The Grand Canyon
December, 2024
The unspoken instruction of striation and red anchoring my maturity. The Grand Canyon has witnessed all my cycles, while I get to guess at its own emotional relics. Erosion. Tastes of lines. Echos of bliss and sorrow and mischief. Lines of tastes.
Three separate river trips, accumulating to about three months of societally distanced-respite, contain some of the most fortuitous expressions, cherished connections, and wild memories of my life. To immerse into company of mystery, friendship, and time have forged questions which have ensured my impulse to seek freedom, and not the sort representable by flag. Thus, here is a collection of photos, videos, musings, and artwork as homage to fleeting, yet life-grounding friendships and these precious landscapes and ecologies, an environment home to mutual beauty and textured ancestry of the Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Navajo (Diné), the Paiute bands and other Indigenous Nations. With self-testimony to both my moments of intrusion and also sanctuary in this mercurial and sensitive river system, here is a small gesture to my care, storage, and impact of the timeless power encompassing the Canyon, which I know, like mine, has underwritten so many journeys.
Dismember, Remember, Watercolor, March, 2021
The little worlds make up a larger spirit.
I’ve seen them in the cottonwood commune
where light dapples in mouthwatering gloss
a hue of humble.
The bumbles of the spring
tell me - my blood smells of
sweet decay.
By this I mean abundance.
By this I mean that
the heart seems an oasis to the mind.
Trip #3 December 2024, January 2025
Trip #2 January 2023
1/14/25
The day after the day after.
In all manners of smeared red lipstick, rocking boat-sleeping, costume slinging, heartbeat syncing, scarf-wizarding absurdity of canyon travel, I grieve the impossibility of remaining where I just was. After 28 days of moving at a pace that makes sense to a 35,000 year-old-brain, I find myself disenchanted by fixtures and carpets and saying goodbye to friends I may never see again. Billboards, flourescents, and tattered gas station sinks. Opponency, superimposing many contexts. Saturn’s curtains blowing as we changed under an undressed sky. We’ve stretched in dire ways. This drought deserves that. Unowning. The salience of cholla-ridden bluffs and turquoise-blue easings has taken over my obedience for manmade purposes. Whatever cooled, held, deliberate, cheerful and bird-like version of myself existed in the canyon cannot continue today as I step on the gas, making my way back to ambition.
Honor, 12/25/24
1/10/2025 Grand Manors and Grand Manners
My kayak was found. It was circling in an eddy after Lava Falls Rapid. It was lingering adjacent to a dead Big Horn Sheep. Powerful waters are indiscriminate to levels of animacy, the archaic and the modern, the flesh and the plastic. I had a dream last night, sharp, that I was in Boston. I was with my current Grand comrades, and we were exploring abandoned, opulent mansions. Spiral staircases were made of Bright Angel Shale, old water vessels on display were cracked, and mosaic floors were made of pottery shards. In these dissolving buildings, a sense of rot and uneasy contempt lingered in the stale shadows. Aimless, expressionless, yet yearning, transparent people wandered the space from many countries, singing, wailing, grabbing our clothing. Along the decorative walls rested odd glass cases containing desert creatures. One captured a raven, failing to fully flap its suffocated, inky wings. Others stored barrel cacti and rattlesnakes, spiders and great blue herons. I recall cracking open a curious closet, and inside, dripping wet, sprawled a dead Bighorn Sheep.
I still cannot discern if these characters were actors, if this desert was hired. What was greeting and what was warning? What was a slot canyon and what was a penthouse? What was contained and what was free? What was celebrating and what was weeping? What was flesh and what was plastic?
Trip #1 March 2021
