Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
“I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood…It is my leisure as well as my work, a game…I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”
In this Pulitzer-prize winning book, Dillard takes us with her on her explorations throughout the Tinker Creek valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge range over the course of a year’s seasons. She writes lucidly about her engagements with her environment and the variety of beings within it, as well as meditations on presence, transience, mortality, fertility, perception, and the divine. It’s a treat to spend time with someone who knows where they live so well, and who can tell you about it with such strikingly visionary writing.