This morning I told the world a secret. It has been something I have been carrying inside of me for 16 years, and has only come out now because of my month in the canyon. While there I wrote about many things: the weather, the beauty, the geology, the people, the way we live and the way we die. But never in that time, or in any time, did I write about a stain I had carried with me since shortly before I entered the canyon for the first time – back in 1996.
That changed today, when the Sunday Statesman Journal published my feature story about what I learned at the Grand Canyon. As I wrote this piece, it became clear that I was not the same person who had drove to that canyon in late January. That somewhere in those days and nights fixed on a cliff, I had been shaped into someone stronger and more aware. We have very little time on this planet, and we can spend it letting our wounds shape us, or letting them be part of the whole tapestry of who we are.
Beginning today, I choose the later.
Here is a link to the article. Lessons of the Canyon
