The Grand Canyon is one of those places that neither words or photographs can capture. It’s a big hole in the ground, but it’s so much more than that.

It was formed by water eroding the rock over millions of years, slowly but surely carving through stone, creating sculptures the most famous of artists couldn’t have imagined, revealing colorful bands that otherwise remain hidden under dirt, moss and dry Arizona grass. It’s one of those places that you just have to go stand at the edge of to begin to understand it’s vastness and it’s depth, both in the physical and historical senses.

The last time I was there I was 13, just the age my son is now.

It was also October. It was cold. My little brother threw up his whole breakfast in excited anticipation of the mule ride we took down into the canyon. That day that stands out as one of the brightest and best in my childhood, and I had more than a few good ones. I was wowed. I loved it. But I don’t think I really “got it.” Or perhaps, with things of this sort, one just “gets it” on another level as years pass and the waters of life chip away at the rock of our souls.

The wind was bitter at the rim of the canyon.

We all shivered and jammed our fists deeper into our pockets as we peered into the deep, hoping for a glimpse of the raging Colorado River so far below. Hiking the rim trail on the south side of the canyon I couldn’t help but think about other deep things, holes in the ground, worn by other sorts of waters.

My husband has long had the habit of writing me notes when we’re apart. Real notes, not the e-mail variety, although I get several of those each day as well.

• When he worked for Apple and he traveled a lot he used to leave a little stack of them on the pillow for me when he crept out in the early morning darkness to get in a limo and head for the airport, or start off on a long drive to New York.

• In Hawaii he snuck along a stash of our old wedding napkins that he’d found in the back of some closet and wrote the notes on the backs of those. They’re framed in storage somewhere.

This trip is no exception. He sent me off with a big stack of rainbow coloured envelopes and when he arrived in Portland a few weeks ago he promptly handed me the next stack, “To get you home.”

Written on the front of one I opened recently was the following:

“Love, like a river, will cut a new path, whenever it meets an obstacle.” –Crystal Middlemas

On the back he wrote something apropos that got me thinking:

• How many years ago was it that the Grand Canyon was nothing but a surface river?
• What did it look like?
• What was it’s path?
• Why did it start digging away, cutting through hard things, growing, changing, revealing beauty as it went, but hard beauty, flinty-stone beauty; the kind you have to really work for?
• Was there a huge gush of water, a deluge of some sort that sped the process and tore away the surface of the earth in huge, painful chunks that wounded what was there and scarred everything in it’s path, burying many other living things in the process?
• Or was it a slow, steady, millennias long process of a river picking it’s way through time, finding obstacles too great to wash away only to forge a new path, cut a new trail and look for some easier route to it’s destination?
• Only the stars know, I suppose.

How like life.

How like my life at least. Standing, shivering at the edge of a cliff face it all seemed so clear:

• The destruction forges something even more beautiful than what was there to begin with.
• The painful erosion of what was produces something new and breathtakingly awe inspiring.
• Continuing to pick away a the hard things, find a way around the immoveable things and the sheer determination of a lifetime, or ten million lifetimes of effort and commitment to a single minded task creates art.
• It creates a monument that inspires the whole world.
• A life can be like that.
• So can a marriage.

I’m sleeping tonight under an enormous full moon beneath another, much warmer, patch of Arizona sky. The children are dreaming safely around me. The note, on yellow paper, is on the table next to me. The Grand Canyon is behind me, but it’s river is still working on my heart.