I’m not going to write about every detail of my Grand Canyon trip, mostly because I didn’t write much of it down. I made voice notes on my phone recorder whenever I had a thought like something I may want to write about later. But, there are 96 voice notes now, and my vacation is over. I need to find some voice recognition transcription software otherwise those ideas are never going to get out of the recorder. I had some breakthroughs, actually, on trying to get my arms around what I should be doing with my life, but those ideas are still gestating, I need a little more time to ponder the big picture. But even so, just listening to a few of the voice notes from the beginning of the trip was fun.

Voice Notes

I have to admit it, voice notes are pretty freaking cool. It’s strange to hear my voice back, but it’s neat too. Now I know why people like me as a speaker. The inflections in my voice are expressive; my voice actually seems to convey the experience so that the listener can feel a part of it, engaged, inside the story instead of just listening to me talk. I wonder if my writing comes across that way? After simply transcripting my voice notes from today, I have to say no, my writing isn’t nearly as engaging as speaking. But people seem to like reading it . . . my life is simply a series of stories.

Life is a Journey and the Sky’s the Limit

That’s soooo nicely in sync with my position on life as a journey. And more and more I’m seeing it weave into the meaning of my Cielem’el name – the sky’s the limit. We can’t know what’s coming, and our possible reactions and emotional responses vary endlessly, so the sky really is the limit, meaning, there IS no limit to what we can experience. There may be limits to what we can do, like me walking a mile which is impossible with this neuropathy, but even with that as a limit, I can simply take a different route, Jeeping my way through miles and miles of isolated forest, seeing deer and Kaibab squirrels, which are supposedly rare and not many people see them, but I’ve seen a ton. Not with enough time to snap off a photo of course, but I’ve seen at least, hmmm, five. I’m just lucky I guess.  🙂

Work After Vacation

You know, the reason I took two weeks off work wasn’t because I had to go to the Grand Canyon right now, but my company set a new rule or whatever that you have to take all your vacation in the year it accrues. Given than my work schedule is absolutely insane from September through January, I’ve always been one of those people who needs to rollover a week into the next January. But sometime in August I was reminded that I need to “use it or lose it,” so I scheduled two full weeks for as soon as possible, because the later it gets in the fourth quarter, the more impossible it is for ne to take time off work. Two weeks though? It took me more than a week to catch up from three days away while speaking at a conference. I dreaded the e-mail backlog I would face after being gone two weeks.

But in my auto-responder, I told people that if they had something they needed my attention on specifically, that they would have to resend it or call me after the 20^th when I would get back to the office. And I set both of my work e-mail accounts to forward 100% of my mail to two other people. So when I got back, I ignored everything that came in while I was out, and I just got moving on the hot stuff.

It’s interesting; my attitude seems to have changed a bit. I still got up at 5AM for work and I dogged away until nearly 5PM, but I never got all freakishly stressed about the fact that I was woefully behind and had no idea how I would catch up to get three models out by the end of the year when we normally only do one a quarter at most, but this new guy is trying to push things and so here I am, behind what may be the biggest eight-ball yet. But I’m not stressed out about it. In the BIG scheme of things, whether or not I make a major deadline I’ve set for myself to deliver in just four days is so unbelievably unimportant in the big picture that it’s laughable.

A Human Lifetime is Barely a Speck in a Planet’s History

I just spent two weeks roaming around with my cell phone turned off and not even opening up the satellite or turning on the laptop. I haven’t gotten unplugged like that in . . . well, since I started college really, which was about when e-mail became prolific. Then I went into industry, and I’ve had a blackberry for an electronic leash ever since.

But at the Grand Canyon, I went everywhere that is hard to get to, and I spent time there. The North Rim is amazing, and Cape Royal, O.M.G., I was the only person there so I went past the guard rail to sit on this enormous boulder . . . I can’t believe I haven’t downloaded my pictures yet. By the time I get to that, I won’t remember where anything was. I didn’t stay at the South Rim long, just one night, and one night was enough. It was crowded and noisy when I got there (which was early) and I had seen enough people and people crowding at vistas to convince me that this was not somewhere I needed to spend my precious time. The next morning I got up at 5AM (funny how getting up at 5AM is so easy to do on vacation when I have something pleasant to get up for, like, a sunrise) and I caught the 5:30AM shuttle out to the point that supposed to have the nicest sunrises. There were only two other people on the shuttle, and they were going to the same place. We got there and it was pitch black. I could kind of see the edges of a trail so I walked that way, knowing there were stone walls all along these lookouts and I certainly wasn’t going to fall off in the dark unless I was dumb enough to crawl over the guard rail (which I wouldn’t do in complete darkness). The sun was starting to gray the shy though, so I found an awesome spot, went two feet past the guard rail, and parked my backpack and my bum a good six to eight feet away from the cliff edge. I was seriously completely safe. But when the tour bus showed up later with 55 people all there to photograph the sunrise, that is when I really appreciated the fact that I don’t mind stepping out of bounds. Because no one could block my view. But the bus drive did ruin it, calling out to me three times that I couldn’t be out there. I pretended not to hear her the first two times, then I came back under the rail. There were so many people, I took off back down the dark trail. I actually walked a really long way, now that I think about it. Funny what loose toe-box sneakers and early morning pain meds will do for walking half a mile on neuropathy feet.

Anyway, back to the point. I spent my time, my real time, at the most beautiful places on the North Rim. I stayed up there a week checking out a different vista each morning for sunrises, and Jeeping all over Kaibab National Forest. I spent an entire day going down into the canyon on a mule, and for my last full day I found a Jeep trail that ended on boulders about as high as I dare take Rubi over, and I had a picnic above the rapids with the biggest fastest elevation drop and even though I was what, 300 yards straight up? I could hear the water. I love the sound of water.

I also went on a whitewater rafting trip. That was after being at the North Rim a full week, and I had come down and around to cross the river at a place called Lee’s Ferry (Lee was an ousted Morman for committing some crime so he went down there and built a ferry but being the only ferry and a bustling business isn’t actually a good thing when you’re a fugitive, and he was caught and hanged two years later. Anyway, Lee’s Ferry is now where they put in for the rafting trips. I stayed there half a day at the river’s beach, satellite up, booking campgrounds for the next week of my travels. I have a tendency, that I love actually, to NOT make tight travel plans because I like to go where the journey takes me, rather than forcing a particular time and place for anything. My whitewater rafting trip wasn’t for another two days, but it was fun to see a couple of groups take off, starting their adventure.

Being all the way down inside the canyon is an experience unlike any other. Down there, the rocks are 1.2 BILLION years old. And you can see the tiers of the ages as each built upon the last. Down at the bottom of the canyon in the river looking up, well, that’s both the smallest and the biggest I’ve ever felt. Small, because my life is not even big enough to be a blip in the evolution of the planet. But I also felt enormously large because after being at the canyon so long, I felt as if it were a part of me. The sunrise I enjoyed all alone at Cape Royal was very similar to where I ended up when my heart stopped the second time (you can read about that in the earlier entry My Nine Lives and How I Survived to Life #10). I was a part of the planet, sitting cross-legged atop the highest peak with the entire world beneath me and a part of me.

Getting Spiritual Again

In that place, as in my NDE (they call it a “near death experience” if you die but they can bring you back to life with the shockers), I felt the eternity of it all, the collective single energy of it all, and that it was all directly connected to me. In the NDE I was the world.

Whoops, I’m sounding like a Subjective Reality wanna-be again. Man, I really need to focus some exploration on that, spirituality and the concept of reality as subjective keep coming up because of the more “out there” experiences I’ve had.