I thought this would be a sort of easy-going philosophical book I could glide through and glean from. It is not. Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a dense work that requires you to set down your popcorn and pay attention.
Terry Tempest Williams is a scholar and a scientist who relies on empirical evidence to reach a spiritual conclusion. After the 9/11 attacks and our government chose war she lost her faith in life. Everywhere she looked the world was shattered and the poetry she once knew was lost.
- I faced the ocean. ”Give me one wild word.” It was all I asked of the sea.
The tide was out, the mudflats exposed / A gull picked up a large white clam, hovered high about the rocks, then dropped it. The clam broke open, and the gull swooped down to eat the fleshy animal inside.
“Give me one wild word to follow…”
And the word the sea rolled back to me was “mosaic.”
Off to Italy she goes to learn the art of mosaics from those who know. Mosaics, she explains, began in Mesopotamia 4500 years ago. They died out and reappeared in Greece. The Romans adopted the art and handed it over to the Christians where the Sun God Apollo was transformed into the Son of God and mosaics were lifted from the floor to the ceilings.
Mosaics are communities. Surfaces are curved like the eyes of the observer, and light is the sacred ally. The mosaic is conversation between that which is broken.
Next we are taken to Utah, and for the next 200 or so pages we are immersed into the world of the Utah prairie dogs. Our ancient relatives and the connective tissue of the ecosystem that spreads over several states, prairie dogs also constitute the focal point of an unbalanced controversy. The government either protects them to the point of shutting down construction or condones their extermination by gassing them. There seems to be little in-between. And at first read there seems to be little reason to be dragged through the daily diary entries of Williams as she observes Madame Eyes Wide Apart and the rest of this community. It would almost be better to skip ahead to her visit to Rwanda where she travels as part of a group who wants to create a war memorial and then go back to read about our rodent cousins. It is in the telling of her trip to Rwanda that Williams creates her own mosaic.
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