She is an amazing writer with a lyrical prose. Her book “Refuge” remains one of my favorite books which still retains its charm on repeated reading. Good to know that she’s out with a new book - must check the library.

As a Nurse Midwife part of an organization working with the Rwandan medical community — my interpretation of beauty in Rwanda was seen in the new generation of babies born as Rwandans rather than Hutus and Tutsis.

I am a finalist in the Vermont Arts Council Art of Action project with a goal of defining/illustrating issues surrounding Vermont’s future in two-dimensional works of Art.

It is a huge project, funded by phiilanthropist Lyman Orton and is closely entwined with the documentary information provided by The Council on the Future of Vermont and the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies.

Thinking about the complexities involved in the future of a divided state striving for progress and economic and energy health while depending a great deal on the financial income from tourism– an industry which relies on Vermont’s UNCHANGED landscape.

A difficult future to contemplate indeed.

Thanks for this program!!! I wish I could talk with Terry.

Clair

I would like to make several points:

As I see it, the main thing that broke on September 11 was a false sense of ourselves as immune to the pain and hurt the rest of the world experiences with some regularity. In the natural world there are many examples - snakes that shed skin, crustaceans that split their shells. We are vulnerable just like everyone else.

I would suggest that things look perfect only from a distance- Hudson River scenes do not show the bio degradation that is the breaking part of that scene or the seeds that died so the flowers could live - i would suggest that breaking and reconfiguring is part of life is, in fact, what life is all about.

In in her voice tone and carefully selected words, Terry Williams demonstrates a brilliant sensibility to life in both its broken and put-together states.

I personally have long admired the mosaics of ancient Rome, Ravenna, Palermo, Otranto and other places visited in a lifetime of travel. I also have been to Wyoming and seen its physical dichotomy between oil/gas interests contrasting with the natural beauty of open space.

Beyond these two examples, I became lost in Ms. Williams rhetorical expanse. Throw in Rwanda and Lord knows, anywhere else in the Third World, and my mind shuts down. Even Tom seemed to have difficulty weaving the legitimate theme of her work into a meaningful new question.

Am I the only listener with Nature/Art/Life images and analogies overkill? Williams is just “too over the place” to satisfy my thinking and feeling.

Your stand-alone player won’t play. It wasn’t broke now it is. What’s up?

I caught just the latter part of the broadcast but was immediately captivated by Ms. William’s compassionate tone and “rhetorical expanse” as another writer put it. By holding to a vision that attempts to see the world in both its breadth and depth, I think Ms. Williams comes closest to what one might call the divine perspective of our situation. In fact there were moments when I felt as if an angel were speaking through my radio, saying “wake up!”

If there is any meaning to be found in human and animal suffering, she has hit upon it. It is the human’s peculiar capacity both create evil and then to make goodness bloom out of the contaminated soil of that evil; to repair what we have broken. However there is a drama inherent in this to which we seem to be addicted. Williams gives me hope that someday humanity will grow out of the former tendency, and the drama of good and evil will no longer have any fascination for us.

Terry William’s comments brought me to tears and wonder, moments apart. The beautiful is the vehicle that pulls us through the mundane. It is both the goal and the search. A most inspiring and provocative program. Thank you!

Nov 18 2008 Tuesday 1430

I guess sometimes I just have to write about my classes, that is to some degree my life. The 2nd class I started talking about my opinions/ideas and really that is just the way it is as far as my personality goes. I think ideas and it does comes out in my manners. It is just a matter of my personality.

