Naturalist-writer Terry Tempest Williams' advocacy for a politics of place rooted in an "erotics of place" challenges the usual categories of environmental, political and religious thinking. Her books include Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger, Desert Quartet and, most recently, Leap, a spiritual, psychological and earth-affirming exploration of the layered meanings of Hieronymus Bosch's 15th-century Flemish triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. She lives in Utah's Castle Valley.

Julie A. Wortman: When we arranged for this interview, you told me that you didn't think you had much to say about weather. Yet in your writing you frequently talk about such things as the solstice and your need for below-ground time during winter in order to be able to continue your above-ground public life the rest of the

See the sidebar: The Greening of the Apocolypse by Catherine Keller

year. In your essay, "Undressing the Bear," you write of "female rain falling gently, softly, as a fine mist over the desert." And your book Refuge, which was my introduction to your way of viewing life, is a powerful intertwining of your reflections about the slow flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge by the Great Salt Lake because of climatic changes and the ebbing of your mother's life owing to the breast cancer she and so many women in your family have contracted through exposure to the effects of nuclear testing carried on the desert winds. So to me it seems you have a great deal to say about weather.

Terry Tempest Williams: Isn't that interesting? Maybe weather is like skin -- we're so close to it we don't even think about talking about it. And you may be right. I may, in fact, be obsessed with weather. And maybe it's just being born with the name Tempest, I don't know. But when you bring this topic up, I suddenly realize that I live with weather, that weather informs my days.

In the household I grew up in, 5:15p.m. was sacred time around our dinner table, because that's when the weather report was broadcast. My father's business depended on the weather because he worked outside in a family pipeline construction business. Certainly, living here in Castle Valley, part of Utah's Red Rock Desert, every minute is infused and informed with and by weather -- clouds, wind, sun, heat, cold. Weather keeps us paying attention -- you can't get complacent here in the American West when there's so much sky. You watch the storms move in. You watch the rainbows. You watch the virga -- the rain that is falling but never reaches the ground. I find that living out here, in the desert in particular, my eyes are always focused upward. And I am reminded over and over again that there are forces out here that are much stronger and bigger than I am.

JW: You've written, in fact, that that sort of awareness leads to a life that includes a spiritual dimension. Here's a quote from Leap: "Spiritual beliefs are not alien from Earth but rise out of its very soil. Perhaps our first gestures of humility and gratitude were extended to Earth through prayer -- the recognition that we exist by the grace of something beyond ourselves. Call it God; call it Wind; call it a thousand different names." Many people, I think particularly of many Christians I know, wouldn't think that their spiritual beliefs rise out of Earth. In fact, I think what we've seen is that Christians and other organized faiths in recent times have steadfastly resisted that earth connection.

TTW: And yet, I think we've always had that connection. It's the ground beneath our feet. It's what feeds us. It's what sustains us. It is not abstract. It is red soil between our fingers. We forget that. So often in our religious traditions our view is not Earth-centered but heaven-bound. It takes us out of our responsibility here on Earth. It takes us out of our bodies. And, therefore, it fosters the illusion that we are not of earth, of body, of this place, here and now.

JW: It is kind of like taking religion indoors into a climate-controlled sanctuary. In doing that, there's a terrible negative result for a politics of place.

TTW: That's right, because we can abdicate our responsibilities. That was one of the aspects of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, that seized me. It seems that, as Christians, it is very easy for us to contemplate heaven and to contemplate hell. It's not so easy for us to be engaged on the Earth. I was so struck by the painting's side panels of heaven and hell, and then the center panel, of Earth, where you see this wild engagement -- even love-making -- with the Earth. With the birds on the same physical scale as the human beings, there is this wonderful confluence of consciousness in that center panel that we forget. We lose track of the central delights of a spiritual life -- hand on rock, body in water, the sweet conversations that exist when we're completely present in place, home, Earth. Again, not that separation of heaven and hell, past and future. The present is the gift.

JW: I've read that the etymology of "ecology" is "ecos," which means home.

