The wonders of biology meet the mysteries of Mormonism in Terry Tempest Williams's spiritual evocation of Hieronymus Bosch's El Jardin de las Delicias. Williams is mesmerized by the painting, and there is much to be fascinated by, including her own stream-of-consciousness exploration of its images and symbolism.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, as it's known in English, is part of a triptych, surrounded by wings of paradise and hell. Williams visits the painting daily in the Prado Museum in Madrid, reveling in the gestalt and concentrating on the nuances in the elaborate and extraordinarily detailed masterpiece. One day she'll devote hours inspecting the cavorting, joyous figures, "the blue pool of bathers standing thigh-high in the middle of the triptych," the cherries "flying in the air, dangling from the poles, dropped into the mouths of lovers." Another day she's there with binoculars, cataloguing the birds Bosch chose to place in the garden of earthly delights (she finds 35 of them, including the gadwall, the wagtail, the great white egret, and Tengmalm's owl--a bird who sings "poo-poo-poo," which she considers a bit of prime Bosch paradise humor). Her insight, however, is not limited to the painting. She looks inward and outward, her probing artistic analysis inspiring childhood memories, worldly observations, and universal questions about love and faith.

Williams's leap into Bosch's garden is an unusual blend of academic rigor and unfettered artistic license, studying the painter's world with erudite discipline, then soaring into lyric associations that'll charm your poetic soul or curdle your objective sensibilities, depending on the latitude you grant in works that mix art history with personal memoir and spiritual exploration. --Stephanie Gold


