Sale!

Open Midnight: Where Ancestors and Wilderness Meet

Amazon.com Price:  $11.02 (as of 06/05/2019 06:06 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Open Midnight weaves two parallel stories about the great wilderness—Brooke Williams’s year by myself with his dog ground truthing wilderness maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather, who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the wilderness almost to Utah, dying a week short. The book could also be about two levels of history—personal, as represented by William Williams, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as Williams.

As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes that he has few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, “If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story.” Thus William Williams becomes one of those spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the writer on his wilderness and life journeys, and that appears at pivotal points when the writer is required to make a choice a certain course.

The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires the writer to create imagined scenes in which Williams meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that finally passes to Brooke Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness.

Brooke Williams’s inventive and vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild. The writer draws on Jungian psychology to relate how our consciousness of the wild is culturally embedded in our psyche, and how a deep connection to the wild can promote emotional and psychological well-being.

Williams’s narrative goes beyond a call for conservation, but in the vein of writers like Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, David Abram, the writer argues passionately for the importance of wildness is to the human soul. Reading Williams’s inspired prose provides a measure of hope for protecting the beautiful places that we all want to thrive.

Open Midnight is grounded in the present by Williams’s descriptions of the Utah lands he explores. He beautifully evokes the feeling of being solitary in the wild, at home in the deepest sense, in the presence of the sublime. In doing so, he conveys what Gary Snyder calls “a practice of the wild” more completely than any other work.

Williams also relates an insider’s view of negotiations about wilderness protection. As an advocate working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, he represents a minority in meetings designed to open wilderness lands to roads and hunting. He portrays the mindset of the majority of Utah’s citizens, who argue passionately for their rights to use their lands then again they wish.

The phrase “open middle of the night,” as Williams sees it, evokes the time between dusk and morning time, between where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the unconscious where all possibilities are hidden.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » Open Midnight: Where Ancestors and Wilderness Meet

Recent Products