Saturday, March 17, 2007

SW+1YR-FIVE: Grand Dawning

The next morning I woke before the sun in Arizona, although back home it had been up for an hour or so. Skye wasn’t though, and after 3 sunrises in a row, she was ready to sleep through this one. So I made a solo run to the rim and waited with several strangers to watch the eastern sky above the eastern rim perform its eastern thing: enlightenment.Taking pictures in-between enraptured gazing, we saw the sky brighten above the still dark canyon, its silhouette announcing its mysterious presence. It was somewhat a repeat of the day before, amazing grace again, and I was readying to leave, when I noticed something I really should have noticed the dawn before.Different sections of the canyon were lighting up like torches set ablaze by early daylight. It was a slow process, maybe lasting a little like half an hour, but one butte after another, depending on height or western leanings, lit. It was something of a revelation that is hard to put in words.But it had something to do with the grandness of the canyon, giving credence to its name like nothing I had ever read or seen before. Like discovering the origins of a word that suddenly endows it with more than just a concept, or a sound, or a name you’ve come to take for granted. This was grand indeed with a capital gee.But it was more than that as well. It was a microcosm of the world, the dawn arising somewhere every minute of every day. We become so settled in our time that we forget that just because the sun might rise at a particular minute in our zone, the sun is rising somewhere every second. Dawn is not an instance; it’s eternal.But it was more than that as well. It was an understanding that is still revealing itself to me as I write this sentence, this word, this letter, this period. The life that passes through our veins is the same as the light that passes through this atmosphere. It’s never dawn and done. It’s dawn and dawn and dawn, ad infinitum.Our zone of personality may pass; our life, our light, will go on dawning. As it is, and always has been, and always will be. That was what I saw that morning in Grand Canyon. And that’s what I see, thanks to that Grand Dawning, tonight in Massachusetts.

2 comments:

Bob Fisher said...

I love that image of different sections of the canyon lighting up, one by one, like torches being lit.

son rivers said...

Hi Bob, glad you like that one but truth be told I kind of borrowed it from the 3rd installment of the Lord of the Rings movie. Not exactly, but that was in my mind as I wrote it.