In a desert embrace between blue sky and sand, A lone cactus flourishes in a thirsty land. Her guardian spines, innocent and wise, Hold fast against winds she bravely defies.
Sandy soil enshrines roots running deep. Silent sentinels giggle while mimicking sleep— Toughened skin above, pulsing with might, Bold rebellion beneath the barbaric sunlight.
White blossoms bloom with delicate grace A coruscating crown in this desolate place. Petals unfold, poetry in hues, Through armored shroud, her beauty renews.
Survivor of drought and weather obscene, The cactus stands, a desert queen. In silence she writes mirage-soaked verses To a curious soul who nearby traverses.
“Dear cactus,” he ventures, “courageous and free, can you whisper your tales only to me?” She smiles coyly—she knows, but won’t tell— Accustomed to hellos, acquainted with farewells.
This was the answer when I asked one of my high school–aged acting students to give me an example of something that is “just one thing.”
“Yep, that’s correct,” I agreed. “Give me another.”
He thought for a moment. “Heaven is good, hell is bad.”
“Yes. Now let’s turn our attention to the horizontal. People, places, and things we can touch and see. Give me an example of something that is just one thing.”
“A car is just a car. A tree is just a tree. This building is just this building. My mom is just my mom.”
I wrinkled my nose when he made the final assertion. A tale as old as time. He stopped and waited for my response.
“Your mom isn’t only your mom. But also, a car isn’t only a car. A tree isn’t only a tree. This building isn’t only a building. Try again.”
A smirk grew across his face. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or annoyed. Maybe both.
“God is good. The devil is bad.”
I laughed. “That’s right. Why do you think you have to keep going into the spiritual realm to give me examples of things that are just one thing? Angels, demons. God, Satan. Why is that?”
He thought for a moment. “Because even though people go back and forth between those two kingdoms, the kingdoms themselves don’t change. We do, but they don’t.”
It was a good answer.
“When I’m coaching students to play villains,” I said, “one of the first things we talk about is the fact that villains don’t see themselves as villains. They see themselves as heroes.” Michael Shurtleff makes this point in his book Audition when he reminds us that if one thing is present in a scene, the opposite is also present. If Sally hates Peter, she probably also loves Peter. If Simon is grieving Teresa, it’s because he remembers their happiness.
We live in tensions. Between here and there. Then and now. Who we are and who we might be.
Take Walter White in the best series of all time, Breaking Bad. He begins as a high school chemistry teacher. Then comes the diagnosis. The bills. The fear of leaving his family with nothing. He starts cooking meth to provide for them, to secure a future that will outlast him.
And then something shifts.
He discovers he’s good at it. The work begins to fill an empty place inside himself. A need for control, for significance, for power. In one of his most famous lines, Walter White reminisces about his drug-lording days and concludes, “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And… I was really… I was alive.”
Is Walter White a villain? Or a hero? Both?
What makes him a villain? The drug that harms other people? The lies? The control he begins to exert over others? The blood that clings to the money he brings home?
What makes him a hero? The motivations with which he acted early on? The care his son receives? The fact that he’s working to build a future? The moments when he protects the people he loves?
Ask Walter, and he’ll tell you he’s a hero. Especially when he believes his objective is to provide for his family. That is the story he tells himself.
And still, the bodies pile up around him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago:
“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
I turned back to my student.
“Think of your worst moment. A time when you chose to be cruel. Did you allow yourself to realize you were being cruel, or did you try to convince yourself you weren’t that bad?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I justified it. I knew I was wrong, but I made excuses. I compared myself to people who are worse than I am.”
“You chose something dark and still looked for light. What did you do to relieve that tension?”
“I tried not to think about it. Oh! And, I helped more at home. I told people I was volunteering at church. I stayed busy doing good things, so other people didn’t think I was a jerk. I guess I was also trying to switch back into a good person.”
I nodded.
“So you were a villain. And you acted like a hero.”
“Yeah.”
“So you weren’t God or the devil. You were aware of both. And you chose, moment by moment, how to move toward what you wanted while carrying both at once.”
“Yeah.”
The wheels of thought whirred.
Nothing is ever just one thing.
When you’re playing a bad guy, you still have to know what he’s moving toward. Somewhere inside that pursuit, something he recognizes as good is leading him forward.
