Continental Drifter
by
Marianna Harris
Copyright ©2010
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“The man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but . . . he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.”
Loren Eisele, “The Star Thrower” (1978)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
In Amazement: Under the Spell of the Painted Desert
Hell Hath No Fury: Zion and the Valley of Fire
Fire Dreams: The Wisdom in the Wild
Continental Drifter
Have you ever really looked at the landscapes of the Southwest? The deserts, mountains, rivers and sky? The cacti, mesas, buttes, and sand? Something in the miraculous nature of the red rocks of the Southwest has found its way into my cells, saturating my thoughts and permeating my dreams, stirring the longing for union with the eternal that lives in us all.
I was never what you’d call a Nature Girl. An Ohio upbringing taught me a healthy dislike of mosquitoes and humidity. Ten years in New York City only added fuel to the flame. It wasn’t until my last few years in Los Angeles that I was struck with inexplicable wanderlust. I was flying back to L.A. from Ohio when, from the window of the plane, I noticed the changing topography of the continent as we moved west. From the flat, green farmland patches of Ohio, to the brown plains of Kansas, the Rocky Mountains began suddenly around Colorado, and from them sprang the Colorado Plateau, a thick, elevated, geographical province named for the Colorado river, stretching outward from the Four Corners of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico. Located almost entirely in Utah, the Plateau is 130,000 square miles of red rock sandstone comprising 300 million years of geologic history.
The pilot made an announcement: “If you’re seated on the right side of the plane, for the next few minutes you can see the Grand Canyon.” Years of travel back and forth across the States has since taught me which side of the plane to sit on for a Canyon view, but that day, it was a happy accident. Within seconds, folks from the other side of the plane were cramming themselves into any available seats on my side. A woman with big, blonde Texas hair crawled over the guy in the aisle seat and plopped herself down next to me, bobbing and weaving her very large head at my shoulder. When we hit California, the mountains turned blue and purple; clouds floated above, etched like figures in a fairy tale, plucked from a child’s story book.
I got the fever in earnest in 2001 when I was suddenly compelled to see the Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Mountains of Central California. Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park is located at the top of one of those mountains, seventeen miles up a winding, two-lane canyon road. At the highest point, elevation is about 7,000 feet. My fear of heights told me I couldn’t make it. But I did, and the reward was the knowing that fear is never a good enough excuse not to do what the soul demands.
A few weeks later, I was called to the Grand Canyon. I say “called” because something was burgeoning within me that I could not yet identify. At the time, it felt like compulsion, but it didn’t matter. I made the only choice I could: I went. The Grand Canyon is, without question, the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen─not that I’ve seen all that much in all my years on this earth, but I cannot imagine anything more spectacular, revelatory or profound. It is a mark of the ages, a doorway to the history not only of mankind but of the planet; an ancient, ever-changing testament to time and the transient nature of our physical lives. That visit reminded me of who I truly am: a part of something bigger, more relevant and more powerful than I could ever have imagined.
Travel of course, requires patience─the planning stage alone can be daunting. But travel can also teach patience. I used to think it was a trick, something I had to talk myself into. Lately I think of it not as a thing, but as a conscious act involving trust; trust that the timing, the money, and all the elements involved in any effort will fall into place. When I am able to open doors in my head so often closed by reason and allow myself to nurture possibility, the muscle of intuition grows stronger, leading my body and mind where they believed, rationally, they could not go. In those moments of trust, of surrender, the veil of things as they are becomes less opaque, more like a scrim through which I am given glimpses of the source of my true power. Patience arrives like an unexpected but welcome visitor and my vision of the world and my place in it becomes clear. Time then ceases to be linear, no longer measured by numbers on a calendar or by physical changes, but by the knowledge and experience I have acquired by listening to what is within.