One of my most memorable and epic adventures was a midsummer’s hike down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and an overnight, Full Moon lit, hike back up out of the Canyon. We caught a bus to the South Kaibab Trailhead before daylight. With a small group of likeminded souls we headed down the trail towards Ooh Ahh point to watch the sun rise. When it peeked over the horizon, highlighting the distant cliffs, time suspended, catching and holding me in that moment.
The rays of the sun, the mixture of shadow with light, the hints of color in a landscape so foreign to me mesmerized me. The desert cliffs of the Grand Canyon are a far cry from the temperate rain forest I call home. The alien landscape caught my imagination and transported me outside my time and place in the world as I understood it, and opened up vistas in my mind that beckoned me towards the unknown.
I am, admittedly, a late bloomer to this whole travel thing; but I am hooked. There are places to go and things to see. Every year since that memorable trip, I make plans for a new adventure and off we go. Well, I did, until the 4 horsemen rode out and Plague broke free of the formation and wreaked havoc with our lives.
I had to cancel my plans to camp out on a subtropical island when the world shut down. It has been starts and stops since then and who knows what to do? Who knows what’s going to happen as we stagger along here.
How many of us are in a holding pattern, just waiting? We are waiting to see what this pandemic is going to do to us. We are waiting to see if the economy has enough life left in it to survive the hits it is taking from all sides. We are waiting to see if and when our lives can go back to some semblance of normalcy even as the media incessantly bombards us with tales of impending doom.
It is dark. It has been dark for a while now. We have had glimpses of light. We have heard whispers of promise, but the dawn seems to be holding out on us. And so we wait.
Take heart! The sun will rise. The rays of light will break the horizon and erase the shadows revealing the truths that have been hidden. The landscape will be revealed and the path forward will be navigable once again. It is for us to turn our backs on the darkness and move towards the coming dawn. Each of us, as individuals must choose, darkness or light? Hope or despair?
Theoriginalneanderthal 