Wild Card with Rachel Martin - Terry Tempest Williams

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Terry Tempest Williams often writes about what is easy to overlook – the “holy ordinary” as she calls it. Whether it's the beauty and plight of the natural world, or the silence and struggle of a loved one. She talks to Rachel about why women with big ideas get labeled “crazy” and how she tries to emulate her late mother. To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

What's something you still feel you need to prove to people you meet? What comes into my mind, if I'm honest, the minute you ask that question is that I'm not crazy. We all have powers. And I think we all tempt them down so that we're not too big. We're not too much. We're not too smart. We're not too sensitive. So I think just being a woman in a misogynist,

culture. I think, I don't know if we have to prove we're not crazy, but we're always being asked if we are. Yeah. Or treat it as if we are. I'm Rachel Martin and this is Wild Card. The show where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life. Questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one question back on me. My guest this week is the writer Terry Tempest Williams. I called my father a month before the book came out and

I said, Dad, I'm so worried it will be read as gossip in our neighborhood. You know, have I told things I shouldn't have about the church and about family? I'm so nervous. And he goes, don't worry about it. No one's going to read it anyway. I first met Terry Tempest Williams about 25 years ago. At a writer's conference I was covering as a young reporter.

Terry was raised in the Mormon church, but she had created a more expansive kind of spirituality for herself that made a huge impression on me. To this day, Terry's writing always reorients me towards what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true. Her new book is called The Glorians, and I am so very happy to welcome Terry Tempest Williams to Wildcard. Hi. Hi, Rachel. It's so good to see you. It's so good to see it. I have on my cowboy boots in honor of our shared interior west. Interior West. Okay, so we're going to get right into it. Memories, round one. Terry, I'm going to hold up three cards. You just pick

randomly, okay? One, two, or three. However the spirit moves you. One, two, three. Let's say one. Let's do it. What activity gave you a sense of freedom as a kid? Watching clouds? Watching clouds. I don't know if that would be viewed as an activity in terms of physicality. But I do remember lying on our front lawn for hours watching clouds. Really? And just shape shift and seeing animals morph into birds, morph into fish, alligators, you know, profiles of people that I knew. It was a companion to my imagination. And I felt completely free. Did a grown-up show you how to do that? Or do you remember? Do you remember? remember being instructed in some way about how to use your imagination? Or is it just, you just saw things?

It wasn't an instruction. It was being pulled upward, you know? But I do remember my grandmother, we called her Mimi, we would always lay on what she called the, it was like a chaise lounge, you know, on her. couches and we would listen to music or we would listen to bird calls. She was quite extraordinary. And then one day I remember she said, Terry, just let your mind go blank. And I tried so hard, Rachel, and my mind would not go blank. And I thought, what is wrong with me? And I just said, Mimi, I can't, I can't quiet my mind. I can't, it doesn't go blank. And I don't remember what she said, but I think it's somehow connected to the clouds because when I was watching clouds shape shift, my mind was completely present and focused. And that was the closest I could come

to having an empty mind. Yeah. Okay, let's keep going. Three more cards. One, two, or three. Three. Were you obsessed with a particular cosmic question as a kid? Was I obsessed with a particular cosmic question? Can define cosmic however you want. I was incapacitated by ritual. Incapacitated by ritual? I had to perform my own rituals, or I felt the world would be out of balance, or something would happen to our family.

We would go to Capistrano every year like the Swallows. We would return. And before we left, I just remember my father honking or my uncle honking with all the kids in the station wagons because I knew I had to be the last one and I would go down to the water and I would perform these hand patterns at the edge of the sea. And then I would know that we could return again. And if I didn't, something would happen. So this is borderline superstitious? It was not even superstitious.

It was this was my belief. Yes, it was your belief. Yeah. As a child, I really paid attention to those rituals, those patterns. I had a secret life, I think. Yeah. And you just learned how to make your own meaning at such a young age. Because isn't this how we all make meaning in our life?