TTW: Yes. Again, we are most mindful of those relationships that we live with every single day. I love the fact that I live in an erosional landscape. You watch the wind and you realize as you see the sand swirling about you that arches are still being created, that this isn't something that belongs to the geologic past. Metaphorically, that is also very powerful. To me, a spiritual life is also part of an erosional life. We are eroding the façade. Wind -- spirit -- sculpts us, sculpts our character, our consciousness, in ways we can't even know. I am shaped differently from others because of the spiritual processes that have formed me. There is physical erosion that goes on in the desert and spiritual erosion that goes on in our search for the truth, however we define that for ourselves.

JW: I was thinking about what you say in your essay about Stone Creek Woman, this apparition of redrock and maidenhair ferns that you've seen in a waterfall on Stone Creek in the Grand Canyon: "I've made a commitment to visit Stone Creek Woman as often as I can. I believe she monitors the floods and droughts of the Colorado plateau, and I believe she can remind us that water in the West is never to be taken for granted." You then go on to say: "Water in the American West is blood. Rivers, streams, creeks become arteries, veins, capillaries. Dam, dyke, or drain any of them and somewhere silence prevails. No water, no fish; no water, no plants; no water, no life. Nothing breathes. The land/body becomes a corpse. Stone Creek Woman crumbles and blows away."

TTW: Water in the desert is like prayer in our lives, that contact with some force that is both beyond us and a part of us. I go down to the banks of the Colorado River weekly -- and in the summer daily -- and, as I watch that powerful body of water, watch the muscularity held in the currents, I'm always mindful of what it is carrying downriver. We, too, can be carried away.

It could be said that we have taken our love inside. We go into our houses, we shut the door, and we have very isolated, lonely lives. When we take our love outside, we not only take it outside with the Earth, with nature, with birds, with animals -- the ravens, vultures and coyotes where I live -- but we take it into community. It is in community that we find another component of our spiritual life. And that has everything to do with service. How do we serve? What are we in the service of? And, again, that's not about heaven, it is about right here, right now.

In the community where we live, which is very small, the needs are great. And they can only be met through service and love and compassion and sacrifice. To me, these are powerful components of a religious life, of a spiritual life. I find the older I get, I'm less in need of an organization as much as a community. I don't need the organization of a religion. I do need the community where we can share a spiritual life. And I think there's a subtle difference.

JW: Some would say that people like us -- people whose spirituality arises out of the earth -- have become pagan. Do you think that's true?

TTW: I think so often our views of one another, of ourselves, shrink by the smallness of our vocabulary. What's a Christian? What's a pagan? Recently I was in Costa Rica, where I had the privilege of meeting a tribal medicine man. As we were walking in the rainforest he was sweeping the narrow trail of snakes with his feathered staff. He turned and he said, "I am a Christian, cosmologist, scientist, Earthist." And then he laughed. He said, "Does that cover it all?" And I thought, that's what I am, too! You know, whether it's Christian, whether it's pagan, whether it's an ecologist, whether it's a writer, a lover of language, a lover of landscapes, can't we just say that our spirituality resides in our love? If that makes us pagan, perhaps. If that makes us Christian, perhaps. But I love the notion that it's not this or that, but this, that, and all of it. And, in a way, this is how I see spirituality emerging on the planet. The constraints that we see within our religious traditions are not so satisfying. The world has become so large. I almost feel like the doors are blowing off our churches to let life come in and move freely.

What we're seeing is that we're taking the best of what we're being offered. There's so much within my own tradition as a Mormon that I deeply cherish. The notion of community, the notion of service, the notion of land, prayer -- things that aren't exclusive to Mormonism, but that are certainly at the core of it. I can't separate my own sense of family from my sense of community from my Mormon roots. But, alongside, I think there's much to be gleaned from Buddhism, much to be gleaned from Catholicism, from that which the Quakers practice, from much that I have been exposed to and learned from my friends who are Indian people. And then there is so much to be gleaned from what we learn from the Earth itself -- from simply walking the land, from the deer, the river, the wind. And so, together, through our traditions, through that which we are exposed, we come to some semblance of a spiritual life, bits and pieces. In my own tradition, I hear my mother saying, "Call it a crazy quilt."

