An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field by Terry Tempest Williams

A Book Review by Zinta Aistars



# Paperback: 160 pages
# Publisher: Vintage, 1995
# ISBN: 0679752560
# $11.00

As the title of one of Terry Tempest Williams' essays states... this collection of immersions into spirit and place are "The Erotics of Place." That is, not just a bodily immersion into her subject, but one of totality. Williams accomplishes that sinking into her well-worded ideas that leaves only the tips of her hair floating on the surface, a faint rippling of the water where she stepped in, and nothing more - she is submerged. And that is a thing of quality.

The essays in this short collection touch on lives of people as well as life force of place. Williams writes about Georgia O'Keefe in "In Cahoots with Coyote" with evident love for the woman, the artist, the landscape: "What O'Keefe saw was what O'Keefe felt - in her own bones. Her brush strokes remind us again and again, nothing is as it appears: roads that seem to stand in the air like charmed snakes; a pelvis bone that becomes a gateway to the sky; another that is rendered like an angel; and 'music translated into something for the eye.'" The essay concludes with Williams, O'Keefe, and coyotes in the canyons of southern Utah howling in harmony.

Williams writes a eulogy for Edward Abbey, another spirit polished by desert sand. She sees Abbey as the leader of a growing Clan, a clan of human coyotes reclaiming their land, "...individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they are infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts... not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh harder than anyone on the planet..."

This is that total immersion Williams renders so well. Her people essays blend seamlessly with her place essays; they are the same, as they should be, she reminds us, the same. "We call its name," she writes of the earth around her, "and the land calls back."

Williams makes political statements in her work. It is her coyote howl to call together an awareness of the destruction of land all around us. She addresses nuclear testing not only as a naturalist, but as a woman born in a family riddled with breast and ovarian cancer. She addresses conservation as a necessity for continued life on earth, not merely as a question of quality of life. Her call is not militant - it is one of lyrical love for the preservation of the gift we have been given, the natural world that sustains us.

Illuminata: A Return to Prayer by Marianne Williamson

A Book Review by Zinta Aistars



# Paperback: 300 pages
# Publisher: Riverhead Books; Reprint edition, 1995
# ISBN: 1573225207
# $12.00

She writes: "Ultimately, the choice to love each other is the only choice for a survivable future... every time we open our hearts, we create the space for a global alternative. The opening of the heart is an awesome personal politic, providing us with an internal strength greater than any worldly power. As we receive God's love and impart it to others, we are given the power to repair the world... Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one..."

It is as if Williamson understands, and I suspect she does, how tired my own heart grows at times as it travels its lifelong spiritual journey. Is striving to better oneself really worth it? Is it a good thing to be a good person in a dog-eat-dog society? Or is the harsh reality that the one who plays in mud, who is willing to step on another's back, who plays hard to get, who is a master of manipulation, who never blinks at putting oneself first, is inevitably the one who wins the prize? Perhaps. More times than I care to know. And still.... the lifelong struggle to better oneself is, yes, worth it. If only for that final moment when one faces one's own image in the mirror of self-judgement.

"Illuminata" is a book of prayers. There are prayers to begin the new day - and to end it. There are prayers for strength, for health, for happiness, for the renewal of faith, for forgiveness. There are prayers for friends, for family, for lovers. There are prayers to heal nations. There are prayers to overcome addictions, betrayal, emptiness, obsession, loss, greed. There are prayers to mark moments of routine, of tradition, of ritual, of ceremony. The prayers are separated by Williamson's simple, but insightful meditations.

Like many of us, I don't pray nearly as often as I should. Many of my prayers are spoken not in words, but in the way that I touch someone I love, in the manner with which I greet my morning, in the silence I keep when my heart requires healing. But sometimes we need the words to pray. Although I have rarely used her exact words, Williamson's prayers have taught me... that to speak to God is to simultaneously speak to our deeper and higher selves. It is an exchange that is necessary. It is a part of that lifelong journey that we cannot, must not avoid. And, as Williamson writes, we do indeed change the world... one heart at a time.

Wit

A Movie Review by Zinta Aistars




Perhaps of all types of courage required in the human condition, none surpasses the courage required to be stripped down to the spiritual bone of one's ego. In Wit, both the character, Vivian Bearing, and the actress, Emma Thompson, have this rare brand of courage. In an age when our female stars in the entertainment industry tend more and more towards cosmetic fluff, Thompson restores my faith in the woman of quality. She has... wit. She has intelligence, she has class, she has style. Her dedication to her art is supreme; in this film she abandons ego so completely in her portrayal of a woman dying, that I had to bow my head in admiration and respect. Cued by her character's devotion to a life of the mind, I followed the greater part of the movie in a state of intellectual fascination... until at last, as she wore down, so did I. Just as she would have me. As wit alone could not save her, nor could it save me, the viewer, from the sheer, naked terror and pain of the process of dying, of death. By finish, I felt ripped open, exposed, brutalized into feeling, into understanding how secluded we become from ourselves and from others when we isolate any part of our humanness. We are not to be intellect alone, however superior. We are not to be spirit alone, not body alone, but we are to be whole, even as we are in the process, no, most of all when we are in the process... of being broken down.

Wit is filmed sparingly and beautifully. There is no excess. The focus is clear and it is never anywhere but where it should be; every detail is in place for a purpose. John Donne's poetry is the perfect encasement to this story of life and death - and the metaphor of life as a comma, a pause, a mere breath away from death, is sharp and true. No less perfect - Margaret Wise Brown's "The Runaway Bunny." Run, if you will, but your humanity will finally find you.

The best movie I have ever viewed? Can it be? To date - it is. And Thompson's performance, even as I wince to downgrade it by calling it a "performance," even as I wince at such superlatives, is the most impressive I have ever seen. Bravo.