You might as well befriend the moon— embrace her clouded peekaboos. And music…
Receive the tune— no time to choose— alone in a crowd or no one in view. And a smell…
Wafts past your nose— what was that? Or who?
Perfume on skin or a place that you knew.
Pause.
No need to wonder— you know who that was— and who you are as nostalgia winds the second hand round.
“Time is a straight line,” said he. “It moves consecutively, watches as it goes behind and below, like walking a path that winds into— well— no one knows.”
“No one knows, that’s right,” said she. “Simply put, I do agree. But there’s no line to speak of. Time bends—not like a knee— more like a finger touching its thumb or a rainbow finding its spherical end and answering with a gentle, Come.”
Time returns to the places we’ve been.
One says, “That memory is far.” Another, “The moment is here.”
Yesterday can be set down, but the nows of that day rise from the ground without notice or sound—
to delight or confound— it depends on the seconds into which they were bound.
Moments become recollections. Recollections, seeds with a life of their own.
Promises and hope, gentleness and rage, a touch, a glance, a well-appointed room or a half-written page—
all sown into skin, finding rest in smiles and tears, repose and toil, love and loss, freedom and cost, and the way sunlight lay across the earth at the end or when it all began.
“That was back then,” said he. “That is today,” said she.
The minutes listened.
“There is wisdom in both.”
Time smiled— crouched, quiet— behind an autumn tree, waiting for the final leaf to fall.
It begins with a question as most things do— standing still and not understanding and then, why? Sometimes, how?
Before me— bands of color arranged with conviction, clearly the earth has already decided what each layer means and is in no hurry to explain itself.
The greatest beauty rarely does.
Someone wearing a mud-stained hat and pants that swoosh when he walks has named them. Kaibab Limestone at the rim. Toroweap beneath it. Coconino Sandstone—once dunes, moved grain by grain under a wind that no longer blows.
This was a desert, then a sea, then something in between that does not translate cleanly into a single word.
Mystery mingling with majesty.
I look at the red— Hermit Shale, perhaps— soft once, willing to be shaped, now holding its position like a memory that has settled into fact.
Further down, older still, Vishnu Schist— stone that endured heat, pressure, nothing erased, everything contained and displayed— a record I cannot read, written in a language I have not learned. But I recognize this:
Resilience.
Two billion years, give or take. The number means nothing to me other than "Wow."
The mind attempts a comparison— a human life, a century, a civilization rising and falling somewhere between two lines of rock.
It does not help.
Below it all, the river— still working. Still carrying what it has loosened. Still, rippling with stories that continue.
The Colorado meanders. It does not rush for anyone's benefit, the way an old man has learned to slow down. It cuts because that is what water does when given time and a way through.
I find myself asking questions that have no immediate use.
Who first noticed that this was once sand? Who looked closely enough to see ripple marks held in stone?
Who intuited that knowing this made the view larger and more intimate at the same time?
The tree beside me leans into its own inquiry, roots set in an answer that does not require words.
Its needles move in present tense.
No concern for uplift, erosion, continental drift— that long, slow negotiation between plates.
As for me—
I want to know how something becomes— how pressure instructs what to keep and what to release.
How absence— of water, of time, of witness— enters the record.
Curiosity does not simplify. It accumulates.
Another name. Another era. Another process quietly at work beneath the visible.
And suddenly the canyon is no longer wide.
It is specific.
I stand at the edge with a growing suspicion—
that beauty increases with knowledge,
and that time, unmeasured and indifferent, is not empty distance but the most patient artist I have ever encountered.
The road is empty, so naturally I walk to the center and stand on the line.
Silence but for the tapping of the cooling engine and the sound of waves— or maybe wind— blowing through pine needles.
Yellow lines under my feet— broken, then whole, then broken again, each piece looks like it's racing but I know better: resting.
Ahead, the road lifts.
Not much— just enough to take the next stretch out of view.
Driving, you don't notice how pretty the variation of black, gray, and blue after years of repaving.
You just keep going.
Inside the car you are listening, or talking, or thinking . . . anticipating, over the hill, onto the next stretch already laid out.
Standing here, the journey slows then stops.