LLQ came over last night. We talked for a while and then she said let’s have dinner tonight. I am suffering a typical sore throat and it is my own fault. And I tried to study chinese via my mp3 player laying on the bed and knowing that I was falling asleep. Eating and sleeping is failure? It is part of life, but when we surrender to it, we have failed as being human. It is simply too easy. Listening to Terry Tempest Williams an environmentalist talking about post 9/11, Ted Stevens said it wasn’t a matter of what when the Artic wilderness, but when, but the thing I know that being able to travel from Maine to Italy is a happiness I have yet to know (the happiness of being able to spend money frivolously) ah I’m just jealous. I then the idea of community, which to be honest, I was excluded from, by circumstance of birth. But I just want to keep questioning things and if bitterness creeps in. Nature is one of the benefits of affluence. We get a sensitivity to the tao, but if you are in the zeigeist of the Congo you want a whore and a beer. It is sad. But even our good intentions are selfish, silence is a luxury. I like luxury. How do we find beauty? Or is the question how do we successfully deal with sex/money/power? Which is more relevant? So should I go to Ravenna? And look at the mosiacs? And is this normal? Is art/beauty just the better half of having a good enough life to have adventure and not just survive. What is creeping in to me. . . walking down Northrup Ave in Bellevue in 1981? Hah, can I help it if the internet make me aware of Bisie. These are not the happiest of thoughts. But in my abstractions or my senses. . . is that China is just overpopulated and polluted. Beauty is not optional, it is a strategy of survival (Terry thoughts not me). The play of light. . . Wow how about 3 meals a day, a room over my head, a chance to have fun and friends, boy I don’t know if I’m just that cosmic? I studied Roman history because I knew that electricity and indoor plumbing were important, I’m not that abstract, Terry Terry Terry, this is a luxury. I can’t follow it. But San Juan Islands were the tao, so I know that, but it wasn’t enough, I wanted the carpentry gig that paid $23.00 a hour. Is banality my profoundity. I can say this for true. That my ideas were not marketable, the agents said no, my few peers that have read what I have said, said that my ideas were too specialized, and Terry the mosiacs of Ravenna are pretty abstract too, yet she got published and is getting radio publicity; is this just talent or a little bit of the circumstances in which we were born. I am not as affluent as Annie Dillard it just wasn’t the hand I was dealt. Maybe this is why these peans to poetry and beauty just don’t effect me as much as they do you. I chant the daimoko, but I love more than Yoko, I know there is a better life. But the life requires a smaller population density, so that to quote Van Halen, we can have the “Best of Both Worlds” I’m not there. I can’t just believe in artistic endeavors. I think that God is the artist, not the mosiac layers in Ravenna. I only know what I have experienced. I have not reached Sufi knowledge yet. Maybe Terry. . . I listen. . . . so okay I’ll take regular trips to Italy as my selfish/spiritual quest. Sounds good. And now I know about Italy to know about what a healthy eco-system is. And what a quality of life so many people will never had the chance to experience.

I have a problem with all these apperent lies. You ask for money for one thing and you do something completly diffirent.. then you seem to have a problem giving some of that money to Detroit..Yes,I said Detroit. You see if the Auto companys fail you lose an entire City and its Suburbs, you lose yet another mostly minotiry coulture, because Detriot is not as much white as it is jewish, black, aribic, latino, polish and it is already in crisis because of all the lay-offs up to this point.
To me, losing Detriot is way Worse than losing Wall St.
There are far to many families , yes entire families at risk, not to mention the loss of the city itself..You like to say “Well Detroit should have seen the signs and come up with a better plan” I can say the samething about Wall St. Cut the B S and give them the money.. They can’t do any worse then the Banks…!

I don’t miss an On Point show, and this is arguably the most colorful language I have ever heard on this program. I actually replayed the program just so I could take down some of Terry’s quotes. I encourage listeners to share this program with others so that they can share in the beauty of Terry’s verse and our collective world.

We need look no further than our own lives to discover the mosaic and brokenness so passionately articulated during this magical hour of On-Point.

The word “Chaord” came to mind as I listened.

This word, which captures the essential, incontravertible condition of the Cosmos and Human experience, is a fusion of order and chaos but neither one entirely. Kind of like the a mosaic in process.

It is all broken and in shards to begin with!!! Personally and collectively. Just because there is an event (9-11) and bad/good guys and countries is irrelevant from this viewpoint.

In our search for order and meaning, we often forget to look inward and practice “home cosmography” as a reference for understanding external realities.

I agree with most comments above; Bill, Greg and Nick, yes, I too had to replay this interview. I am interested in her sentence, “Beauty is not an option but a strategy for survival.” I was trying to hear where this came from. I guess Ms. Williams just coined it. I like to photograph beauty but lack the scope to find it in the varied places Ms. Williams can. I see it most where man is least.

Perhaps my reading Finding Beauty in a Broken World will help.

Thanks.

I hope it will be possible to download an audio file of this extraordinary interview. Please don’t take the link down! I’d like to post a link to the audio of this broadcast on my Blog Living Lessons.

Terry’s language is a language I’m completely familiar with. It’s the language spoken when soul meets body and body lives soul’s purpose. I’ve waited decades to hear this language spoken publicly with such a coherent focus on mainstream media. Thank you so much for bringing this rich eloquence to your listeners, Tom, and to your readers, Terry.

The depth of consciousness in which you are living your life, Ms. Williams, is the future. I suspect, like me, you are a mutant human being, forged by personal loss, exquisite understanding of the spiritual, environmental, emotional, political and psychosocial intersections between what can’t be seen and what must be seen. Beauty is, indeed, a strategy for survival; or, rather, the penetration of beauty into one’s life, even if only on occasion and without it lasting for long, is the resting place in the struggle for survival. I believe Ms. Williams is asking us to consider the deeper meaning of survival.

We are living in a dark, broken world. Surely, it is one of the circles of Hell. However, we are not alone.
The beauty of interconnection, as Ms. Williams is purposed in her life to teach us, is that it will free us from the hell, the broken world, we have created on earth.

Thank you. I look forward to encouraging my network to read your book and to give it as a gift.