Terry Tempest Williams - Leap

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2001

Copyright2000 by Terry Tempest Williams

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work appeared, in different form, in The Nation, Western Humanities Review, and Parabola, and in Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape by David T. Hanson et al. (New York: Aperture, 1997).

The Garden of Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, which follows the last page of this book, is reproduced by kind permission of the Prado Museum in Madrid. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. All rights reserved.

Permissions acknowledgments appear on .

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

Williams, Terry Tempest.

Leap / Terry Tempest Williams.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 0-679-43292-2

1. Williams, Terry TempestReligion. 2. Spiritual lifeChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 3. Bosch, Hieronymus, d. 1516. Garden of delights. 4. Bosch, Hieronymus, d. 1516Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

BX8695.W547 A3 2000

289.3092dc21

[B] 99-057914

Vintage ISBN: 0-679-75257-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-91242-3

Author photograph Arturo Patten

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

Acclaim for Terry Tempest Williamss LEAP

Truly astounding. [Williams] has somehow managed to turn her encounter with the Bosch masterpiece in Spain into an intense and profound meditation on faith and belief.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Brilliantly constructed and deeply moving, the writing catapults us out of the static role as reader into a direct experience of the revelations of a trembling open eye. Leap awakens a fresh way of seeing our lives, art, religion, and nature in the present.

Parabola

Williams has crafted something special a search for the entwined roots of faith, wisdom and creativity that are wrought in the landscape of the imagination.

The Denver Post

In a language that is deeply lyrical and critically intelligent. Leap is a remarkable and wondrous book written by a writer at the height of her considerable power.

The Rain Taxi Review of Books

Leap is an intimate and revealing story. It solidifies Williams position at the forefront of writers dedicated to passionate exploration of the intersection of landscape and community.

The Seattle Times

Turns an ardent study of The Garden of Earthly Delights into a meditation on her Mormon heritage and an arresting and creative inquiry into our relationship with nature, the divide between religion and spirituality, and the significance of art and wilderness.

Booklist Editors Choice, 2000

Leap is a devotional and a chronicle, an optics for the mind and spirit.

The Bloomsbury Review

Leap is an exhilarating and transforming meditation on art, spirituality and nature that is anchored to a vivid journey through Hieronymus Boschs masterpiece.

Newsday, 2000 Critics Pick

A remarkable book that is part religious quest, part artistic investigation, and part psychological reflection.

The Christian Science Monitor

[Williams] moves through the painting as if it were alive, guiding us with a river of words and the lucid, fearless intensity that has defined her voice among nature writers. Readers of Refuge will recognize in Leap her willingness to bare anguish and ecstasy and find in the full range of human emotions, as she finds in nature, a rich moral vein.

Orion Magazine

In this lyrical, wise, and questioning book, Terry Tempest Williams leads us in and out of the double-sided looking glass that is Boschs Garden of Delights and of the heavens and hells of our own natural world. An innovative hybrid, woven of lived experience, visionary thinking, and critical intelligence, Leap points the way to new spiritual dimensions buried in art, nature, and our own lives.

Lucy Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local

Confession: I sat down, opened the book in the middle of it and of a busy day. An hour later I got up from my chair. Page after page of discovery. What a marvelous manner of handling the interlaced themes of flesh and soul. The beauty of Terry Tempest Williamss writing, her feeling, her devotion. Leap took me into the heart of Importance.

James Hillman, author of The Souls Code

Leap does what we hope literature can dorinse the readers gaze, refreshing our sight and making the world new again.

Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria

T ERRY T EMPEST W ILLIAMS

LEAP

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger, Desert Quartet, and Red. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives with her husband, Brooke Williams, in the redrock desert of southern Utah.

also by T ERRY T EMPEST W ILLIAMS

Pieces of White Shell

Coyotes Canyon

Refuge

An Unspoken Hunger

Desert Quartet

Red

For the men in my family:

John Henry Tempest III

Stephen Dixon Tempest

Daniel Dixon Tempest

William Henry Tempest

and, especially,

Brooke Williams

mi gua y amor para siempre

Otro da veremos la resurreccin de las mariposas disecadas.

We must follow the vein of our blood.

Federico Garca Lorca, Blood Wedding

The new can bear fruit only when it grows from the seeds implanted in tradition.

Paul Tillich, The Dogma of the Trinity

I once lived near the shores of Great Salt Lake with no outlet to the sea.

I once lived in a fault-block basin where mountains made of granite surrounded me. These mountains in time were hollowed to house the genealogy of my people, Mormons. Our names, the dates of our births and deaths, are safe. We have records hidden in stone.

I once lived in a landscape where my ancestors sacrificed everything in the name of belief and they passed their belief on to me, a belief that we can be the creators of our own worlds.

I once lived in the City of Latter-day Saints.

I have moved.

I have moved because of a painting.

Over the course of seven years, I have been traveling in the landscape of Hieronymus Bosch. A secret I did not tell for fear of seeming mad. Let these pages be my interrogation of faith. My roots have been pleached with the wings of a medieval triptych, my soul intertwined with an artists vision.