JW: Women, in particular, seem to speak of that sort of crazy-quilt religion. But within the churches, of course, such an approach has mostly been rejected as unorthodox.

TTW: With the message that you need the structure that orthodoxy supplies -- that without that structure, if we pick and choose the spiritual beliefs that are comfortable to us, then we're somehow missing discipline, missing sacrifice.

But I think life is a discipline we don't need to seek. Each of us is aware every single day of the discipline upon us, about the sacrifice, the suffering. I don't feel that I have to have that imposed on me through an orthodoxy. I'm very mindful of that just being human.

What I do struggle with is that when we practice our own spiritual life -- however we define that -- we miss the collective rituals. We miss the delight and strength and comfort that comes with our relations with others, and that comes with building a community. Here in Castle Valley, as the millennium approached, there was a particular cave where meditations were being practiced. People in the community would come and sit for an hour, and then another person would come and sit for an hour. I took great solace in that -- that as a community, surrounded by these buttes and mesas in the desert, we were mindful of the passage of time in the sense of deep time.

Then, last Sunday was the monthly Fast and Testimony Meeting at my church. What that means is you fast for 24 hours, mindful of what feeds the body, mindful of hunger, even a spiritual hunger, and in that gesture you find a sense of humility. Then you come together as a community and you break the fast with the sacrament, with the body and blood of Christ. And then the time is ours to contemplate and to share what we've been thinking, feeling, something that's happened during the week that moved us. So it's really a time of stories, much like a Quaker meeting. And I just loved it! I realized that this is something within my religious tradition that I cherish. I love listening to the members' stories. And especially after forgoing food, I realized the stories feed us in the same ways that food feeds us. And that that can only be found in the embrace of community. And the ritual of sacrament means something to me. Again, I find both solace in the tradition and also outside the tradition.

JW: One of the stories that's interesting to me, since you bring up your Mormon heritage, is the story of the Mormon people coming in search of land, and then finding the land -- "This is the place!" -- in the Salt Lake valley. Has that heritage of a people seeking a sacred land influenced Utah's public policy in the direction of conservation?

TTW: It's a complicated question. I started thinking about the conservation ethic in Utah, specifically inherent in the Mormon religion, when we were confronted with a crisis in our state. And that was the crisis of wilderness. You'll remember in 1994 when the Republicans took over the House and Senate with the Gingrich revolution, how everything shifted. Our political delegation in Utah couldn't have been more thrilled, with Orrin Hatch and Representative Jim Hansen at the helm. It was decided that for once and for all they would end the wilderness debate in Utah and because they had a majority they thought that this would move through quickly. To Governor Mike Leavitt's credit, he said we needed to have a public process. And so for six months there were hearings held in every county all over the state of Utah that had wilderness under consideration in Bureau of Land Management land. Over 70 percent of Utahns wanted more wilderness, not less. In June, Hatch and Bennett, the Senators from our state, as well as Hanson in the House, came up with what was called "The Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995." This said that 1.7 million acres out of 22 million acres of BLM land would be designated as wilderness. Those of us within the conservation community were appalled. The citizens' proposal had been for 5.7 million acres. So a nasty fight ensued in the halls of Congress. Bottom line, people spoke out, not only in Utah, but all over the country, and the bill died. And, because of the political climate judged by a very astute Bill Clinton, the Grand Staircase Esconde National Monument was created with almost 2 million acres of wilderness in Utah.

Our Senators would have had us believe that if you were Mormon, you were Republican, you were anti-wilderness; if you were non-Mormon you were a Democrat, you were pro-wilderness. Those of us within the Mormon culture said: That cannot be true! So we set out to find stories that would show otherwise. We created a book called New Genesis -- A Mormon Reader on Land and Community that contains about 40 stories from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who spoke about how nature informed their spirituality as a Mormon or, conversely, about how Mormonism has enhanced their view of nature. It was very, very moving to see the different discussions, everything from the natural history of the quilt, to a treatise on air pollution, to a conversion story of the former mayor of Salt Lake City, a world-class rock climber, who, hand on stone, felt the spirit of God and joined the Mormon church. In each of these essays they tied the theme to a Mormon scripture, or to something in the doctrine, so that we were trying to pull our history of a land ethic through time to where we are now at the beginning of this new millennium. We also took a deep look at our history to say: What was the ethic of Brigham Young when he came across the plains during the Mormon exodus, came into the Salt Lake Valley, and said, "This is the place!"? We found that there was a very strong conservation ethic. That over the pulpit, at Temple Square, in the Tabernacle, there were talks given by general authorities that warned the saints of overgrazing, warned about using too much water and upheld the value of water conservation. Somewhere along the line we have forgotten that. It's been an interesting exercise of retrieval.

