We are dreamers,” Terry Tempest Williams opens her 20th book, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, invoking her grandmother, a Jungian, who liked to insist that “dreams are the facts from which we must proceed.” It’s a posture, or a positioning, with which I feel sympathy, for I, too, have long been fascinated by dreams. Not by their predictive capabilities—I’m not a believer in augury or prescience—but rather by the way they direct, or reflect, our attention. Refracted through that lens, dreaming offers another filter on our waking experience. “If we dared to look more deeply at what our dreams hold and can inspire,” Williams wonders, “would we live more fully in the presence of all that binds us together as human beings? Might we become more open to seeing the visitations of the holy ordinary as moments of encountering, even inhabiting grace?”
Such questions feel increasingly essential in a world that is unraveling beneath the weight of all sorts of overlapping devastations. And yet, for Williams, unraveling is very much a double-edged (s)word. “When I don’t know what something means,” she confides, “I consult a dictionary, ask someone I respect, or go for a walk. The dictionary defined my unraveling as becoming undone, 1) to undo twisted, knitted or woven threads. Not satisfied, I turn to the next two definitions: to disintegrate or be destroyed; fall apart, or lastly, to solve, resolve, work out, reveal.”
Reveal. And isn’t that what The Glorians represents, a book of revelations? The title refers to a kind of trickster spirit whose first trick is to remain uncategorized. “I am learning,” Williams admits, “that a Glorian cannot be defined, only met with surprise and awe and, sometimes, terror. Humor may accompany them.… The unsung moments that inspire our actions and beliefs arise often without words—a central drive to being human is to translate those experiences into shared stories that delight, disturb, and heighten our senses.” Here we see the process in which Williams engages throughout this idiosyncratic and deeply moving work.
If all that seems abstract, even bordering on the mystical, this both is and isn’t the case. Williams, after all, has made a career out of the close reading of landscape and a commitment to environmental justice, both of which emerge as key threads in The Glorians. In this, it can be read (at least in part) as a continuation of the inquiries that frame such works as Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) and An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (1994). In 2003, Williams cofounded the University of Utah’s environmental humanities program, and since 2017, she’s been writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, teaching an immersive seminar called—borrowing the title of her 2008 exegesis—“Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” In that book, she writes: “Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision. Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together.” A similar sensibility emerges from The Glorians, which for all the slipperiness of its central concept finds its footing in a like mosaic, made up of tesserae of memory and meaning amid the detritus of our scorched earth.
A Glorian, Williams posits, “is an encounter.… A Glorian is a moment of grace.” This may mean something physical, such as the ant Williams witnesses early in the COVID-19 lockdown, carrying a coyote blossom across the Utah desert, aided, “each time a breeze comes up, threatening to blow the tiny ant over,” by another pair of ants, who “appear to hold the ant steady, then disappear.” It may also mean something spiritual or ethereal: a whisper or a dream. “Can a lament be a Glorian?” the author asks. “What if grief is a presence, its own being particular to a moment, something or someone we would recognize with encompassing awe?”
That these questions are open-ended is the point precisely, for what other questions do we have? “The place of our innocence is gone,” Williams mourns while visiting the Great Salt Lake, where she and her husband “witness bone-dry canals bordered by brittle reeds and rushes. The blue lanes of water—teeming with western grebes, ruddy ducks and redheads, cinnamon teals and pintails, that once flowed into generous ponds where avocets and stilts foraged in the shallows—have been replaced by sun-baked, drought-cracked playas.”
The language, the landscape, is that of apocalypse, and Williams does not look away. Her intention, rather, is to remind us that none of this is conditional or reversible. “If the facts don’t matter anymore and misinformation does…if the stories and statistics scientists are bringing to us do not stir us to action…then the question must be asked: Are we too dead to the world to feel alive?”
Nonetheless, and in spite of everything, Williams continues to look for grace. As the book progresses, she experiences the terrifying dislocation of the pandemic. She worries over extreme weather—the storms and heat and fires and flash floods climate change has wrought. Her husband faces a medical emergency and undergoes bypass surgery. Friends are lost and recollected, persevere and die. Life, in other words, with all its cycles, heightened by the act of “speaking truth among the ruins.” But what happens when ruins are all that is left?
It is here that dreaming comes back into the conversation: that of the individual and that of the world. Nowhere is this more vivid than in Williams’s account of the Divinity Tree at Harvard, which she describes as a 200-year-old red oak, reportedly once visited by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 2019, the tree was cut down as part of a construction project, over the objections of students and faculty. This, too, is one of the many griefs The Glorians carries, although grief, like unraveling, is more complicated than it may appear. The Divinity Tree offers a case in point: In the fall of 2024, Williams was contacted by a woodworker named John Monks, who told her he had “the body” of the tree. What follows is an epic reconciliation project, spurred when, having cut the tree into “thirteen vertical slabs” to convert into tables, the woodworker heard a voice insisting: “Take me back to the Divinity School.”
“I am a normal person,” Monks says. He can’t, however, deny what he heard. I would describe myself as normal also. But we are in the presence of a different definition of the word. For Williams, this means the normal of a conscious planet. It means the normal of return. “There are no accidents,” she notes, “there are only Glorians.” And in March 2025, six years after being felled, the Divinity Tree was restored at Harvard, the slabs turned into benches in a Grief Garden dedicated as “a space of reflection and exploration.” A similar description might apply to The Glorians.
I can’t explain this, and I don’t want to do so. In the face of a world in crisis, I’ll take reconciliation wherever it appears. “We are dreamers,” Williams tells us, “and I believe Earth is dreaming us into a new way of being.” As to what that is and how we get there, we could do worse than to start with her simple admonition: “Believe the words you cannot bear to hear.”•
THE GLORIANS: VISITATIONS FROM THE HOLY ORDINARY, BY TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
