“I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.” NatureWonderBeautySacredHolinessAweRiverGrand CanyonColorado RiverHoly PlaceSacred Place Book:Crossing Open Ground Source: Crossing Open Ground
“Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…” TimeNatureWonderBeautyPhilosophy Of LifeAweGrand CanyonHoly PlacesSacred PlacesCanyonColorado RiverRiver Rapids Book:Crossing Open Ground Source: Crossing Open Ground
“I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick intimate pounding of the heart. The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first.” LifePainSufferingHumanityPeaceNatureWonderBeautyMeditationQuietMindfulnessSacredCalmAweConnectionConservationRapidsGrand CanyonSacred PlacesRaftingColorado RiverHealing In NatureNature HealingInner LandscapeRiver RunningInner Gorge Book:Crossing Open Ground Source: Crossing Open Ground