Canyon/Winter/Tao

Grand Canyon in winter is altogether different from its summertime persona. There’s hardly any traffic, and the absence of crowds means that at some lookouts you feel like you have the place all to yourself (although you still tend to overhear German just as much as English). Walking along the rim in the village in the cold air at night, the full moon ghosting the canyon walls, we saw practically no other living being except for a few elk and deer. It was truly tranquil.

The Canyon is a mecca for geologists, and we came across a feature we hadn’t noticed on our last visit: the rim walk east of the village features a “journey through time” with displays of rock specimens indicating their age. We’re talking hundreds of millions of years, and it made us laugh to recall that there are some fools who insist that our planet is no older than can be deduced from the Bible – something on the order of six millennia. They twist the evidence to serve their need to believe in the infallibility of a document, never mind the exacting science behind the dating process.

Beyond the west end of the village, the rim walk leads to a small area with a simple stone altar where ecumenical services are held during the tourist season. We’ve never attended one, but can imagine that they focus on the majesty of the place without pretending that an old guy in the sky created it as part of a six-day creation binge. The very fact that many of the Canyon’s landmarks were named for Asian religious figures attests to its transcending the limitations of any one belief system.

But I’d like to propose that the Grand Canyon is more than anything else a temple to Taoist thought. We see the persistence of water in a place carved by it: “the softest thing in the universe overcomes the hardest” (ch. 43); “nothing is more soft and yielding that water, yet for attacking the solid and strong nothing is better” (78); “it flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao” (8). We also see the ultimate representation of the Tao as an empty vessel (4) in a place that allows us to fully exalt “the valley spirit” (6).

Taoists value the strength of low position, and here is a place that takes you constantly lower, where the immutability of time is on permanent display. And, especially in the winter, we find the rejuvenating power of tranquility. “Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature. The way of nature is unchanging” (16). (All quotes from Feng/English translation.)

So rant on, young-earthers. But after sitting on the edge of the rim, I’d have to agree with Lao Tzu, that “ignoring knowledge is sickness” (71).