The Spirited Review

Leap by Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams' Leap is both agony and ecstasy, an invitation that pushes the envelope of intimacy beyond expectation. It is a dry deluge, a swamp-thick desert, a morass of contradictions, and a fascinating expression of soul. It is an amazing tribute to the explorative power of art and of landscape, and an honest revelation of the wilder processes of the spirit. It is so rich that I had to put it down, over and again, to eat it in pieces, like rum-soaked cherries, a book so full that it can burst open the reader without warning, and that seems to stretch against the boundaries of print and page. It took me two months to read the main text, because I didn't dare begin a chapter (there are only four) until I was prepared to finish it in one sitting, with my attention completely engaged. Like a walk through the desert, or in the tidepools, Leap requires concentration, and a careful watch over your own feet.

Leap is Williams' journal of her exploratory love affair with Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Delights. Bosch's painting is a triptych of Heaven, Hell, and the Garden; Williams' discourse echoes the triptych, with an additional step into Restoration. Like Bosch, Williams plunges her readers into the seeming purity of Paradise, the terrifying horrors of Hell, and the glories of the Garden. It is no great surprise -- though somewhat at odds with her Mormon upbringing -- that Williams finds the Garden to be the richest, the fullest of all; indeed, Leap is in part Williams' enjoinder for us to spend our passion on the Garden -- the earth, here, now. And while Leap is many things, including a contemplation of church and theology, and culture and identity, of marriage and passion, and art and meaning, it is the roots of land-love that run under and provide foundation; it is the earth, the garden, that defines and requires and fulfills.

In Leap, Williams turns sin on its ear, and spills out instead the richness and wholeness of living. The Hell she perceives is bound to our abuse of the Garden, being the agonies we have inflicted turned back on us, making us mad. Paradise is beauty without freedom, seen through a glass, complicated but incomprehensible. Only the Garden, in its sensuality, its intimacy, its passionate and physical reveries, only the Garden is the place that lives and enlivens us, the place of love.

Artists and writers, theologians and naturalists all will find much to examine and ponder in the four chapters of Leap, in Williams' struggle through heaven, hell, and here. But I think that it will be environmentalists and earth-lovers who ultimately will be the most indebted to this work, and to Williams, for peeling aside the niceties of polite intellectual discourse and so-called scientific abstraction -- for making a leap into a sensually saturated place, and arguing from it on behalf of the living, the land. In Leap, Williams journeys not only into a predictive painting but also into the dangerous territory of her own wild mind, and comes back through the triptych with a message of Restoration for us all.

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