Everything here knows one another and all is stable, but the wind and the clouds and the sun and moon and stars— but the road.
Each yellow line serves a purpose to guide to rightly divide . . . but also to watch to remember to enjoy?
It occurs to me in the middle of the road:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
No matter how fast or slow I move, God.
The road is the road.
The adventure— where I go— is up to You.
—Iris Lennox literary pen name of Jill Szoo Wilson
The photo is courtesy of Pixabay because my iPhone 12 didn’t quite cut it.
Night settles over the desert and the sky draws back like a curtain on opening night.
Stars peer from the wings and then enter from every direction— innumerable, but every one commanding attention.
I lay my head on my daypack no longer needed because . . . well, night . . . light arrives from distances I cannot measure, each point steady, each one burning fiercely but without sound.
Around me, the land falls into a hush that is greater than quiet— stillness.
Stone cools. Air thins. The last traces of what the sun gave rise from the ground and into the sky, probably trying to join in the celestial production.
Lucky.
Here we are in the chaos— for a time— but above, order.
Not scattered, not random, but placed.
Line after line, field after field, a vastness that neither moves toward me nor recedes.
Tightrope walkers, all of them. The theatre? Or a circus? None of my metaphors matter.
Every person stops— and you can understand why
why the eye lingers, why the body quiets, why the heart bends and breaks and mends and unfolds all in one inhale.
The sky doesn't look back. It doesn't need to. There is nothing we can give to it except wonder.
Brilliant, unreachable, unaffected.
And still— it draws.
The ground beneath me, the sky above me, the measure between them—
all set in order, all kept in place, all speaking without voice.
In the keeping of it, in the placing of each light and the distance between them, God gives:
what is set in the heavens and seen,
what fills the eye and commands attention—
and wonder— not as something given,
but as what rises in us at the sight of it,
returning, not to the sky above, but to the One who directs its course.
At the edges of Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, stone lies where it came to rest.
Dark, porous, each piece holding the memory of heat, each surface fixed in the moment of its becoming.
Across the field— fragments.
Lifted, scattered, set in place by force and the long settling after.
In the slow passage of it— through wind, through cold, through the steadfast work of seasons— a different order solidifies.
Between the stones— vibrant lime green equally brilliant yellow
Pushing through fissures, rooted in spaces of fracture, drawing from elements above and below, rising from where the earth was devastated.
A bird alights on a twisted branch.
And we, who come searching for shape, stumble through the surface, reading the ground for what we imagine, while beneath our steps roots move among the stone, threading through death and life.
On the surface— rock, jagged silent warnings emanating from frozen faces.
Beneath— a rumbling of breath, forced tilling turned to growth, through time's signature shocks of courage.
The land holds both together, dividing nothing, choosing neither.
In the keeping of it, in the settling of what has been cast down and the quiet rising that follows, God gives:
what remains where it has fallen, set in the ground as it came to rest—
and what takes root within the break, drawing life from the opened places—
and healing— not as the return of what was, but as something new set among the fractures, color rising—but more, the story not only of wreckage but of life where the ground came apart.
At the rim of the Grand Canyon, Without widening, announcing, or calling the eye— it gathers.
Close to the ground, armed at every point, it holds what little comes— light taken in, water kept, time pressed inward until it thickens.
In the long discipline of it— through heat, through absence, through the steady refusal of the earth to give— a form is made that does not bend outward.
It keeps its boundary.
And then— at the very places of defense— a breaking open.
Not of the structure, but from within it.
Red, rising at the tips, petals pushing through the same points that once kept distance, softness unfurling precisely where sharpness was required.
The form remains— spine, circle, the careful architecture of survival—
and yet, from that same design, another shape appears.
On the surface— color, sudden, plain to the eye.
Beneath— a long keeping, a measure held without witness, without haste.
The cactus carries both at once, dividing nothing, choosing neither.
And we, drawn to what widens, what opens easily to us, pass by— standing at the edge of what is vast, naming that grandeur, and missing what has taken form among the spines.
In the keeping of it, in the exactness of boundary and the timing of its release, God gives:
what holds its form, what keeps its boundary under pressure, without collapse—
and what opens only where it has been formed to open,
until what has been gathered in silence appears, not everywhere, but precisely—
Iris Lennox 