This past weekend, our good friend Joyce Harvey-Morgan joined us in Utah. We hopped in her car and headed south to Moab which is smack dab in the desert. It has two national parks right beside it: Arches National Park and Canyonlands. There have been many times here that I thought “it doesn’t get better than this”. The past 24 hours topped that. (Roshi’s going to have to work very hard to top this!)
Many people have told me of these experiences in the desert. Nothing prepared me for the wonderful beauty of it. The fact that we only did the usual tourist hikes didn’t trivialize the incredible experience of all of it. After looking at the photos I took, I realized that the shots can’t express the magnificence and magnitude of it all. Only have the 360 degree experience can do that.
Even so, paltry digital photos will have to do. See the slideshow at left for a sample; click on the static image to see larger photos.
Arches National Park and Canyonlands couldn’t be more different. And they are within the kissing distance of 30 miles of each other. Arches consists of a relatively flatland with this soaring towers and naturally formed stone arches (apparently a hole in the rock wall has to be 3 feet big before it’s officially called an arch). One of the arches, Delicate Arch, is particularly famous and graces Utah’s license plates.
Canyonlands is the beginning of the series of canyons that moves southwards and eastwards into Colorado, and turns into the Grand Canyon. We went to Dead Horse Point and walked the rim, an easy hike of 6 miles all along the rim of the canyon. The views were extraordinary into the canyon 2000 feet below. The canyon walls revealed 7 layers of earth, representing 275 million years of the earth’s history in that area. The Grand Canyon exposes 2 billion years of geological history.
Alistair and Joyce kept teasing me because I frequently asked “how long do you think it took to create [the arch, the boulder, the pinon tree, the river bed, etc., etc.]. I was rather fixed on time because I loved putting me (and humankind) into perspective. But instead of feeling insignificant, I felt like I was a part of all of it. And I absolutely loved knowing that when my bones are nothing but dust that this beautiful, spectacular, wind and cloud swept panorama will still exist. That’s if we don’t completely blow up the environment and ourselves before that.
And what a place to experience the non-dual! When we first arrived, we took an easy 1 mile hike down a canyon with towering walls, called Park Avenue. I tried to take in my surroundings, the likes of which I had never seen before, and it was altogether too much. Too much sensory input, too much to hold all at once. Reminded me of the first time that I walked into Toys R Us and had a near sensory meltdown. This was much bigger. I think that’s why, in part, it’s hard for us to live outside of dualism – it’s too big to hold. Or rather, we’ve progressively and systematically shut ourselves down to the nondual as we grow up, so that we can just manage to get along without blowing our circuits on a daily basis. And then, eventually, we have to re-learn how to shift back into the non-dual, intentionally and with focused awareness. It’s definitely do-able.
That’s it for today. The home stretch of the final week is already happening. The more hard core facilitation practice is happening and everyone is bring on board the Healthy Competitor. Bring it on!
* This is a direct quote from a guy who, after a 2 minute walk to the rim & back, was heading back to his RV with is generator and TV. He ought to know!
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