This week I have literally stood on the edge of the world, my self just a miniscule particle-part of the vastness of time, force, beauty, death and life. Such a wonder, the Grand Canyon! It took 5 million years for what we see on the surface and 2 billion years of earth history at the bedrock. When you ponder time and the forces of change, eternity is evolution infinitum. 

When I last visited the Grand Canyon with Wally 10 years ago, his response was shocking! He stripped naked and stood on the edge with his arms open and his face lit from within.  The contrast of his uninhibited aliveness stirred a longing in me. It felt pure. I clearly did not share the same impulse, in fact, it was forgotten until I visited the Grand Canyon again with my sisters this week.  

Walking along the edge I felt waves of electric charges in my groin – fear, protective and contracted mixed with intensified awareness. It heightens the preciousness of being, of flesh, and also the fears of suffering pain that annihilates. It’s a thrill – one that draws and repels like both sides of a magnet. 

My inner landscape of late has been more like a tropical jungle. It’s easy to get wandered-off-lost and lose track of time and meaning in busy-ness. It’s necessary to cut away at the overwhelming jungle-growth, to clear a way to see. I resist taking on more and instead shed the weight of stuff that slows me. I feel the need to get on with it before I’m too tired. What is it to pound the jungle to discover that the threshold I’m on is actually a gaping chasm! My toes grip the earth, vastness blasts my face! Ay, Dios!  – hold onto life by nail and toe and maybe fall? Or let go of fear and hope and fall into the Wonder and Mystery? What is it to die before dying and live this way? Isn’t that the pattern in the Grand Canyon scheme of things? 

I feel the transforming forces all around me. Below my feet are miles of time and matter, invisible, intelligent, the ground of my being realized in new materiality, and above me a spaciousness as great and grand and unknowable. I make a turn and walk the rim in a new practice of living- an act of active surrender.