We give significance to certain things and create rituals that make that moment stand out and held in stark relief to every other banality in our life. and you learned how to do that so young. I think that's right. And there's a reciprocity between our outer world and our inner world and that it's deeply personal. I also have to say that Mormonism

is a very cosmic religion. You know, we're taught early on that you have the capacity to have your own visions. I mean, the church is predicated on a 14-year-old boy that had a vision in the sacred grove so that trees had standing. I think our whole family, whether it was the religion, whether it was our own tendencies

being out in nature, where, I mean, that in itself is filled with rituals. You know, as a family, we would, every fall, go listen to the elk bugle in Grand Teton National Park. Yeah. And so I think ritual, tradition, reciprocity, generosity all centers around these practices. Hmm. That's a good one. Three more cards. One, two, or three? Two. Two. How do you consciously try to emulate your parents? How do I consciously try to emulate my parents? My mother was full of grace. She had a wicked sense of humor. I think those are two qualities that I would hope to emulate from her. She was very self-contained, very private. Sometimes I wish she hadn't been so private until at the end when she was dying. I think much was revealed.

That's where she found her freedom, was, I think, through her illness, where then she could proclaim her own voice, her own truth. Before my mother died, she said, Terri, I'm leaving you all my journals, and she told me where they were exactly. And I remember being in bed with her, rubbing her back, and it was a wicked storm outside. And she died a week later under a full moon. And about three weeks later, I went and found her journals exactly where she said they would be. Three shelves full, each one beautifully individual, leather, fabric, painted.

I opened the first one. It was empty. I opened the second one. It was empty. The third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth. Shelf after shelf after shelf, all my mother's journals were blank. What? I don't get it. I didn't either. It was like she died twice. And I remember thinking, why would she consciously tell me she left me her journals and then only to find all her journals were blank? Was she saying, please write? was she saying the two things the Mormon church asks of women is that you keep a journal and bear children

and that was her protest? Wow. Or was she living so fully that she didn't have time to write? But she kept books. She collected books that were... One after another. Physical journals that were blank. Blank.

Every one of them blank. Every one of them beautiful. And I remember being so stunned. No one was in the house. My father was gone. My brothers were gone. I just gathered them all in my arms like babies and put them in the back of my Subaru and drove home, put them on the shelf, and filled them with the exception of one that I wanted to remember. And it wasn't until I was 54, the age my mother was that she died, that I even remembered that.

I buried it so deep. Wow. So when you ask, you know, what do I emulate, it became even more important as a woman to speak. To speak the language women speak when there's no one there to correct us. To write what scares us. What did you fill her journals with? Because you were, presumably, you were keeping journals of your own. Have you always been?

That's the one thing I've been faithful to. Yeah. you know, my journal. That's, that's, I live twice. I live in the world, and then I record it. So it's a mirror. What did I write about? I wrote about grocery lists.

I wrote about the birds I saw. I wrote about what Brooke and I did. Just day-to-day things. Nothing profound. And then a phrase came to me, and I think it had everything to do. with voice when women were birds. You know, bird song, morning evening vespers, you know, how do we as women find our voice, use our voice, keep our voice, and when we lose it, how do we retrieve it? So that's what my mother gave me. I think her silence became her

voice and that became an urgency in my own. With my father, I think what I emulate about my father is he's so honest. He's so, he's very, he's all about earth, dirt, shovel. You know, and he's still around, right? He's 92. And I can tell you two accounts. One, I wrote a book called Refuge. And it was about the rise of Great Salt Lake and the death of my mother. and I called my father, you know, a month before the book came out, and I said, Dad, I'm so worried it will be read as gossip in our neighborhood. You know, it's, have I told things I shouldn't have about the church and about family? I'm so nervous.

And he goes, don't worry about it. No one's going to read it anyway. And, you know, or at a Thanksgiving when we were giving blessings. And it actually was comforting. I thought you're right. You know, who cares? Right. And then I remember at Christmas, actually it was Thanksgiving.

one year, and he just turned to me and we were talking about what we were grateful for. And he turned to me and said, Terry, I'm so glad you have a hobby. And I thought, golf, croquet, you know. He meant writing? You met your life's work. And then my favorite is with this last book called The Glorians, I gave my father a coffee. There's a chapter in there called My Father's Roses. At 92, that's His Joy.

And I handed it to him very reverentially. and he picks it up and he looks at it, turns it upside down, turns over like he's checking machinery, you know, kind of kicks the tires, looks in the covers, opens it, you know, flips through the pages, reads a paragraph or two, closes it, and he goes, you know, Terry, every writer deserves a clunker. Come on. But doesn't this hurt you? No, I think it's hilarious, you know, and it's just, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it. You know this as well as I do, living in Idaho, born in Salt Lake City. You can't, in the West, you can't take yourself so seriously. That's true.