From Publishers Weekly
When naturalist writer Williams was a child staying over at her grandmother's house, she would sleep beneath images of Paradise and Hell thumbtacked to the wall above her bed, symbols of the "oughts and shoulds and if you don'ts" of her Mormon upbringing. Years later, as an adult, Williams rediscovered those prints in Madrid's Prado Museum--they are the wings of Hieronymus Bosch's 15th-century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. But why had the erotic center panel been hidden from her childish eyes? The question leads Williams on a prolonged meditation contemplating the painting's meaning, her own childhood and the place of religion in life. In rich, poetic prose interspersed with scripture, news items and anecdotes, she builds a monument to the richness of Mormon culture in the life of a woman who is fiercely environmentalist, feminist, aware. But Williams also mixes her philosophical musings with the quotidian events of her trip to Spain and quotations from writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin, burdening her work at times with excessive detail. The hundreds of cherries in Bosch's garden remind Williams of picking cherries as a child in the orchards along the Wasatch Front. "What principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ means the most to you?" asked her great-uncle as she and her cousin perched high on a ladder. "Obedience," the cousin replied. "Free agency," answered Williams, savoring a cherry. Her memoir searchingly explores the distance and tension between these answers. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-An extraordinary blend of allegory, spiritual quest, and meditation on creativity (human, natural, and divine), Leap is Williams's there-and-back-again presentation on the ability of art to imbue and transform random experience into a spiritual whole. As a child raised Mormon in Salt Lake City, the Heaven and Hell panels of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Delights hung over her bed in fractured triptych-Heaven and Hell were displayed but the center of the triptych was omitted. It wasn't until adulthood that the author realized that Earthly Delights had been withheld from her, and what this lack of a union between the two remaining parts might symbolize. The author traces her devotion to the painting and her trips to the Prado Museum over seven years to view the painting firsthand. Leap is both beautiful and blasphemous in the best senses, as Earthly Delights is clearly the only true place for human habitation. This complex book muses over art, spirituality, the religion of one's birth, environmentalism, and the nature of paradise without many nods to narrative thread or the conventional workings of the conscious self. It is for serious students of art and the spirit, and dedicated readers and searchers.Sheryl Fowler, Chantilly Regional Library, VACopyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
"I am a traveler returning home after wandering through a painting," concludes Williams (Refuge). The muse that serves as her metaphorical and spiritual travelog is Hieronymus Bosch's enigmatic 15th-century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Williams's "leap," which reads like an extended prose poem, consists of her journey inward, aided by her passionate interaction with Bosch's painting at the Prado in Spain, while she seeks to reconcile her dark night of the soul through art. In chapters titled "Paradise," "Hell," "Earthly Delights," and "Restoration," one voyeuristically accesses Williams's interior dialog, in which she struggles against the greatest sinDthat of indifference in a world fraught with the ephemeral mystery and beauty so ardently exemplified by this medieval painting. Her thoughts about the environment, for which she is well known, are folded into the panoply of concerns she faces here. She is a thoughtful individual, grounded in the tenets of Mormonism, questing for a mature faith. Though Williams finds that she is not the believer she once was, she emerges stronger for having undertaken the quest, finding in her faith the keys to creating a meaningful adult life. Williams's lyricism will resonate for spiritual seekers of all types.DSandra Collins, Univ. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In a provocative narrative notable for its flow and lyricism, Williams, the naturalist author of Refuge (1991), expresses her profound response not to the outdoors but to a world born of the imagination, the triptych known as The Garden of Delights, by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch. As a Mormon child, Williams slept beneath reproductions of the two outer panels of this fabulously detailed masterpiece, yet she never knew of the existence of the central painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," a veritable pageant of sensuality, until she stood, thunderstruck, before the original in the Prado Museum. The sight of Bosch's nearly hallucinatory vision of life in all its elaborate fecundity sparked an epiphany so powerful Williams embarked on a life-altering study of the painting she chronicles. Like a biologist in the field, she watches the painting as though it were alive; she even uses binoculars, much to the amazement of the museum guards, to identify the birds Bosch so accurately portrayed, as well as all the fruits, flowers, and figures ecstatic and tormented, graceful and grotesque. Williams gives herself over wholly to the experience, even writing from within the painting's lushly detailed and wildly inventive landscapes, an immersion that gives rise to extraordinarily revelatory leaps of thought. Williams' insights into Bosch's resonant work form an arresting inquiry into our relationship with nature, the divide between religion and spirituality, and the question of how to preserve wilderness. With each leap, she extends her definition of a "living faith" and discovers something new about our need for art and wilderness. Earth is art, Williams realizes, and at the very least, it deserves the same respect and protection accorded Bosch's triptych. "The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy," she writes, and no one who follows her on this remarkable journey will ever take art, nature, or faith for granted again. Donna Seaman


Review
"Strange and endlessly fascinating... take[s] on the burning urgency of a dream."
--Time

"[A] dynamic, shape-shifting and lyrically interrogative meditation."
--Chicago Tribune

"Intriguing... [Williams] approaches art as she approaches religion: as a matter of revelation."
--Boston Globe



Review
"Strange and endlessly fascinating... take[s] on the burning urgency of a dream."
--Time

"[A] dynamic, shape-shifting and lyrically interrogative meditation."
--Chicago Tribune

"Intriguing... [Williams] approaches art as she approaches religion: as a matter of revelation."
--Boston Globe



Book Description
With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights.

Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist's prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams's divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.



From the Inside Flap
With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights.

Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist's prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams's divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.


From the Back Cover
"Strange and endlessly fascinating... take[s] on the burning urgency of a dream."
--Time

"[A] dynamic, shape-shifting and lyrically interrogative meditation."
--Chicago Tribune

"Intriguing... [Williams] approaches art as she approaches religion: as a matter of revelation."
--Boston Globe



About the Author
Terry Tempest Williams lives in Grand County, Utah.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I once lived near the shores of Great Salt Lake with no outlet to the sea.

I once lived in a fault-block basin where mountains made of granite surrounded me. These mountains in time were hollowed to house the genealogy of my people, Mormons. Our names, the dates of our births and deaths, are safe. We have records hidden in stone.

I once lived in a landscape where my ancestors sacrificed everything in the name of belief and they passed their belief on to me, a belief that we can be the creators of our own worlds.

