... I cried a little at the Grand Canyon today.
To be clear, they weren't tears of fear. It's true that I have an "uncomfortableness" with regards to high heights (as memorably illustrated last year about this time when I told my story about jumping into the old Dunbar watering hole [a story I trot out frequently just because I think it's interesting to *have* a story about a watering hole in my repertoire]) ... but I ended up not having a problem on the skywalk, a glass walkway suspended above the Canyon at the West rim.
And they weren't tears of despair. I did not have a psychotic break or hear any voices in my head telling me to jump over the edge. Did I think about it? Yes. But only in a clinical sense. I'm always scouting locations for dramatic settings and filing them away for any story ideas in tales I'll tell in the future. I think that's just second nature for someone as curious and dramatic and writer-ly as I.
They also weren't tears of disappointment, as nearly happened when I saw the Mississippi for the first time in the shadows of the Arch in St. Louis -- my expectations having been so raised by a certain Samuel Clemens that when I saw that body of water as more of a downgraded muddier version of the Susquehanna, I left a little saddened and confused as to how its "mightiness" could have inspired so much creative output. And they weren't tears of irritation ... which, sadly, I experience now more frequently with this last batch of contacts I have (and which therefore always serve as an at-the-ready excuse should I be caught bawling at commercials [which has happened before]).
No ... these misty eyes didn't represent a breakdown but more of a breakthrough. Maybe it was the setting, in that the place I visited was on the Hualapai reservation, and since we think my mother's mother's mother's mother was Native American, the 1/16th of my DNA was on alert that I was with my people. Or maybe it was the fact that I had been blaring Toad the Wet Sprocket's latest masterpiece 'New Constellation' on the two hour drive from Vegas to the site ... with the lyrics from the title track about being "just a spec on a spec of a spiral arm ... ahh it feels so good to be so small" being in the cache/cookies part of my brain. Maybe it was how the experience made me reminisce about a favorite spot of mine from my key developing years -- the Cornwall rockpile (more about that on Monday) -- a place to which I retreated for perspective back in the day.
Whatever the reason ... it was the sheer beauty that got to me that caused my eyes to well up. I thought about the paradox of how what I was seeing graphically represented the loss in life (it was a canyon after all, a ground gap of extreme proportion) and the ability to withstand and to weather that loss in life ... the canyon walls having fought valiantly for eons to continue to stand proudly as a testament to the fact that survival is the key ... changed, definitely ... affected by the loss, surely ... but still strong ... still standing. I thought about the losses in my life ... the people who have gone before me ... those who never got to see that which I was seeing in that moment ... those parts of my past that I've previously mourned as having been a loss of a more normal path of development ... of parental affection that was lacking ... of confusion and uncertainty in the years I spent wandering in my wilderness before coming to know the entirety of my being ...
The welling up of my eyes matched the welling up of my consciousness as I let all of the negativity leave my being, flowing into the negative space in the canyon. I stood firm on the edge of the precipice, renouncing doubt and hate and frustration and confusion, freeing myself from all of those shackles that we too willingly place on ourselves. All of it ... offered up to the void, sacrificed to the gaping ground maw in front of me. When it was over ... the totality of all that I had manufactured to keep me down and to hold me back in my life ... those things that seemed to me like they were the biggest problems in the world ... they were now but a infinitesimal part of the grandiosity that was right in front of me. And, when finished, I was still standing. I was the canyon wall. I was a testament to having survived and to being able to survive again.
That was the magic of it all. In that moment, I was experiencing the past and the present and the future simultaneously, opening up a portal of sorts into a crystallized clarity regarding my place in the world and the world's place in me. I wasn't dealing with my body that had climbed to the highest point I could find, nor my mind that was processing the images I was taking in. Instead, for the first time in a long long time ... maybe the first time ever ... I was communing with my soul and my spirit -- the part of me that was, that is and that will be.
And if that's not worthy of a few tears to commemorate, then I don't know what is. So yes ... I'll rave about what happened ... I cried a little -- and got my soul cleansed -- at the Grand Canyon today.
MY SOUNDTRACK TO THE GRAND CANYON EXPERIENCE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC0RMo8vlp8
EVERYONE NEEDS A GOOD "WATERING HOLE" STORY:
http://capcognition.blogspot.com/2013/07/random-flashback-for-friday-72613.html
THE SITE OF TODAY'S EPIPHANY:
http://www.grandcanyonwest.com/
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