You can take the weather seriously. And if you do, there will be someone right next to you is going to knock you right down. I mean, with real stuff and real work, you know. Yeah. And it always kept me in check. And I think my father is a great lover. That's the kind boy about it. He hurt me in other ways, you know, in terms of.

of anger and you can't have a name like Tempest and be very calm. But it gave me a sense of humor. It kept me in check. And it's humbling to work alongside my brothers who've given their bodies to pipelines and gas lines and water lines and sewage lines and watching how their body breaks down, how they're working 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day in, brutal weather, brutal hate. My job is really pretty cushy, and they remind me of that.

Let's talk more about your newest book, The Glorians, which is one of these words that I read it, and I'm like, that is a word that I haven't heard before, and yet it has a quality that feels like it's always been a word. You know, it felt very familiar. It felt like it should have been. It should already exist, but I'd never heard it, which is sort of what you're doing in your examination of life through this framework of glorians.

Can I guess we just start by having you define what that means? What is a glorian? You know, I think it's not so much how to define a glorian what a glorian is, as much as it is to pay attention to what is calling us. or what is calling us to attention. And to me, a glorian is when energies are fused or you are met by another and you are fully present with each other.

And there are so many different kinds of glorians that you include in your book. A very special tree at Harvard, the divinity tree. A dear friend of yours, a Ukrainian writer who was poet, who was a dear friend of yours, who was trying to document war crimes in Ukraine. She was killed in a strike.

Another glory in your cat, Jade? I mean, they're such disparate, on the face of it, they're such disparate beings. And yet there's a through line that connects them that seems to me, you tell me if I'm wrong, It's just about being awake to life, just being aware of being aware of the natural world, being aware of sacrifices that people are making. There's an awareness that undergirds your epic documentation of the Glorians. And I appreciate you seeing it that way. You know, in my mind, it's really an answer to Simone Vei when she says, attention is a prayer.

I think if we are present, we will know what to do. And at a time when there's so much uncertainty in the world, and I don't know about you, but there are days I think, can I even get up? And I realize my own privilege, you know, but I think we're all struggling on some level. Are we reading The Onion or are we reading The New York Times? Is this Saturday Night Live or is it the inaugural address? You know? I hardly know where we are at any given moment.

And in the midst of the chaos, there is this pulse of the Holy Ordinary, be it an aunt, be it like you say, Jade, a kitten that I had while I was at Harvard. I love the expression. I love that articulation, the Holy Ordinary, yeah. And that is going on all. the time. And I think it is by paying attention to realize the gift of water in drought, a flash flood in the desert, a body of water, Great Salt Lake that no one can drink and now is in retreat. It's everywhere. It's all around us. It's bird song in the morning, the robins.

It's been in New York City and seeing the leaves coming out and drying the warblers in on migration. Everywhere we look, there is beauty. And living in the desert is particularly poignant right now because we are in drought. And two summers ago, we had five flash floods in a matter of weeks. And how do you make sense of that? What do you do with that? I can tell you that our landscape around our home in our community of 250 people, you could say it was devastated. You could also say it was transformed, and I choose to see it as being transformed. And I think if we are living a sensorial life, if we are living a life of our senses, then that demands that we be present. And if we're present, we will know how to act. We will

know how to respond to the wholly ordinary around us. Nothing is more ordinary in the desert where I live, then flash floods, then wind, water, and time. And that very, that erosional landscape that drew us there, we've been there 30 years, maybe the very qualities that forces us to leave. So we are in times of immense radical change. Maybe we always have been, but I think with climate, we're particularly aware and acute to that. So how do we see it as a time of transformation and evolution rather than devastation and despair. I think the holy ordinary, the world around us, shows us that again and again and again. Round two.

Insights. Three new cards. One, two, or three? Two. Two. During which season do you feel most yourself? It used to be fall. Yeah. Oh, it's changed.

My birthday's in the fall. I love the change. I love the colors. I love the drama of it. I love the quiet of it. But I think now, as I'm getting older, I love the spring. There's something about the new growth, the promise of life. Out of the snow, out of the winters. Maybe it's because I've been living. living in Boston, and so when you see spring, you just say, hallelujah, even if it's snowing in April. But I couldn't really, I think summer's my least favorite, I will say that.

