![stream running through a forest, gentle sunlight](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-07/iStock-2258383247.jpg?itok=56DgoiCn) # Annie Dillard and “The Tree with the Lights in It” July 13, 2026 [ Rachael Petersen ](https://german.fas.harvard.edu/people/rachael-petersen) Annie Dillard (b. 1945) is an influential American writer, best known for her Pulitzer Prize–winning book *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek* (1974), a genre-defying blend of memoir, natural history, and theology. While often called a “nature writer,” Dillard herself has rejected that label, insisting her work be read as theology or metaphysical inquiry. Over the course of her career, her works have interrogated questions of suffering, time, materiality, and the divine through narrative forms that fuse scientific precision with spiritual awe. Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak in 1945 and raised in an upper-middle-class Presbyterian household in Pittsburgh. A precocious and wide-ranging reader, she devoured novels, field guides, and theology texts with equal fervor. Dillard received a B.A. and an M.A. from Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and theology, completing her master’s thesis on Henry David Thoreau’s *Walden*. She has described herself as “spiritually promiscuous,” exploring various religious traditions with curiosity rather than dogma.\[[1](#notes)\] In Virginia, Dillard lived in a quiet house on a hill that sloped toward a modest stream called Tinker Creek. She began visiting the creek regularly to observe the wildlife and natural features of the local ecology, keeping a journal that would form the basis of *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*. The result was a “meteorological journal of the mind”—a phrase she borrows from Thoreau.\[[2](#notes)\] Throughout *Pilgrim*, Dillard describes moments of piercing beauty and intense observation that verge on the ecstatic. Dillard often encounters the divine in the grotesque, for example, when watching a giant water bug consume a frog, dreaming of mating Luna moths whose eggs spawn fish, or observing a mosquito feasting on a copperhead. Her meditations focus on questions of fecundity, gratuitousness, and the ceaseless appetites to devour and procreate that characterize the living world. Dillard considers her practice “stalking” the sacred, cultivating a discipline of contemplative sight that can identify the transcendent dimensions of the forest’s “leafy interior.” In Chapter 4, Dillard recounts an ecstatic vision in which she sees “the tree with the lights in it.” The cedar tree, the mourning doves, the grass—everything is radiant, aflame with presence. She feels that she is not only seeing but also being seen—a reversal of the subject-object roles previously operative in *Pilgrim*’s observational mode. The experience is brief but profound. She later writes that she spent years trying, and failing, to recover it. For Dillard, that flash of unmerited insight became a reference point for her spirituality and writing. She “lived for it” and continued to seek similar encounters. In later works like *Holy the Firm* (1977), she again writes of sudden mystical illuminations. These experiences do not serve as isolated anecdotes but as pivot points in Dillard’s broader inquiry. They illustrate how moments of ecstatic insight can emerge from the most ordinary of circumstances: a suburban walk, a field at night. Dillard’s work insists that divinity is not elsewhere, but here—glimpsed, if fleetingly, in the fierce, wasteful beauty of the living world. *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek* catapulted Dillard to national fame, winning her the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, a year marked by deepening environmental consciousness and rising feminist literature. *Pilgrim* responded to both trends as a metaphysical inquiry and a work written by a woman alone in the woods. Dillard’s work is often situated as a contemporary continuation of the American Transcendentalist tradition; critics such as Edward Abbey and Scott Slovic have hailed her as the literary heir to Thoreau. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for her contributions to American letters. Her work has influenced countless contemporary nature writers, including Terry Tempest Williams, Robert Macfarlane, Margaret Renkl, and others. ## Source Dillard recounts her ecstatic vision in Chapter 4 of *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*, titled “Seeing.” The chapter, an extended meditation on sight—literal and contemplative—features the story of a young girl who, blind from birth, is healed through an operation. Bandages removed, the girl enters a garden and reportedly sees “the tree with the lights in it.” Dillard goes in search of this tree.\[[3](#notes)\] > It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. Later in *Pilgrim*, Dillard tells of being radically absorbed in the experience of petting a puppy, which causes her to recall the tree with the lights in it, and to reconsider the relationship between transcendence and immanence in such ecstatic moments.\[[4](#notes)\] > I had thought, because I had seen the tree with the lights in it, that the great door, by definition, opens on eternity \[...\] now that I have experienced the present purely through my senses \[by petting the puppy\]—I discover that, although the door to the tree with the lights in it was opened from eternity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless was opened on the real and present cedar. It opened on time: Where else? > > On that cedar tree shone, however briefly, the steady, inward flames of eternity; on both occasions \[the tree and the puppy\] I thought, with rising exultation, this is it, this is it; praise the lord; praise the land. Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. ## Notes \[1\] Annie Dillard, accessed October 13, 2024, . \[2\] Annie Dillard, *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek* (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), 11; Henry David Thoreau, *The Writings of Henry David Thoreau*, vol. 7, *Journal I, 1837–1846*, ed. Bradford Torrey (Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906), 403. \[3\] *Pilgrim,* 33–34. \[4\] *Pilgrim,* 80–81. ## Bibliography Dillard, Annie. *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974. ———. *Holy the Firm*. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. ———. *Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters*. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. ———. *An American Childhood*. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. ———. *For the Time Being*. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. ———. *The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New*. New York: Ecco, 2016. Hass, Andrew. *Annie Dillard and the Word Made Flesh: An Incarnational Theory of Language*. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1999. Ireland, Julia A. “Annie Dillard’s Ecstatic Phenomenology.” *Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment* 17, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 23–34. Johnson, Sandra Humble. *The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard*. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1992. Merrill, Thomas F. *Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: A Critical Commentary*. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993. Peterman, Laura. *Annie Dillard and the Silence of God*. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985. Smith, Kimberly R. *The Religious Imagination of Annie Dillard: A Study in Ambivalence*. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Yarbrough, Jane. “The Transformation of Experience in Annie Dillard’s *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*.” *South Atlantic Review* 52, no. 2 (1987): 1–14. Author Biography ### Rachael Petersen Rachael Petersen is a PhD student in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her research explores how philosophical systems, past and present, conceive of the minds of more-than-human beings, particularly plants. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she served as Program Lead for Thinking with Plants and Fungi at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. She is the editor of *Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World* (Center for the Study of World Religions, 2026) and has published both scholarly and creative works on environmental humanities, religion, and ecological thought. ![Rachael Petersen looking into the camera](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-12/Rachael%20GLLheadshot.jpg?h=44ca2865&itok=GoGBqroi) See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences) - [ Nature ](/topic-tags/nature)