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.

Terry Tempest Williams