And that could be desert because, you know, 52 days of 100 degrees and 116 last summer. Walking back, we had a friend come over and I walked her to her car, and as I was walking back, I thought, what is that flapping sound? And my sandals were delaminating, you know? But why is summer your least favorite? Oh, yeah, I'm just hot. I'm just too hot, Terry. I'm always too hot.

I'm so hot all the time. I hate humidity. I hate humidity. And I just, I like transitional seasons. I love change. My husband's from San Diego. I could never, ever live there. I need the markers.

I need the external natural world to shift around me. So I always love. Spring and fall always. You know, and maybe that's the truth is that maybe as Westerners, we get a chance every four times a year to change ourselves. You know, and there's something about the cusp that it's like the ecotone, you know, between the forest and the meadow. It's the cusp, isn't it?

I'm with you on spring. Okay. Three new carts. One, two, or three. I just keep seeing two as turquoise. I like it. Let's go. What's something you still feel you need to prove to people you meet? What a wild question.

There's an assumption baked in there that you still feel the need. Maybe you don't. Read the question again. What's something you still feel you need to prove to people you meet? I mean, on one hand, I don't think I have to prove anything at this age. but I'll tell you what's in my mind, which is sort of sad. Tell me. What comes into my mind, if I'm honest,

the minute you ask that question is that I'm not crazy. Because I think when you live on the edge and when you see things and feel things and are as porous as I believe we all are, I'm just aware of my own poracity. I think people think you're crazy. And I think as women who have certain powers, we all have powers. And I think we all tamp them down so that we're not too big, we're not too much, we're not too smart, we're not too sensitive.

So I think just being a woman in a misogynist culture, I think, I don't know if we have to prove we're not crazy, but we're always being asked if we are or treat it as if we are. So that's the honest answer. It's not about proving, but it's understanding that the people just say, well, it's her, it's Terry. she's having a vision again or she's had some peak experience or a mystical experience. It's not anything special. It's just if we pay attention, if we are in love with the world, if we recognize the power of an aunt or horny toads, horned lizards that can squirt blood from their eyes, don't mess with me,

we're not crazy. We're just alive. So I think maybe it's proving to people. we are alive. We feel things. We can tell the truth. And we can ask questions. And it makes you unemployable. Unemployable. I mean, let's be clear. If we lived in a different time in these United States, you would have been like put into the ocean with a stone wrapped around your foot and drowned as a witch or burnt at the stake. Because, yeah. Yeah, you are in my mind.

And there's metaphors for that. Yeah. But you are a woman who is tapped into the world. And the men who ruled the thing back in the day weren't so keen on those kind of people. Well, Rachel, you know, you were born in Salt Lake City. I've lived in Salt Lake City. And that's a tough town to be a strong woman. Yeah.

You know, and I think it's what I've had to fight against. Last one in this round. One, two, or three. Three. How are you with authority? Terry Tempus Williams. I love that I, that's my favorite question. Oh, I'm very good.

I'm very good with authority. You're lying. I love authority. I know enough about you. So that's just a hilarious question. Give me an example of your relationship with authority, how it may or may not have changed over time. How long is your program? You know, this would be the question I would pass on because it's just hilarious.

Let's pass it. I do not have a healthy respect for authority, and let me just put it this way, it's gotten me in a lot of trouble. I've been to jail many times. Climate protests? Some by climate, some by protesting the Iraq War. And one for speeding in Soda Springs, Idaho. You went to jail for speeding? Uh-huh, 38 miles per hour in a 25-mile-hour zone.

Sunday morning, I'm in my best clothes. I've come from a funeral. And, yeah, taken to jail, put in an orange suit. Anyway, it's a long story, but I ended up, they give you paper and a big pen without the plastic, and I met some of the most powerful women I've ever met. And we wrote together. Really? And I remember saying, what do we all have in common?

And one woman said, we all have orange. And I remember we all wrote essays on orange. and some of them, why do I hate the color orange when red and yellow are my favorite colors? Orange, ice, the lipstick I had to clean off my mother's martini glasses every morning. I mean, it was, that's a diversion, but authority. None of those women had, those women were in jail because of circumstances. is not because they did anything wrong, you know? Right.

And I just think when you go back to what authority, where is our authority? I do have a problem with authority, and I fight it because I was raised with it. And I saw how unjust it was, whether it was the Mormon church saying women could not hold the priesthood, whether it was calling native people Lamanites. I think there's an anger that burns in me about the people. what authority can and does do to people. Yeah, and now that power can be abused. You've seen it abused too many times.

