A week ago, we were deep in the American Southwest, pursuing one dramatic escarpment or cliff after another.
One writer has described travel as the quest for the perfect view. I would add that in travel, we also pursue the perfect memory -- the unblemished, unalloyed sense of who we are at a specifically crystalline and perfectly poised point in time.
On Saturday afternoon, we meandered our way through the northern high plateaus of Arizona into the equally dramatic landscape of southern Utah -- a land littered, unfairly, with six amazing national parks or national monuments, each with its uniquely pristine and otherworldly beauty. As Fiona's earlier post had already noted, we spent Saturday night deep in Zion Canyon It was evening as we drove in, and we watched the cliffs of the inner canyon fade from their reds and whites into towering, shadowy presences lit only by the brilliance of the stars and the moon that night. And we allowed the silence -- a rarity in Los Angeles and Singapore -- to envelope us. Waves of silence, echoing between the barren, forbidding walls of the cliffs rising on both sides of
Zion Lodge.
I had visited
Zion National Park over ten years ago, at the peak of summer, and before Zion started its shuttle bus system. Although I enjoyed that trip, I had felt overwhelmed by the crowds and the traffic snarls worthy of a big congested city deep in the heart of Zion Canyon. So this time, the silence, the absence of crowds, and indeed, the presence of solitude and reverence renewed my sense of this place as a place of worship and wonder.
I woke up early on Sunday morning, when the sky outside was still dark. I wrapped myself in my blanket, and went outside to our patio to have some time to myself before the bustle of family started. As I sat on our patio, the sun, which had risen far to the east but had not yet touched the inner canyon, began to its process of warming and coloring the cliffs around Zion Lodge. From my seat, I looked up and saw the highest cliffs adjacent to us, at first still shrouded in a dull half grey. But minutes later, a line of gold had outlined the tops of the cliffs, and that line began to widen. I imagined setting a match to a piece of paper, and seeing the line of flame slowly, and irresistibly, engulfing the paper. The process of sunrise on the cliffs was precisely the reverse. The sun did not destroy the cliffs as a flame reduces the paper to dusty ashes. The sun was reviving the cold sandstones and limestones, bringing new and brilliant color that darkness had hidden, revealing their true selves. In the darkness, they seemed lifeless and monotonous. As the sun's light revealed more of them, I saw all sorts of trees and shrubs clinging, stubbornly, for life on the impossible crests and cliff faces. No doubt birds and other animals had made homes for themselves on those heights too. The different layers and colors of the rocks asserted themselves.
Life and color sometimes lie hidden and obscured. But these vital elements of reality remain and hold on to wherever their roots lie, buried deep within whatever layers of bedrock or soil that they have to tap into. And when true life is revealed, in unexpected moments of grace, it inspires. And we stand back in amazement, or in simple love, baffled by our blindness before.
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The Virgin river runs through (and created) Zion Canyon. On Sunday, we went for a short walk along the river (Fiona's post had lovely photos of the kids enjoying themselves there). The running water contrasted starkly with the omnipresent and apparently unyielding stone of the canyon. But of course, the stone has yielded, for what else would have carved the canyon out? Later that day, on our drive to Las Vegas, we followed the course of the Virgin for some miles, until we lost it in the Nevada desert. Fiona told me, after we had seen the river, that the water made the canyon more appealing. She liked the water; I liked the stone. And together, both water and stone have created a place of beauty, a place that once gave farmers a livelihood, a place of peace. Water and stone can create life in the most surprising places.
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I first visited these lands when I was 17. That trip was particularly memorable because it was my first time out of home and from my parents, as that was a school study trip. I next came to the Southwest in 1997, soon after graduating from college. 10 years have passed since my last visit. The canyons have changed, in their own geological fashion. And
perhaps -- and I use that word intentionally -- I have changed even more. At 33, my perspective of the world is different from the view I had at 17 or 23. Marriage and fatherhood have endowed me, perhaps reluctantly, with some semblance of respectability and seriousness. Like the rock of Zion Canyon yielding to the water of the Virgin river, I have softened and ceded the rougher edges of my life. I have had to. I have wanted to, because I want to become more fully formed, a closer approximation of the man God formed me to become.
Wordsworth lamented, in his "
Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" (1798), the change that had taken place in him between his youth and mature age. I challenge that thought. Without the erosive change of water, the rocks of the Colorado Plateau would remain featureless and dull, their beauty and mystery hidden and unguessed. Without the enlivening change of the sunrise, the stone of the canyons would remain cold, forbidding and unearthly. And without the patient change of maturation, our lives would remain unformed, our dreams unrealizable. We are who we are. We have no choice over the raw materials of our character. But we can allow the process of change to shape us, to form us into people with life, with character, with rich and vital color. Last Sunday morning, I saw the dramatic, daily, change that sunrise brought to the cliffs of Zion Canyon. We saw the Virgin river, flowing on its seemingly eternal course through the rock of the canyon, creating change in its own tectonic way. But the most important change took place in me. There remains much for the renewing forces of my life, like marriage, fatherhood and God, to discover, to uncover and to form. And I am excited for what lies ahead.
