“If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his wartime manifesto for hope in difficult times, “he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… is in you too… most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing.” At the same time, on the other side of the world, D.H. Lawrence was tussling with the multitudes that live within us: “Gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.” That it is not one god but many, that they are not only within us but around us in forests and oceans and microcosms of moss, is what Terry Tempest Williams offers in The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary (public library) — vespers for a burning world, a rosary of stays against despair threaded with the insistence that “wildness is the taproot of our consciousness” and being consciously alive “means living close to the bone with trust, unease, and uncertainty.” She writes:The gods I recognize are many, multitudinous, mysterious, and infinite — they are everywhere and commonplace, with mouths and eyes and arms and legs, with wings and hooves and fins and fur, with gills and trunks and leaves and spores and, in the case of the horned lizard, with eyes that can squirt blood as a carnal warning. Be aware of us and wary. The gods before me are large and small, underwater and rooted in soil, some live inside the bodies of others, some live out of sight. The sublime minds of these gods inhabit all shapes and sizes and their habitations are at once endless and ending. We have a hand in their survival and they have a hand in ours.Laced throughout the book is the lucid, luminous recognition that “there must be something deeper than hope” — more prayerful, more purposeful, more pulsating with aliveness.In consonance with Simone Weil’s insistence that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” she writes: Our task is to pay attention and listen… Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone printComplement with Darwin on the spirituality of nature and Camus on how to live whole in a broken world, then revisit these blessings for an unbreakable world.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.