To what I call sacred rage that is highly motivating. I think it's why I write, Rachel. You didn't want to answer this question, and it's actually so fundamental to who you are, you know? That's why it's a good thing to pass on those, you know. Beliefs I did not mean to match my t-shirt to these cards But now they feel camouflage

Okay, beliefs, Terry One, two, or three One Are you preoccupied with the past, the future, or neither? I think I'm preoccupied with the present. Yeah. You know, what are we going to do today? What does today's choreography look?

like. I'm here with you. Nothing else is happening today, just this. Are you truly good at, I mean, of course you are. That is what your writing is. It's again, it's like awareness. It's being present to your current circumstances and who's in front of you. And I think I learned that early on. There's been a lot of illness in my family. And if I look back, it was too sad. And if I looked forward, it was terrifying. Yeah. Because the people I loved wouldn't be there. So I learned very quickly, if I'm present, if it's here, then that's what we can trust and it will take care of us. So I think the present moment allows us to trust what will follow and to trust that the past brought us here. You know, I remember when I was, when I turned 50, I was in

Rougarero, a genocide survivor's village in Rwana. And we had just painted the village with the children. It was an unspeakable sadness in the village. And Lilliers, an artist, barefoot artist, brought all these paints. We were in there to help with the Red Cross and creating with the village a genocide memorial. And after the village had been painted, it was motorcycles, it was five-legged cows with huge udders, you know, it was flowers. All the children started dancing and singing. And I remember dancing and singing with 50 children, you know, just, it was, I've never known such joy in the midst of such unspeakable loss.

And I thought, here. we are. This is the present moment. This is what the children know. And I thought, what in my life has ever brought me here? And how can I worry about the future when every day is a gift and you can't foresee the future because it's made of these moments now here, nothing else? How do you reconcile that with climate change, with your work? on, you know, raising the red flag about what is what we have wrought and the consequences of our action and inaction. I mean, so much of that work is about the future. But I also think it's how we're living now. You know, we can't change the future if we don't change where we are right here,

right now, together. Right. So it's interconnected. I don't see the separations. It's not past. It's not future, it's not present. It's right here, right now. The past brought us here. If we make a future, it will be because of the decisions we make now. Yeah. So I see it as an interweaving. Again, it's an ecological point of view. You know, it's where all, we all have our niche. Again, it's the holy ordinary. It's, it's seamless. Yeah. I also was just thinking the other day, Rachel, time is so strange, isn't it? In the desert, you're living in time. You're living in time. deep time. You're part of geologic time. But I was thinking when I'm present, we have all the time in the world. And when I'm not present, it's like time goes so slow. I just think, really, it's been five minutes.

Whereas if I'm present, it's both endless and it's like, really, we've been talking for five hours. You know, it's like that. It's like that. Three new cards. One, two, or three. Two. Have you made peace with mortality? Yes. Yes. I just turned 70. And there's a horizon. There's a horizon now. Speaking of future. But I have been with the people I've loved the most in their passing. I was breathing with my mother as she was dying and saw that last breath. and saw her look at my father when he walked in, and their eyes met. You know, I've been a witness to death.

I was with my brother, as was our family. My brother's death by suicide, you know, we watched and participated in his cremation, even the grinding of his bones, and feeling the last heat of his life. and I remember as Mr. Rabe, who oversaw the cremation, when he poured the bone and ash into this box and we waited. It was 8 pound 4 ounces, the same weight that my brother's birth weight was. You know, and I was with my grandparents when they died. and holding Mimi's hand as she was done, she looked like Socrates.

You know, she had cancer. She had no hair. But I looked at it and I said, Mimi, you look like Socrates. And she just smiled. And then she looked up and she said, oh, can't you show Terry? She would be so excited. You know, I don't know what she was seen. I don't know if it was in her mind.

I don't know if it was God. I don't know any of it. But I knew she wanted to share it in that. moment. Yeah. You know, and I'm not afraid of death. That's what I was going to ask. It sounds like fear is not a part of your thought process when it comes to dying.

