The Glorians

Terry Tempest Williams, an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist, draws on her decade as writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School and her life in Utah's red rock desert to explore what she calls "Glorians": moments of unexpected grace encountered in the natural world, in human relationships, and in the interplay between grief and beauty. Structured as an essay collection, the book unfolds across four parts, moving between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Castle Valley, Utah, during the COVID-19 pandemic, climate collapse, political upheaval, and personal loss.

Williams opens by describing her grandmother, Kathryn Blackett Tempest, a Jungian scholar who taught her grandchildren to interpret their dreams, asking each morning whether God had spoken to them in the night. This practice of attentive dreaming shapes the book's central framework. Williams articulates her own theology as rooted not in a singular deity but in the multitudinous gods she finds in all species and forms of life.

On March 11, 2020, Williams fled Cambridge after Harvard moved classes online. She drove to Castle Valley, Utah, where she sheltered with her husband, Brooke. One week later, she had a vivid dream in which she climbed a spiral staircase to the top of a Tower and found herself in ruins. A female professor behind a locked iron gate, with students behind her, asked Williams whether she remembered her vow to create "the Epic Documentation of the Glorians." She searched for the word "Glorian" and found it in a Kenyan book of names, meaning "Bringing praises and worth," but the concept remained elusive until she watched an ant carry a magenta coyote willow blossom across the desert, aided at perilous moments by attending ants who appeared and vanished. Williams declares this encounter a Glorian: a meeting with life force that cannot be defined, only met with awe.

During the pandemic's early months, Williams worried about her family. Her brother Hank, a backhoe operator who had lost part of a lung, contracted COVID-19 and became gravely ill. Williams, who had already lost one brother to lymphoma and another by suicide, brought Hank to the desert to recover. Her Divinity School students self-organized into the "Coyote Chaplaincy," creating creative offerings for frontline health care workers.

The book's first part weaves together episodes from the pandemic years: in "A Threshold Moment," the Black Lives Matter uprisings following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020; the megadrought and wildfires burning across the West; and Williams's reckoning with her Mormon ancestors' complicity in the 1863 Bear River Massacre, the deadliest mass murder of Indigenous people by the U.S. military. In "Friendship," she mourns the death of her close friend, the writer Barry Lopez, on Christmas Day 2020. She also documents the ecological crisis of Great Salt Lake, which fell to a historic low, threatening millions of migrating birds. Williams frames the lake's retreat, driven by water diversions and climate change, as both an environmental and a spiritual crisis.

In Part II, Williams returns to Harvard for the 2021–2022 academic year and confronts the absence of the Divinity Tree, a red oak over two hundred years old cut down on March 29, 2019, for the renovation of the Divinity School's main building. She had bonded with the oak after arriving in 2017. When plans revealed the tree would be removed, students and faculty campaigned to save it; the administration argued the tree was diseased, but independent arborists disagreed. Students held vigils, draping the tree with prayer flags and tucking poems into the bark. The night before the felling, Williams slept at the tree's base and heard it say, "My absence will be my presence." The dismemberment revealed solid heartwood, not the hollow rot the administration had cited. The tree's killing intersects with Williams's grief over her brother Dan Tempest, who died by suicide. Williams connects both losses to novelist Richard Powers's concept of "unsuicide," the active effort to oppose a way of life that destroys itself and all else.

Part II also follows Williams's students and their creative acts of witness. Maisie Luo, a Chinese-born artist, collected discarded blue COVID-test-kit caps from Harvard Yard and reimagined them in paintings of endangered North Atlantic right whales. In "The Call," Williams recounts her unreturned phone call to educator bell hooks, who had reached out in solidarity after Williams's "terrible treatment" by the University of Utah; hooks died in December 2021 before Williams found the courage to call. Williams recounts her friendship with Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who told Williams that writing was no longer enough before joining an organization documenting Russian war crimes. Amelina was killed by a Russian missile strike on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, in June 2023. Williams connects Amelina to the myth of Cassandra, a truth-teller believed only in death.

The book's depiction of Harvard extends to the crisis following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Williams describes the campus polarization, pro-Palestinian encampments, the doxing of student activists, and the forced resignation of Harvard's first Black president, Claudine Gay, in January 2024. She frames these institutional fractures alongside the broader erosion of American democracy.

Part III returns Williams to the desert. In "Venus Tadpole," Brooke survived a quadruple heart bypass after a ninety-nine percent cardiac blockage his surgeon called a mystery. Williams describes five flash floods in the summer of 2024 that carved new canyons through Castle Valley. She watched one flood roar past her house while boiling beets in the kitchen, her hands bloodred and shaking. She catalogs desert creatures as Glorians and celebrates her fifty-year marriage to Brooke through the metaphor of snakes shedding skin. She visits her ninety-two-year-old father, John Tempest, whose true legacy she locates not in toughness but in the roses he grows and gives away.

In Part IV, in "River of Grief, River of Joy," Williams co-creates a grief class at the Divinity School. She learns that the body of the Divinity Tree survived: John Monks, a woodworker, received five trunk pieces from an anonymous crew member in 2019, accompanied by a note identifying them as the Divinity Tree. Monks cut slabs from the wood but twice heard what he describes as the tree's voice telling him to return it. Williams and donor Susan Swartz begin planning the tree's return. Artist Lily Yeh, known for creative placemaking in communities affected by poverty and war, works with students to create a Grief Garden and "Grief Staffs," found branches painted with motifs of sorrow transformed into color. On the sixth anniversary of the felling, the community holds a Procession, ending at the Grief Garden, where benches made from the Divinity Tree serve as an altar.

A former student, Anna Eliza Brady, writes Williams a letter offering a new reading of the dream: The students lined up behind the Professor at the locked gate are themselves the Glorians, the next generation waiting to rush in. Williams recognizes this as the element she had not seen. Her task is to open the gate and step aside. She closes by declaring that Castleton Tower, the red-rock formation near her Utah home, is the Tower of her dream; a century-old cottonwood near her house is akin to the Divinity Tree; and the Epic Documentation of the Glorians is her daily vocation. The dream has merged with her waking life: Earth, she writes, is dreaming humanity into a new way of being.