Conscious Choice: Earth’s Mosaic

September 2008 | Conversations

Earth’s Mosaic

Author Terry Tempest Williams talks art, ecology and finding beauty in a broken world

By Jessica Kraft

Terry Tempest Williams is known as a passionate and poetic advocate for wilderness and the webs of ecology that surround her home in the Utah desert. She’s written numerous books that artfully blend personal and family memoir with natural history, and has long worked to raise awareness about ecological conservation and human health. In her 1992 book, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, she drew a connection between the high incidence of cancer in her family with the aboveground nuclear testing conducted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and ’60s. Her newest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, published by Pantheon Books, comes out this month.

In the book, Williams follows one revelatory word, “mosaic,” through a three-part journey that takes her from the resplendent nave of the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, to the plateaus of Utah’s Bryce Canyon, where she spends weeks observing the habits of endangered prairie dogs, to a Rwandan village where “barefoot artists” create a moving memorial to the genocide. Through it all, she pieces together a vision of beauty wrought from the multitude of human intentions.

The settings of your book are so varied. How did a journey to study the art of making Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna lead you to Rwanda?

The whole journey really began in Maine in the context of September 11th, when I chose to speak out. I found myself saying that there are many forms of terrorism, and environmental degradation is one of those. In a New York Times op-ed piece I had written about how secretive the energy policy in Washington is with Dick Cheney and his energy task force meeting behind closed doors, but here in Utah their federal oil and gas exploration is an earth-shaking experience you can see and feel. Their 50,000-pound thumper trucks roar across the desert without an environmental impact statement, totally trampling the land. Amidst this, desperate to retrieve a sense of poetry, I went down to the ocean shore in Maine and I asked for one wild word from the ocean to follow. And the word that came back to me was “mosaic.” I thought mosaic was a craft — where you take your grandmother’s broken plates and piece them together into pictures. I realized quickly that mosaic is not a craft, but an art — an art of integration.

So I went to Italy to study with master artists and conservators interested in reclaiming the beauty of mosaics in Ravenna and Greece. My teacher recognized I was a novice and a dunce, and I was relegated to the corner where I spent most of the time cutting stone for other artists, which was wonderful. I loved it!

In fact, I was really transformed by it, and I became obsessed with the art form as a metaphor. I suddenly saw the prairie dogs in Utah I had been studying not as a grassland community, but as an ecological mosaic. And I was interested in other mosaic artists around the world. Lilly Yeh has done art in some of the roughest parts of Philadelphia, and I made a pilgrimage to meet her. We talked about all of these semblances and correspondences between art and ecology and we were asking, “How do we live a meaningful life?” My brother had just passed away from cancer, and she said, “Will you come to Rwanda with me where we’re creating this genocide memorial for survivors? Will you be our scribe?” At first I said no, I don’t want to be around more death, but then I heard myself saying yes, because to say no would be saying no to my own spiritual development.

Little would I have known that in 2002 when I was on my knees asking the ocean for one word, that it would lead me to a genocide memorial in Rwanda where we were creating mosaics out of the rubble of war. In many ways, it is a book about how we trust the truth of our own lives, how do we fail and how do we find beauty in a broken world.

You mention that when you are working with the mosaic up close, it presents a jarring juxtaposition of mismatched colors and shapes, and yet when you step back and look at the entire picture, the little pieces assemble into a beautiful vision. How does this relate to your own life?

We can’t see the truth of our lives and how this experience makes sense up close, but looking back, it creates this beautiful golden strand, which is the power of mosaics. When you look up close at the beautiful shadowed face of Emperor Justinian in Ravenna, you can’t see how a green tesserae (tile) next to a gold tesserae next to a black and pink one will work. It’s only when you look from afar that you can see the wonderfully constructed face.

The way you put the book together is also like composing tesserae — you’ve got pieces and fragments of documents, from Lao Tzu’s poetry to federal regulations, letters to your brother, newspaper clippings and single sentences of epiphany.

People could be put off by this book, thinking, “Where are the chapters and headings?” But I wanted to put together a book based on faith, and unmoor the whole thing. Headings are contrivances anyway, so what would happen if I created one long, moving narrative? The text becomes its own mosaic.

And the mosaic, or lattice, is a fundamental pattern in nature — it’s a natural way molecules come together, it’s the way honeybees construct their hives, and the way dirt cracks when it dries.

And our lives are a mosaic. We think they are linear and compartmentalized, but we can also see our lives as a pattern filled with such beauty amidst the brokenness. When I look back at the eight years of constructing this book, I couldn’t have imagined how all of these pieces fit together. Nor could my father, when he first read this book. He was really startled. He said, “How can you have prairie dogs in the same book as a discussion of Rwandan genocide survivors?” To me it’s all the same. It’s not that you compare the plight of prairie dogs to the plight of genocide survivors, but recognize the regard with which we view the natural world is, I believe, the regard with which we view each other.

The impulse to exterminate a species is the same impulse that tries to exterminate a certain type of people. In my mind, it’s about cruelty, arrogance and prejudice. But now we are moving toward a heightened regard for the equality of all life. I believe we as a species are evolving toward a very different consciousness that truly will be sustainable. It’s like the land ethic of Aldo Leopold. He said community could be defined to encompass all life forms: plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings. It’s that kind of dignity and empathy that, in my mind, creates a grace we are hungry for.

You write extensively in the book about the struggle to protect the prairie dog. Their communities provide valuable ecological services to all sorts of plants and animals, but many land developers, golf courses and state agencies regard them as pests to be destroyed. What was it like to be out in the field observing them?

I greatly admired the work of biologist John Hoogland who I was working for. We were up at 5:30 in the morning watching and recording prairie dog behavior in 15-minute intervals. At first I thought, “My God, I’m going to die of boredom,” but after a couple days, I could hardly wait to get back to my post to see what the mother was doing, how the babies were. The complexity of their communication was thrilling. They would sound their alert calls and I would see nothing and in three minutes, a pronghorn would walk through their village. The men in my family see these particular prairie dogs on the high plateau of Bryce Canyon as pests and say you can’t shoot enough of them. But I think they are greatly maligned.

I spend a big portion of the book reporting on them because we live in a world with such rapidity and speed, with a million things coming at us, and we have no time to focus. This book isn’t so much about what I had to say — it was about the experience I wanted to bring to the readers. I found those two weeks to be a heightened state of meditation. I wanted to bring the reader into that state of witness I had been given. In a way, that is the most we can do as writers: to bring the reader with us to those places of transformation.

And yet, you are an activist. You have always done more than write, with your work on nonprofit boards and advocating for conservation issues.

Well, when people ask the artist Lily Yeh, “What can we do?” she says, “Do something.” We tend to be so passive. We’re observers and voyeurs watching TV and computer screens, but I hope readers will be taken into a deeper state of empathy and grace and ultimately action. Each of us in our own way, with our own gifts, in our own time, can find a way to be part of this mosaic of a rising consciousness.

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