I once lived in the City of Latter-day Saints.

I have moved.

I have moved because of a painting.

Over the course of seven years, I have been traveling in the landscape of Hieronymus Bosch. A secret I did not tell for fear of seeming mad. Let these pages be my interrogation of faith. My roots have been pleached with the wings of a medieval triptych, my soul intertwined with an artist??s vision.

This painting lives in Spain. It resides in the Prado Museum. The Prado Museum is found in the heart of Old Madrid. I will tell you the name of the painting I love. Its name is El jard??n de las delicias.

The doors to the triptych are closed. Now it opens like a great medieval butterfly flapping its wings through the centuries. Open and close. Open and close. Open. Hieronymus Bosch has painted, as wings, Paradise and Hell. The body is a por- trait of Earthly Delights. The wings close again. Open, now slowly, with each viewer??s breath the butterfly quivers, Heaven and Hell quiver, the wings are wet and fragile, only the body remains stable. The legs hidden, six. The antennae, two. The eyes, infinite. The artist??s brush with life, mysterious. Close the triptych. The outside colors are drab. Black, grey, olive blue. The organism is not dead. Hear its heart beating. After five hundred years, the heart is still beating inside the triptych. The wings open.

I step back.

Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. Black. Pink. Orange. White. Gold.

Paradise. Hell. Earthly Delights.

As a child, I grew up with Hieronymus Bosch hanging over my head. My grandmother had thumbtacked the wings of Paradise and Hell to the bulletin board above the bed where I slept. The prints were, in fact, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art??s series of discussions designed for home education. The Garden of Eden to the left with Christ taking Eve??s pulse as Adam looks on???opposite???Hell, the bone-white face of a man looking over the shoulder of his eggshell body as the world burns: these were the images that framed the ???oughts and shoulds??? and ???if you don??ts??? of my religious upbringing.

Whenever my siblings and I stayed overnight, we fell asleep in ???the grandchildren??s room??? beneath Truth and Evil.

Standing before El jard??n de las delicias in the Prado Museum in Spain, now as a woman, I see the complete triptych for the first time. I am stunned. The center panel. The Garden of Earthly Delights. So little is hidden in the center panel, why was it hidden from me?

The body.

The body of the triptych.

My body.

The bodies of the center panel, this panel of play and discovery, of joyful curiosities cavorting with Eros, is not only a surprise to me, but a great mystery.

I stare at the painting. My eyes do not blink. They focus on the blue pool of bathers standing thigh-high in the middle of the triptych.

Bareback riders circle the black and white women bathing in the water, the black and white women who are balancing black and white birds on top of their heads. Cherries, too. Faster and faster, the bareback riders gallop their horses and goats and griffins; bareback riders, naked men, riding bulls, bears, lions, camels, deer, and pigs, faster and faster, circling the women.

The triptych begins to blur. My eyes begin to blur. I resist. Focus. I rein my eyes in from the pull of the bodies, the body of the triptych, the bodies bare, bareback on animals, circling, circling, circling them, circling me, black and white bodies, my body stands stoically inside the Prado determined to resist the galloping of my blood.

I feel faint. I turn from the painting and see a wooden chair shaped like a crescent leaning against the wall. The wall is white. I sit down, stare at the floor, the granite floor, and get my bearings.

I begin counting cherries in Bosch??s Garden. I lose track, they are in such abundance. I stop at sixty. Cherries are flying in the air, dangling from poles, being passed from one person to the next, dropped into the mouths of lovers by birds, worn on women??s heads as hats, and balanced on the feet as balls.

In Utah, my home, cherries are a love crop. They are also our state fruit. They grow in well-tended orchards along the Wasatch Front. Cherry picking was a large part of our childhood. Our parents, aunts, and uncles would load up their station wagons with kids and drop us off in one of the orchards alongside Great Salt Lake with empty buckets in hand. Sometimes we were paid by the pail or given bags to take home for our families. Once we were up in the trees, out of view, we could eat as many as we wanted.

