought was floaters. That's what I thought was black litter. And the minute they were throwing out the dead, they were rebuilding, restoring their cohesive society. They were sealing up the wall. Then on the other side of the canyon, these darkling beetles, stink bugs, we called them as children, were coming out, rolling on their backs, settling themselves. What were they doing? They were eating the dead ants. And then crawling out of the mouth of the canyon were the ravens taking the beetles.

44:54this trophic cascade. It was so powerful. And I thought, this is how we face change. We continue. We rebuild. It's what you were saying is, what is life after Donald Trump? We will rebuild. We will find that sacred space again in the name of community and compassion.

45:14Rick Steves:Terry, I don't always give a book to anybody who walks in my door, but after reading your book, I grabbed my book called for the love of Europe. I'm so excited to read it. And that's my attempt to grab these little experiences and not have people have a bucket list to do what Rick did, but to be inspired by how I found experiences on the road so they can do that when they're on the road. And what you've done with the Glorians is I think do the same thing, is not say, okay, you got to, when it rains, go outside and wash your hair. But think with abandon. How can I not run from nature, but jump into it?

45:55And I think it's that idea, yes, yes, yes. If we are present, we will know what to do. And you remind me, Rick, it's all about love, and we lose nothing by loving.

46:08Rick Steves:Amen. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're being inspired by Terry Tempest Williams. Her newest book is The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. Terry, you just said something that made me say amen. How's your relationship with God? Rick, you always ask the deeper questions. How is my relationship to God? It's expanded. It's not human. It's not gendered. It's finned and furred and multitudinous. to me, maybe that's what the Glorians are, the different manifestations of God, meaning something larger than ourselves. And the Glorians are reaching out to us, inviting us to engage. And I think it's reciprocal.

47:08So I would say my relationship to God is sensory, sensorial, relational, interconnected, interrelated. Grace.

47:20Rick Steves:and you wrote that you're praying in a different way. You said, recognizing that we're living in a time where we're being brought to our knees, you've learned to pray again. How so? Because you said, not one God, but many gods, and they don't look like you. I think prayer for me has become an act of listening. As a child, I believed in an anthropomorphic God. I don't anymore. I believe that God is within. I believe God is outside us, all around. I believe God is the relationality between two people and other beings. And you wrote that, you know, you're praying not like you were taught by clergy, but more like a child when the holy ordinary was both right in front of you and in the sky above.

48:18Rick Steves:So I wanted to talk about that for just a minute. The book is called The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. What do we mean with this holy ordinary? This moment between you and me. May I ask you a question? Sure. What is your relationship to God? My relationship to God is, I believe, in a heavenly creator. You know, you can make it a man or a woman or whatever, but that's just kind of what people need to get their brains around it. But my relation is we're all created by something and that means we're all brothers and sisters. And when we travel, that's my thing, we get to know the family.

49:04Rick Steves:And when you get to know the family and you believe in that universal idea of love your neighbor, you realize that loving your neighbor has nothing to do with proximity. And I know that through my travels. And then you can take it one step further. Loving your neighbor is not limited to loving other people, but it's loving creation. I love that. That's the Glorian. And I think that is the Glorians. And, you know, my grandmother said, Terry, do you know what enthusiasm means? And, you know, I think about Rick. That is one of your gifts, your enthusiasm. And I said, no, tell me. And she said, it's God within.

49:41Yeah.

49:41Rick Steves:And my favorite church is the top of an Alp. I love that. As a Lutheran, we sit on our hands. We don't raise them. But when I'm walking on a ridge, it's hard not to raise your hands and say, life is good. Amen. That's Glorian. It is the Glorians. And to me, that is the holy ordinary that each of us carry, each of us have the capacity to witness and to share. Thanks, thanks, thanks, Terry. and happy travels in a way that you give so many dimensions to. Well, I'm so excited. The map on the table downstairs in your Mecca, my eyes went to Isle of Man, and I thought, I think I'm having a spiritual experience.

50:27I'm going to go there because of you. Thank you.

50:34Rick Steves:Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Muralhall, and Donna Bardsley. at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. Find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Since 1973, I've spent about 100 days a year exploring Europe. My mission? To empower Americans to have European trips that are fun, affordable, and culturally broadening.

51:14Rick Steves:With my 100 well-traveled colleagues, we produce America's best-selling guidebook series and organize small group tours to take over 30 ,000 travelers every year to Europe. If you're dreaming of a European adventure, whether on your own or with a tour, we'd love to help you make it happen.