Tour guides and interpretive rangers tell the story of the canyon every single day. But it's a violent story, a story with great geologic trauma along the way. Plates colide. . . .rivers change direction. . . .winds and rain erode away that which makes the canyon whole and complete.
This is the story of the canyon.
But the canyon herself, she's not ashamed of her story. . . .she doesn't shrink away when people talk about her story. . . .her self esteem doesn't erode away like sediments and sand. . . .and she isn't concerned about moving on, either. She simply is what she is, filled with a magnificent beauty that is the result of this grand story of great violence and spirit altering geologic upheaval.
Human beings are very different, of course. . . .we hide our stories of violent upheavals of spirit.
The canyon wasn't always thought of as a grand place, though. Many of the first visitors saw it as nothing more than a vast wasteland, devoid of value and meaningful resources, a place where no one in their right mind would ever visit by choice. Many people still can't see the beauty of the canyon, calling it "the great big hole in the ground." But things change. . . .and people do begin to look beyond their initial conceptions to see the beauty that emerges out of violent upheavals and erosion.
There is much that the canyon has to teach about living life on life's terms.
I can't change anything about the way the forces of life and circumstance collided with the plates of my spirit and eroded away the sediments that remain from landscapes embedded with the layers of a life that are no longer vibrant and alive. But these forces create nothing more than the story of me. . . .the story that helped to shape this amazing woman I have become. . . .a story ever in process of the erosion of change . . . .and I look to the canyon each day for guidance on how to simply be what I am regardless of what the onlookers and observers have to say about what they see. . . .even if all they can see is a great big hole in the ground.