I'm afraid of this interview, you know. I'm afraid of, you know, getting in trouble at Harvard. I'm afraid of a million things. I'm always afraid. But it doesn't stop me. But I'm not afraid of death because death is life and death is the tree that's merging into the ground. You know, it's the dust that I want to rub all over when I was, I was just in the redwoods. And I, you know, I watched this huge tree just disintegrating horizontally. And there

was this fine, fine powder. And I just, I picked up some, and my instinct, I just wanted to rub it all over my face, my arms. You know, it's like, what can this tree tell me in death so that I might live more fully? I'm just curious. This is a highly personal question. But do you want to be cremated? I don't. You don't? I don't. It was like rocket fuel.

You know, when we carried my brother's body, Hank and I, my youngest brother, into the retort, and closed that door and locked it. And then Mr. Rabe turned on those engines. It was like rocket fuel. It was not fun of natural. Yeah. And the energy use, you know, we tend to think. That's a practice, but we live in a place where we have green burial laws. And so Brooke and I have our Pendleton blankets picked out.

You know, I just want to be wrapped in a blanket and put it in the ground. And if a flash flood carries me away, my neighbors will know, and they'll just put me back in the ground. And I also, we picked our plots during the pandemic. You did? You thought, you know, we may go with, I mean. Yeah. So we might as well know where we're going to be. So we bought two plots in the Castle Valley Cemetery.

And Brooke said, it was $500 a year. They're very inexpensive. And Brooke said, how will we know? And I said, we'll know. We'll just know. Like, how will you know which site? Yeah. Brick said, I liked these people.

I'd like to be in their neighborhood. And I said, well, I'm really much more solitary. I want to be on the edge with a good view. So we had these discussions. and we walk in, and all of a sudden we both just went here. And it was on the edge in the corner, but they'd already been dug by badgers. And I just thought, we don't even have to dig, you know? It's just all there.

And so it was a wonderful way. It wasn't even about the afterlife. It was about the underground. So we know where we'll be buried. Last one. One, two, or three. Will you pick one for me? Yep.

is the one I want to ask you. Is there anything in your life that feels like praying? On a good day, writing. Listening. Listening feels like praying to me. What about praying? When I went to the divinity school, I learned how to pray again. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

And what I got on my knees. and what I learned was that praying wasn't about asking or even gratitude, but really listening. And so I think the decade that I've spent at the Harvard Divinity School, I realize how much I don't know. And in many ways what I know isn't valued in the same way because what I know are the names of birds because that's what I cared about when I was young.

And I still do. And the birds to me are the links to everything else, whether it's women's voice, whether it's ecological health, or whether it's looking upward at a night sky of stars, birds. But I think prayer to me is about listening, listening to voices beyond ourselves, listening to the voices within ourselves, and I do think it's plural,

and listening to one's deepest questions that no one else can answer, except for by living an authentic life. This is also a highly personal question, but I'm just going to ask anyway, what specific, what are your prayers today? What feels urgent to you? Can we love ourselves enough to change? Can we love each other enough to change? Can we embrace change in all of its manifestations?

That's my prayer. And can we create the kind of changes necessary together to thrive on this planet, the only planet that we will ever. call home. That's my prayer. That we can realize all that binds us together rather than what tears us apart, and that we can have the hard conversations, that we can ask the difficult questions, and that we can listen, and that we can be changed by one another. Terry Tempuss-Williams, we end the show the same way every time with a trip in our memory time machine. In the memory time machine, you,

go back and revisit one moment from your past. It's not a moment you want to change anything about. It's just a moment you'd like to linger in a little longer. And I'm sure you have many. But what is the memory that comes to the fore? Honestly, it's sitting on the river with Brooke and we watched a hatch of mayflies. And we realized they would only live. one day. And in that moment, it was perfect. Terry Tempest Williams, her newest book is called The Glorians. It was such my pleasure to get to do this with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. And take special care. Thank you so much for listening. If you found yourself smiling at the way Terry Tempest Williams

imbues even the most ordinary of things, like a tree with the kind of sacred quality, you should go back and listen to my conversation with Sul Laca Jawad. As an artist, a writer, and someone living through cancer, Sulaka too can draw your attention to the smallest moments in your life and turn them into something magical. This episode was produced by Alicia Zhang and Lee Hale. It was edited by Dave Blanchard and mastered by Andy Huther. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni, and our theme music is by Romteen Arablewee. You can reach out to us at Wildcard at npr.org. We'll shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. week.

Talk you then.