September 13, 2008
Zion, Utah

(Sorry I have no pics.. all on film.. returned my digital camera to Wally World.. need to get another one. This pic taken from the web from the Khalsa Family Photo Album.. credit where credits due.)

I have to say out of all the places I’ve been on this journey Zion Canyon is one of the most beautiful. This place is aptly named after paradise.

This place has everything someone could need to survive. The virgin river flows down it’s center, there are large numbers of deer everywhere, trees grow happily in the balanced sun and shade under the high cliff walls. This truly is a travelers paradise, and I could only imagine how it would have felt to come across it back when then Mormons were traveling the trail of tears.

I’m really working hard to get back to a place of solitude. I’m really working at letting Liz go. It’s hard to let someone go after you’ve woken up next to them for months on end. It’s hard to be alone again and not have the steady companionship that one can so easily grow accustomed to. Or even grow to depend on. I miss Liz and everyone back in Colorado deeply, and there’s a part of me that can’t help but wonder if I’m nuts to be back out here alone again.

I keep telling myself that it’s not about me, and that I’ve made a commitment and the all journeys are filled with trying times. I keep telling myself that it’s about finding the inner strength to carry on, and that in finding that strength we find ourselves, we find power and a sense of self that can never be taken from us.

These are the mantras I keep repeating as I trudge up an eight-hour hike to the top of observation point overlooking Zion. Once up there, I sit and finish the book my friend Josiah gave me a few weeks ago, Still Life with Woodpecker, by Tom Robbins. If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it!

There are some great lines throughout that book that resonated with me deeply, but especially the last three pages, which you’ll have to arrive at yourself if you’re at all interested.

On the way back down from Observation Point I watch as the sun disappears to one side and the moon rises to the other. I walk hike under the cover of darkness now, the moon and my headlamp illuminating only a few feet ahead. I remember that there are cougars in Zion so I’d better make some noise. In a mix of English and the Blackfoot taught to me up in Alberta, I pray. I pray out loud the entire hike down through the darkness, at times I cry through my prayers thinking of loved ones that I’ve lost that I’d love to talk to now more than ever, I pray for everyone and everything and when I’m done I pray some more. I pray for when must have been a good three hours until I am back at my van under this full moon in September.

Hiking throughout Zion I’m pushing myself harder than I’ve pushed myself in a really long time. There are moments when I feel my heart will pound its way free through the flesh of my chest. I carry 45lbs of film gear on my back everywhere I go and it makes every hike that much more difficult, in some strange way my commitment to this film is also a spiritual burden I’ve placed on myself. There’s a big part of me that would just like to go home, in fact, I think that’s what I tried to do in Colorado, I tried to go home. Maybe that’s even what I did on the Piikani Reservation, but I’m not free in myself to go ‘home’ yet, and a large part of my heart is still here within the freedom of the open road.

However, this freedom at times seems to be a double-edged sword.

peace,
d