How to find glory in the ordinary

March 13, 2026·40 min·3 clips

An ant carries a magenta blossom like a sail, attended by helpers, in a 30-minute trek to its colony.

1. On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti interviews Terry Tempest Williams in the WBUR studio about her new book, The Glorians, while wearing a Grand Teton National Park t-shirt she calls an homage to Williams's work. 2. Terry Tempest Williams is the author of many books including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and Finding Beauty in a Broken World; she is also a naturalist, activist, and faculty member at Harvard Divinity School. 3. The episode's central question is whether ordinary moments of focused attention — Glorians — can serve as anchors of meaning amid personal grief, ecological destruction, and political chaos. 4. Williams opens by narrating a 30-minute encounter in which she followed a single ant carrying a magenta coyote willow blossom across her southeastern Utah patio, watched attending ants help it over a prickly pear patch and the porch edge, and saw it disappear into an ant colony where dozens consumed the blossom in seconds. 5. She says the term 'Glorian' came to her in a dream on March 20th, 2020 — one week after pandemic lockdown — in which she was told by a woman at the ruins of Cassandra's Tower that her vow was 'the epic documentation of the Glorians,' launching a six-year project. 6. Williams explains that she ultimately removed her four-part definition of a Glorian from the book, deciding that naming the ineffable was not her place: 'who am I to say what a Glorian is?' 7. She recounts her grandmother, a self-taught Jungian scholar, teaching her to record dreams every morning over buckwheat pancakes, and connecting a childhood dream of a great horned owl landing on her shoulder to the approach of menstruation and Athena's divine feminine symbolism. 8. Williams says a Glorian does not have to be beautiful: her mother's cancer was a Glorian because it focused attention and demanded presence, and five flash floods in her southeastern Utah community were Glorians — one of them carving an overnight canyon that revealed a living ant colony in full trophic cascade. 9. In the flood canyon moment, what first appeared as 'black glitter' turned out to be ants ejecting their dead from a 10-foot cross-section of their colony, darkling beetles eating the dead ants, and ravens waiting above — what Williams calls 'a holy room of the sublime.' 10. Chakrabarti shares that her greyhound curled outside her dying mother's room and would not move; hours before her mother passed, the dog unwound, stood, and urinated in the hallway despite having been out several times — beginning his own mourning, as she understood it. 11. Williams discusses the Harvard Divinity School's decision to cut down a 200-year-old red oak for an interfaith construction project, connecting it to her brother's death by suicide: watching one worker remove nooses from each branch with 'such care and compassion' over four hours, she said she saw her brother. 12. She describes a six-year coda to the tree's death: a worker diverted its body to Vermont artist John Monks instead of a chipper; Monks found the words 'Good luck, humans, you're going to need it' spray-painted in green on the trunk and eventually created benches and a table from the oak that returned to Harvard Divinity School. 13. Williams says she entered the pandemic already grieving her brother's death but did not realize she had not finished grieving until the death of the divinity tree made the unresolved loss visible. 14. On climate chaos and political disorder, Williams calls the current moment 'disorienting' and 'unlike anything in my lifetime,' while acknowledging that 'privileged American naivete' means others have always lived with this level of disruption. 15. She points to the Diné, Navajo, Hopi, Ute, and Pueblo communities at Bears Ears National Monument as models of surviving without losing tradition, quoting community member Jonah Yellam's response to a question about the drought: 'Like we always have.' 16. Chakrabarti reads a Marilynne Robinson passage from Gilead — 'There is no justice in love, no proportion in it... it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal' — which Williams says captures the book's themes: 'grief is love and love is grief.' 17. Williams describes a community water ceremony during a lunar eclipse in Castle Valley: 100 people carried water from the Colorado River with an intention or prayer, poured it into an empty vessel, and when it was returned to the river it swirled into what looked like a spinning galaxy before shooting downstream as 100 bubbles. 18. On young people's despair about climate, Williams says she observes a shift at Harvard Divinity School: students now arriving not to become clergy but as artists, writers, and filmmakers asking how to create new stories for a spiritual life of care. 19. Best suited for listeners drawn to nature writing, contemplative spirituality, grief, and the intersection of personal loss with ecological thought. 20. Less likely to appeal to listeners seeking practical advice, political analysis, or a conventional interview format with verifiable claims and data.

As heard by us

A reflective interview that links wilderness, animals, and grief to the way people notice what is close at hand.

Terry Tempest Williams turns a conversation about wilderness into something larger: a look at attention itself, and at how the natural world and the lives around it are never ordinary.

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A reflective On Point interview with Terry Tempest Williams, where wilderness, pets, and grief become a way of paying attention.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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