As Harold Bloom has said, Mormonism is an "American religion." We have become very successful. What was once community-based has now become more corporate-based. So I think what we're seeing is not something unique to Mormonism, but something that we're seeing in the evolution of American culture.

JW: Ched Myers wrote a piece in these pages several years ago about "The Bible and earth spirituality" in which he concluded that, "It is not the Bible that hates nature, but rather the culture of modernity."

TTW: Exactly. This relates to that process of retrieval and restoration of which I was speaking. I think we're seeing a greening of our churches because our life depends on it. I think it's that simple. If we are concerned about spiritual health, it must be in correspondence with ecological health. Look at people like Paul Gorman or the Bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople, who was first to come forward in saying that doing harm to the environment is a sin. And so our consciousness is expanding. We're retrieving our animal mind that knew this in our early stages of development. This is very positive, but it is met with suspicion because it is not human-centered, but life-centered. That's very threatening to a vertical notion of power, a power that isn't based on Earth, but on heaven. So, in a way, we're grounding our spirituality, we're embodying it. And we all know that the body is something that we're terrified of in religion.

JW: Yes. And because natural forces are so strongly seen as feminine, some people are saying that the crisis we're in, in terms of the planet, is the stuff of ecofeminism.

TTW: Again, we get into semantics. Certainly, when we look at the history of religions, we see a removal of the Feminine. But what I hope we come to is not a worship of the masculine or the feminine, but the wholeness of both. All we seem able to say is masculine or feminine, this or that. Again, I think of the two side panels of Bosch's triptych, heaven or hell. But how do we live in the center panel, how do we live on Earth? How do we live in that place of wholeness, that place of integration? That's what I'm interested in. And that's why I always return to the land, because I think we see that there. We see what it means to live in relationship, in harmony, even in predator-prey relationships, that there is a natural order to things. I think that in many of our religions, that natural order was broken. We feel the yearning to restore what was broken within ourselves. But how do we begin to not only make love, but make love to the world, when all that is thwarted with this heaviness of guilt and ought and should that institutionalized religion imposes? That's why I think it's healthy to have the doors of the churches blown open, to take our religions outside and not be frightened of the erosion that will be brought by spiritual winds. l

Julie A. Wortman is editor and publisher of The Witness.

The Greening of Apocalypse
by Catherine Keller

You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky;
but why do you not know how to interpret
the present time? -- Luke 12:56

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, "the end of the world?" A premillennialist horror fantasy of final tribulation, complete with planes crashing as born-again pilots join the rapture of the true Christians? The final heat death of the universe? The smoke and fire of nuclear war, and endless winter afterward?

... [T]he rhetoric of "the end of the world" stimulates for most white middle-class North Americans, male or female, anxious ecological associations. Apocalypse is getting colored green. "Increasingly, apocalyptic fears about widespread droughts and melting ice-caps have displaced the nuclear threat as the dominant feared meteorological disaster," notes Andrew Ross in his aptly titled Strange Weather (1991). Consider what it means that -- among the religious and the irreligious alike -- phrases like "the destruction of the earth" or "save the planet" have within a few years become commonplace. But if apocalypticisms have become casual, so has the casual become apocalyptic. You exchange pleasantries with a stranger and find a casual allusion to the weather -- for instance, when it is unseasonably warm, or cold, or when the weather weirdly bounces -- rudely insinuating the end of the world. The foreboding feeling of irretrievable and unforeseeable damage reverberates in the brief silences, as we nod and shake our heads, break eye contact, change the topic.

