THE GLORIANS

Hope in a time of grief.

Environmental activist Williams, who teaches a class at Harvard’s Divinity School called “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” (also the title of one of her previous books) elaborates on that theme in her celebration of Glorians. A Glorian, she explains, “is an encounter…a meeting with élan vital…a moment of grace.” It can be an ant carrying an unwieldy flower petal to an ant hill, or a desert landscape “alive with creatures aligned with darkness.” In chapters that range from brief meditations to longer narratives, Williams bears witness “to beauty and brokenness, love and grief.” Among the most moving pieces are elegies to the dead: her friend, nature writer Barry Lopez; the Great Salt Lake, a victim of drought; and one beloved tree. She recounts the futile protests that arose when plans to build an addition to the Divinity School entailed cutting down a centuries-old red oak. For Williams and the many others who protested, the Divinity Tree was a living being deserving of honor—which, Williams reveals, was eventually achieved. Many pieces reflect on landscape and environment, as Williams travels between Utah, where she and her husband make their home in the desert, and Cambridge, where she lives in a small apartment and misses her animal companions. Marriage, friendship, dreams, ravaging fires, her aging father, the pandemic, all feature in deeply felt pieces. Just as Lopez “exhorted his readers to see attention as love,” Williams advises, “We can resist despair and complacency and act lovingly, fiercely on behalf of life in all its beautiful and endless manifestations with neighbors, friends, and colleagues.” Grace can be found in empathy, not only with one another, but with the wondrous presences of the natural world.

An impassioned defense of interconnectedness.