A Breath

Trekking out of a canyon in Arizona, still miles from the trailhead, I round a bend and see a gigantic rock, its wide flat face slants just like my rock back home.

I pull off my pack, breathing heavy in the heat, crawling up onto the rock. I reach for my water, looking up at the canyon walls, at the rock I’m sitting on, its deep red striations clearly crumbled from the canyon wall—when?  How long ago?

Everything about the canyon is gigantic, ancient, everything about this hike has been awe inspiring. I’ve spent the last four days hiking ten miles down into the canyon, to waterfalls though red dusty soils, listening to birds and rushing waters, all of it a world away from home. This place humbles you: vibrant life tucked so far down in the folds of the rust red rock, deep blue waters and birds and trees, and the tribe who has survived and thrived here, weathering colonization.

We are so tiny, and the canyon is so vast. You can read years upon years in its lines, its layers, see the rush of ancient waters cutting through, wearing down the rock, deeper and deeper, year after year. After year. (How deep after one thousand years?)

We are a tiny breath, a blink in time and in space.

Back home, my rock, the rock with the same wide slanted face, is a granite boulder resting in the middle of green fields. It towers over my head, one of six giants resting on our land. The rock is pink granite, split with gaps just wide enough to walk through, shapes like puzzle pieces, pulled apart by the movement of earth over the ages. A fort. A cathedral. A place to sit and wonder. The lessons at home are quieter, as Iowa tends to be. You have to search, investigate to understand their story: They are glacial erratics, stranger rocks not formed here, migrants that scraped and tumbled into our neighborhood about fifty thousand years ago with all the other rocks and great sheets of ice pressing, pushing, moving them along—mere inches in a season. Slowly.  Year after year. After year. (How far after one thousand years?)

These rocks are a gift. These rocks remind me of what has come before, of how I fit in the timeline, of where this place has been and how this place will continue.

Fifty thousand years. What was the view here then?

Five thousand, or five hundred years ago?

Sitting there on the red rock in the canyon, the echo of the rock back home, I feel the same. I wonder at these remnants, a touchstone of time and space, far older than any of us have been alive on this planet.

We are a breath, a blink in time and space. A glimmer of something far greater than ourselves.

There are two halves of my heart. First, there is the one deeply rooted in the oaks and green pastures. It finds peace with the bison and cattle. It sings with the red wing black birds and the spirits of Iowa holding me close. 

The other half longs to go and explore, to see, to marvel and experience the wonders of this planet, to gut check, to miss my farm and to surround myself in a world that is not mine, to see that my way is not the only way to live in this world.

And the real magic: how the patterns repeat. 

One hundred years from now, what will these rocks see?