One day, my great-uncle was standing on a ladder picking cherries with my cousin and me. We were perched on sturdy branches above him, ten-year-old girls unafraid of heights.

???What principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ means the most to you???? he asked, filling his bucket.

Mormon children are used to these kinds of questions practiced on them by their elders, who consider this part of their religious training.

???Obedience,??? my cousin replied, pulling a cherry off its stem.

???Free agency,??? I answered, eating one.

It is early morning on my way to the Prado. Pink camellia petals cover the path inside the Real Jard??n Bot??nico adjacent to the museum. I love coming here first before watching the painting. Flocks of white butterflies appear to have lit on bare branches. Up close, I recognize them as magnolia trees in bloom.

It is difficult not to touch everything. Blue hyacinths line the walks. Daffodils and narcissus tower above them. Red and yellow striated tulips are now cups holding last night??s rain.

The gardener??s hand is evident. There is an overall narrative to be followed, nothing is random. Each hedgerow, each bed now flowering was an idea before it took root in the land. The leaves of each plant express themselves rhythmically. Iambic pentameter. Blank verse. A sonnet. The arrangement of leaves can be read as poetry.

The miniature rock garden stops me. Sage grows next to verbena. I bend down and rub its blue-grey leaves between my fingers and smell the Great Basin of home.

Paradise.

The Tree of Life stands behind Adam. Vines of raspberries wrap around its trunk. Christ, who appears to be staring outside Eden, is dressed in a pink robe. He holds Eve??s wrist. Eve kneels. Adam sits. Neither is clothed.

Focus on Eden. Remain in Eden. Today it is Christ??s hand on Eve??s that holds my attention. Eve??s head is bowed. Her eyes are closed. Her knees are tight against each other. Eve??s obeisance becomes my own baptism and confirmation.

I am dressed in white and descend into the warm waters of the baptismal font accompanied by my father, also dressed in white. We stand in the center of the pool and face family witnesses. My father raises his right hand to the square, fingers pointing toward heaven. He delivers a prayer, then holds my wrist as I hold my nose and with bended knees, I am leaned back into the holy waters. With one quick swoosh through the process of immersion, I am happily declared a Mormon.

I am eight years old.

The following Sunday, I wished I had not worn the white headband to keep my bangs out of my eyes. Even before the confirmation began, the weight of the men??s hands on top of my head was forcing the plastic teeth to bite into my scalp. I opened my eyes seconds before the blessing to see the varied shoes pointing toward me around the circle: wing tips, Hush Puppies, and boots. I recognized the black polished cowboy boots as my father??s, the wing tips belonged to the bishop, the slip-ons were his counselor??s shoes. I couldn??t wrap my eyes around far enough behind my ears to see what shoes my uncle or the remaining priesthood bearers were wearing.

The pressure of the warm hands on my head increased. I quickly closed my eyes. My father began, ???Our beloved daughter of Zion, by the authority vested in me . . .???

And then the words ???Receive the Holy Ghost.???

The hands lifted. My eyes opened. I stood up and faced the congregation as the bishop congratulated me on becoming a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All the men in the circle shook my hand. My father put his arm around me as we walked back to where my mother and her mother and her mother??s mother were sitting.

I sat down on the pew. My grandmother took my hand and patted it.

???I am possessed,??? I thought. ???I am possessed by the Holy Spirit and protected from evil. I am a clean slate. There are no sins on my record before God.???

The Paradise of childhood.

???Bosch is rubbish,??? I hear a British guide say to her group. She is wearing a brown wool suit just below her knees. ???He ate rye bread that was rotten, which most certainly brought on the cruelest of hallucinations.???

