Leap

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. 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.

As a Mormon child, the author slept under the two outer panels of Bosch's Garden of Delights. After discovering the existence of the central panel in the Prado, she was drawn to write about her fascination with the entire triptych and the connections to her personal life, the "relationship with nature, the divide between religion and spirituality, and the question of how to preserve wilderness."--Booklist review. "Seized by the beauty and mystery of Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights, Terry Tempest Williams focuses her gaze on his medieval triptych as she would on a natural landscape. She carries us into the world of Bosch's painting, uncovering the connections between his vision, the world it mirrors, and contemporary life."--BOOK JACKET. The author explores the beautiful, enigmatic landscape created by Hieronymus Bosch in "The Garden of Delights," in a study that uncovers the spiritual and personal links between the great masterpiece and her own life. I once lived near the shores of Great Salt Lake with no outlet to the sea.