|
2d440fb
|
We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins--it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, "Silence is the strength of our interior life.... If we fill our lives with silence, then we will liv..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
8eb866a
|
Today, I feel stronger, learning to live within the natural cycles of a day and to not expect so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
4c94faa
|
It's strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
953c43a
|
But, today, the idea of faith returns to me. Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
6c430ad
|
Her body was rounded like earth. Stories. Breath. . . . Her eyes have been painted closed. I understand. To tell a story you must travel inward.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
49dc599
|
Your voice is the wildest thing you own," Brooke says to me. "And you're giving it away. You can't see it. Your obsession is blinding you." He is angry. He is talking in shorthand. "You're losing yourself."
|
|
losing-self
voice
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
cd448cd
|
Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision. Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
f5f1a70
|
Agitation gives birth to creation.
|
|
birth
creation
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
d057c15
|
It is not possible to satisfy women," a friend said. "We are disturbed if we have children too young. Disturbed if we have then later. Disturbed if we don't have children at all."
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
67870a9
|
I have refused to believe that Mother will die. And by denying her cancer, even her death, I deny her life. Denial stops us from listening. I cannot hear what Mother is saying. I can only hear what I want. But denial lies. It protects us from the potency of a truth we cannot yet bear to accept. It takes our hands and leads us to places of comfort. Denial flourishes in the familiar. It seduces us with our own desires and cleverly constructs ..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
79e5c13
|
There becomes little doubt as to why power chooses to support power. Rwanda becomes invisible once again. We have nothing America wants.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
e63f25f
|
I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.
|
|
names
nomenclature
naming
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
9d35d4a
|
When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear.
|
|
words
fear
quote
voice
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
4ef4a10
|
We borrow. We steal. We purchase what we need and buy what we don't. We acquire things, people, places, all in the process of losing ourselves. Busyness is the religion of distraction. I cannot talk to you, because I have too much to do.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
efdded4
|
What is evolution if not creative adaptation and the progression of our own souls?
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
c949514
|
It was a dead swan. Its body lay contorted on the beach like an abandoned lover. I looked at the bird for a long time. There was no blood on its feathers, no sight of gunshot. Most likely, a late migrant from the north slapped silly by a ravenous Great Salt Lake. The swan may have drowned. I knelt beside the bird, took off my deerskin gloves, and began smoothing feathers. Its body was still limp--the swan had not been dead long. I lifted bo..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
c2f323e
|
Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the Moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges.
|
|
voice
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
2ce993e
|
Once you know that you have a voice," Louis said, "it's no longer the voice that matters, but what is behind the voice."
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
a53e29a
|
There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.
|
|
silence
writing
beauty
disclusure
privicy
private
voice
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
a9d5c54
|
Reading has not only changed my life but saved it. the right picked at the right time--especially the one that scares us, threatens to undermine all we have been told, the one that contains forbidden thoughts--these are the books that become Eve's apples.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
6ae7499
|
But harboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
9eba74c
|
She is reading Zen, Krishnamurti, and Jung, asking herself questions she has never had the courage to explore. Suddenly, the shackles which have bound her are beginning to snap, as personal revelation replaces orthodoxy.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
53d8ee1
|
What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us?
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
7e0b987
|
We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed We give milk. We are the mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stores and poems.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
a8246a5
|
Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life.
|
|
water
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
c61d8d4
|
My grandmother simply shook her head and said, "You know what you saw. The bird doesn't need to be counted, and neither do you."
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
7da421b
|
I am a woman with wings,' I once wrote and will revise these words again. 'I am a woman with wings dancing with other women with wings.' In a voiced community, we all flourish.
|
|
feminism
women
inspirational
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
8dca8d9
|
Our ability to travel is a privilege. But it is also a choice. Money is time. Where do we spend out time? Wilderness is not my leisure or my recreation. It is my sanity.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
9270707
|
Wilderness is the source of what we can imagine and what we cannot - the taproot of consciousness. It will survive us.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
6514db3
|
We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
a3d8e83
|
I want you to read 'God Sees the Truth, but Waits,' " said Mother. "Tolstoy writes about a man, wrongly accused of a murder, who spends the rest of his life in a prison camp. Twenty-six years later, as a convict in Siberia, he meets the true murderer and has an opportunity to free himself, but chooses not to. His longing for home leaves him and he dies." I ask Mother why this story matters to her. "Each of us must face our own Siberia," she..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
65e9781
|
When I was a young woman with four children, I was always living ahead of myself," she said. "Everything I was doing was projected toward the future, and I was so busy, busy, busy, preparing for tomorrow, for the next week, for the next month. Then one day, it all changed. At thirty-eight years old, I found I had breast cancer. I can remember asking my doctor what I should plan for in my future. He said, 'Diane, my advice to you is to live ..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
9b25b63
|
Boundaries are fears made manifest, designed to protect us. I don't want protection, I want freedom.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
20a1259
|
I was not rebelling by smoking dope or drinking, I was testing ideas. I was experimenting with voice, what I could say and still be heard in an atmosphere of prescribed truths.
|
|
testing-ideas
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
a2aa88d
|
The hostility of this landscape teaches me how to be quiet and unobtrusive, how to find grace among spiders with a poisonous bite. I sat on a lone boulder in the midst of the curlews. By now, they had grown accustomed to me. This too, I found encouraging--that in the face of stressful intrusions, we can eventually settle in. One begins to almost trust the intruder as a presence that demands greater intent toward life. On a day like today wh..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
d162abf
|
The irony of our existence is this: We are infinitesimal in the grand scheme of evolution, a tiny organism on Earth. And yet, personally, collectively, we are changing the planet through our voracity, the velocity of our reach, our desires, our ambitions, and our appetites. We multiply, our hunger multiplies, and our insatiable craving accelerates. Consumption is a progressive disease. We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more ..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
988b808
|
Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees.....Wilderness is a knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even in remote country, you cannot escape your mind.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
5167d97
|
Listening over and over to the voices through a family of instruments allowed us to recognize and appreciate the dignity and uniqueness of each living thing in the meadow and forest.
|
|
story
music
peter-the-wolf
listening
voice
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
64eb83a
|
And all your Faithless doubts Will not destroy The rising spring In me.
|
|
faithless
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
9ea49d1
|
This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history - an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
83bef13
|
When one of us says, "Look, there's nothing out there," what we are really saying is, "I cannot see."
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
fa36477
|
It is winter. Ravens are standing on a pile of bones -- black typeface on white paper picking an idea clean. It's what I do each time I sit down to write. What else are we to do with our obsessions? Do they feed us? Or are we simply scavenging our memories for one gleaming image to tell the truth of what is hunting us? 'To write,' Marguerite Duras remarked, 'is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
945fa58
|
What was it like when your mother passed away?" I asked Mimi. "I was twenty-eight years old. I had just given birth to John when I found out Mother had died from a stomach ulcer. A sudden infection. She had just made plans to come from Washington, D.C. to see him." She paused. "I'll never forget the telegram my sister Marion sent. I couldn't believe it. It was so final. Suddenly, the world seemed very dark. I couldn't imagine how I was goin..
|
|
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
|
23ac7d7
|
words are much stronger than I am.
|
|
words
voice
|
Terry Tempest Williams |