My view of Paradise is often blocked by other visitors. I have no choice but to watch them interact with the painting.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Seized by the beauty and mystery of Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights, Terry Tempest Williams focuses her astute gaze on his medieval triptych as she would on a natural landscape. With spiritual candor, psychological immediacy, and exhilarating emotional intensity, she carries us into the world of Bosch's painting, uncovering the connections between his vision, the world it mirrors, and contemporary life.

Approaching Paradise, Williams reenters the terrain of childhood, where the foundations of orthodoxy are built; Hell, in all its diabolical madness, allows her to reflect on the inherent dislocations of our lives; in The Garden, moving away from the dualities of Heaven and Hell, she sees personal engagement as its own form of prayer and celebrates the possibility of living faith right here on earth. And in Restoration, we meet two sisters, art restorers, who reveal their understanding of artistic vision.

Leap is an unexpected pilgrimage through the landscape of a painting that continues to startle five hundred years after its creation. It is also an utterly original account of one woman's search for the place where faith, passion, and creativity converge. Finally, Leap captures the alchemical moment of imagination -- the flight from the real to the poetic.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

"I am a traveler returning home after wandering through a painting," concludes Williams (Refuge). The muse that serves as her metaphorical and spiritual travelog is Hieronymus Bosch's enigmatic 15th-century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Williams's "leap," which reads like an extended prose poem, consists of her journey inward, aided by her passionate interaction with Bosch's painting at the Prado in Spain, while she seeks to reconcile her dark night of the soul through art. In chapters titled "Paradise," "Hell," "Earthly Delights," and "Restoration," one voyeuristically accesses Williams's interior dialog, in which she struggles against the greatest sin--that of indifference in a world fraught with the ephemeral mystery and beauty so ardently exemplified by this medieval painting. Her thoughts about the environment, for which she is well known, are folded into the panoply of concerns she faces here. She is a thoughtful individual, grounded in the tenets of Mormonism, questing for a mature faith. Though Williams finds that she is not the believer she once was, she emerges stronger for having undertaken the quest, finding in her faith the keys to creating a meaningful adult life. Williams's lyricism will resonate for spiritual seekers of all types.--Sandra Collins, Univ. of Pittsburgh Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-An extraordinary blend of allegory, spiritual quest, and meditation on creativity (human, natural, and divine), Leap is Williams's there-and-back-again presentation on the ability of art to imbue and transform random experience into a spiritual whole. As a child raised Mormon in Salt Lake City, the Heaven and Hell panels of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Delights hung over her bed in fractured triptych-Heaven and Hell were displayed but the center of the triptych was omitted. It wasn't until adulthood that the author realized that Earthly Delights had been withheld from her, and what this lack of a union between the two remaining parts might symbolize. The author traces her devotion to the painting and her trips to the Prado Museum over seven years to view the painting firsthand. Leap is both beautiful and blasphemous in the best senses, as Earthly Delights is clearly the only true place for human habitation. This complex book muses over art, spirituality, the religion of one's birth, environmentalism, and the nature of paradise without many nods to narrative thread or the conventional workings of the conscious self. It is for serious students of art and the spirit, and dedicated readers and searchers.-Sheryl Fowler, Chantilly Regional Library, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Author of The Soul's Code:

Confession: I sat down, opened the book in the middle of it and of a busy day. An hour later I got up from my chair. Page after page of discovery. What a marvelous manner of handling the interlaced themes of flesh and soul. The beauty of Terry Tempest Williams's writing, her feeling, her devotion. Leap took me into the heart of Importance. — James Hillman

Author of My Alexandria:

Leap does what we hope literature can do -- rinse the reader's gaze, refreshing our sight and making the world new again. — Mark Doty

Author of Overlay and The Lure of the Local:

In this lyrical, wise, and questioning book, Terry Tempest Williams leads us in and out of the double-sized looking glass that is Bosch's Garden of Delights and of the heavens and hells of our own natural world. An innovative hybrid, woven of lived experience, visionary thinking; and critical intelligence. Leap points the way to new spiritual dimensions buried in art, "nature" and our own lives. — Lucy Lippard

ACCREDITATION