Through The Shimmering

The Shimmering Is All There Is: On Nature, God, Science, and More is a collection of essays and poems by the late Heather Catto Kohout. A native of San Antonio, Heather was a disciplined and original thinker and writer. Her education, experience, and temperament—as a loving wife, mother, and daughter; a proud Texan; a teacher and scholar with graduate degrees in English literature and religion; and the founder of a residency program for environmental writers and artists at a ranch in the Texas Hill Country—permeate every word she wrote. She had a unique combination of empathetic imagination, profound spirituality, cosmic sensibility, and an ability to laugh—gently—at her fellow creatures and, especially, herself. Heather Kohout’s essays and poems are thoughtful, profound, and generous, shifting constantly between the specific and the universal and carrying throughout a message of stewardship. She was an environmentalist at heart, but her writing explores so much more: nature, art, theology, science, food, and family. She wrote about Mexican teenagers who dress as angels in an attempt to halt drug-related violence; the perils of industrial agriculture; the pleasure of letting the chickens out of their coop in the morning; and the battle to save the Georgetown salamander. Always, she wrote about what it means to try to live an ethical life and to be fully human as a part of, not in opposition to, nature. These essays and poems exemplify the best of Texas womanhood: stubborn independence, fierce conviction, good humor, and instinctive generosity and kindness.