Talk about weather has lost its innocence. Such a loss poses a social crisis for human discourse. How but through the weather do we move beyond the formalities? What other topic everywhere and always connects us, whoever we are, whether we are strangers thrown together for a few moments or partners rising from the same bed? The great inclusive "it" of "it's looking like rain," "it's gorgeous," has always bound us, with accompanying sighs, groans and grimaces. It embeds our relations to each other in nature -- that materiality which is shared, no matter what, across every arbitrary human division. In the commonplace medium of the weather we encounter the ever mobile face of the creation here and now. ...

What weather talk means differs quite precisely according to our cultural as well as geographic location. Thus elite Western cultures tend to scorn weather-talk as banal. This superiority to small talk about the weather symptomatizes a kind of relationship to the planetary condition. Thus it is important to ask who benefits from a relationship of distance from the rest of creation. Who profits from the so-called transcendence of nature? However piously couched in the language of higher, eternal and invisible preoccupations, such transcendence correlates nicely with western technological practices. Freedom from nature implies, for instance, freedom from the vicissitudes of weather. It therefore facilitates practices of control of the environment and the exploitation of the earth's energies to sustain artificial environments with homogenized, centralized, steady, comfortable weather. Who can better afford to experience "nature" as banal, exterior, outside of immediate importance than those urban elites who seem to have severed the immediate bonds of dependency upon weather conditions? But have they not therefore also forfeited the subtle shifting consciousness of our connections to all the earth creatures who share the dependency? This means most of us in the Northern Hemisphere. Nonetheless, even in the banality of our clipped connections, we talk about the weather. We are somehow still at home together in it.

The weather is at once a metaphor for the ecological crisis in which the planet finds itself, and its most inescapable symptom. The weather, like "nature," has readily been woman-identified -- alternately enchanting and frightening, nurturing and withholding, rhythmic and capricious, moody and unstable, subject to the modern and "manly" sciences of meteorology, climate control, and other modes of social management. Talk about the weather therefore becomes ecofeminist discourse. Theologically, because it is about the end of the world as we know it, it falls under the heading of eschatology -- talk about end things. ... Apocalypse is a type of eschatology. The ecological trauma apocalyptically encoded in the weather may clue us in to our eschatological mission, as theological practitioner -- our mission not to a life after life but to life itself.

"Apocalypse" means literally "to unveil." In exposing and disclosing, it leaves no hiding place. The text in Revelation 6:12ff mocks the very effort to hide, when, at the opening of the sixth seal, "the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich ... call to the mountains, 'Fall on us and hide us.'" That seems to be our situation, when even weather patterns threaten the future life of human civilization. In North America, we normally think of cozily hiding in our homes from bad weather. But the ecological vision reveals, in a less mythological sense than apocalypse, that there is no home to hide from the weather in. The home of the human species is the planet. The ravaged air and water and earth are the elements in which we move and live and have our being. We can't keep the weather out. There is no "out."

Ecology -- etymologically it means "talk about home" -- has become talk about the planetary home of homes, the ultimate "habitat for humanity." It has developed as a discourse only because there is no longer any notion of home, like weather, which can be taken for granted. The weather itself poses the need to talk about the rapid deterioration of the home-spaces, deterioration to the point that without radical and rapid renovation, our terrestrial habitat will soon be uninhabitable to most of us except the rich, the armed, and the insect. Talk about home merges with talk about the end of the world -- the ultimate case of homelessness.

Apocalyptic eschatology, which entertains the vision of the imminent collapse of the world (the sum of nature and civilization), appears at moments irresistible. This is both mythically appropriate and historically dangerous. And precisely therefore must those who practice spiritualities of justice within Christian contexts consider the theological force field of the weather and other ecological traumas. This means doing our apocalyptic "home-work." l

Catherine Keller teaches feminist theory and constructive theology in the Graduate and Theological Schools of Drew University. Excerpts from "Talk About the Weather: The Greening of Eschatology" by Catherine Keller, from Ecofeminism and the Sacred, edited by Carol J. Adams, copyright 1993 by The Continuum Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher.