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
In many stories, we see a man overcoming great odds by wrestling with the weaknesses anchored inside himself, rather than those he must fight in the world around him.
The age-old story of Man vs. Self.
One of the most memorable tragic heroes in Greek mythology is Sisyphus, the prince whose moral foibles Zeus punishes by dooming him to roll a boulder up a hill eternally, the rock rolling back down each time he manages to muscle it to the top.
The first time I heard this story, I was in seventh grade. We read it aloud in English class through timid and cracking voices. I should have known then that I had a serious bent toward the philosophical. The story captured both my imagination and my emotions to such an extent that I immediately felt what I can now identify as empathy for the main character. I wanted to reach beyond the centuries to help Sisyphus.
Because I couldn’t do that, I settled on trying to prove the story wrong.
This was my way of rectifying the deeds of Zeus and the fate of Sisyphus himself. It was also my way of closing the dissonance I felt as I considered the unfairness of the story. How had we, as a human race, allowed this man’s torment to survive in our books, our minds, our cultural imagination for so long?
Clearly, it was up to me to change the narrative.
Once the bell rang for lunch, I donned my invisible cape and set out on a dangerous adventure. Knowing we weren’t allowed on the soccer field unless we were in PE, I slipped past the lunchroom proctor, ducked under the railings, and made my way down the hill that led to the edge of the field. At the far end, the incline rose steeply enough to pass, in my mind, for a mountainside.
My school was called Foothills Junior High. The name was not decorative. It sat at the base of a mountain in Los Angeles. I knew this was the place to right the wrongs set forth by the Greek gods.
I looked for a rock. I never found one large enough to make the journey feel worthy, but I did find a kickball. Orange, round, just large enough to wedge between my shoulder and neck as I climbed on my hands and knees, pushing it upward with a kind of theatrical conviction that, in retrospect, revealed itself early.
I made it to the top.
My hands were filled with pebbles, my knees ground into denim and dirt. I stood there for a moment, the kickball in my grip, scanning the field beneath the dry California sun. A victory, unmistakable.
And then, unlike Sisyphus, I made a decision.
I would not let the rock roll back down. I would carry it.
Halfway down the hill, I lost my footing.
It happened quickly. Instinct took over. The ball slipped free. I watched it fall.
Disaster.
I tried again.
Three times I made it to the top. Not once did I make it all the way down.
Up the hill. Down the hill. Up again. Down again.
The past returned as the present, and I heard the bell ring for science class.
Maria Popova writes of Sisyphus:
He may be a tragic hero, but he is first and foremost a hero, precisely for this unrelenting faith in the possibility of accomplishing the impossible. His optimistic tenacity renders him the epitome of the creative spirit.
Jack White, in his song Over and Over and Over, gives the story another life:
The Sisyphean dreamer My fibula and femur Hold the weight of the world (Over and over)
The rock ‘n’ roller, the young and older Rolling back to the stroller (Over and over)
One story, carried through different forms, returning again and again.
And then, from Ecclesiastes:
All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
A repetition that feels, at times, unbearable.
Life returns us to the same questions, the same efforts, and the same inclines. We strain, we lose our footing, we begin again. Something in us resists the cycle. Something else learns how to thrive within it.
There is a kind of dignity in that.
Not in escaping the hill, but in meeting it.
Not once, but again.
And again.
So I think of that hillside near the soccer field.
Of the orange ball slipping from my hands.
Of the certainty I had that I could change the ending.
As he leaned down toward the sand, his knees creaked under cotton trousers and then grew quiet again.
Kneeling, he sunk his finger between a million grains to write a message there— first a W and then an H, followed by a Y?
He drew a circle around the word as though the spelling alone lacked power to catch the eye of anyone who might be qualified to enter the quandary with him, for him, take it from his hands, lift the weight, and carry it away.
His hair used to be black— until it was grey— and in the wind that hovered above land, after being cast from the sea, his curls lifted and fell like waves, answering the whims of the moon and gravity.
He placed his hands on top of his thighs and stood, once more facing the mystery of tossing foam, his question scrawled below and below— in the center of himself— doubt churned under a stomach filled with acid and disaster.
Like bricks, a collage of faces, a map filled with places, melancholy traces, unending races erected a wall inside his soul too high to climb, too wide to choose whether left or right might end the mounting fight.
Hiding in plain sight, he felt alone until he was not— she stepped in close from a shadowy distance to share his pool of light, breaking through the clouds, illuminated by the night. The two stood staring, astonished—
“How did you find me?” he asked— she had no certainty to give. “I don’t know,” was all she said— he brought one hand up to his mouth as though to stop the words from coming out. “I needed to be found.”
They stood above the crudely scribbled “Why?” and respected its presence as a minnow respects a shark. However, they refused to bow their heads in reverence for the question and, instead, they walked together hand in hand, and waited for answers to roll in with the tide.
Ask the old ones. Not for stories— for dates, distances, what came first and what followed.
Has anything like this happened before?
A people hearing a voice from the middle of fire and continuing to breathe after the sentence ended.
Fire does one thing well. It finishes what it starts.
Yet there they stood, faces lit from below, listening to licks and flares carry meaning without turning kindling to ash.
Or this—
a nation taken out of another nation, not quietly, but with signs that carved faces and covered the sun, by a hand that did not hide itself, with a kind of persistence that left artifacts in places and on the skeletons that witnessed it.
Ask Egypt, if ruins could answer.
Ask the sea, which briefly agreed to try on the accoutrements of land and then returned to its original fashion.
They were shown these things so they would know— this is how the account records it.
Not suspect. Not wonder.
Know that the voice was not one among many, not a possibility, a debate between equally convincing objections.
Above, below— no second version waits to be discovered later.
This is the claim as it has been carried forward.
So they are told to keep it.
Not out of fear, though fear was present. Not out of habit, though habit will come.
Keep it so that when their children ask what happened in those days, they will not offer a softened account.
Tell them they heard something that should have undone them and did not.
Tell them they walked through what closed behind them.
In Krakow, under the mutual agreement of cobblestones and centuries, I stopped for lunch because hunger, like history, does not wait for proper context.
A restaurant offering pierogi seemed more convincing than the Hard Rock Cafe, which had installed itself with great confidence in the wrong century.
A young woman greeted me.
Blond hair, a practiced smile, the unmistakable economy of someone who has already lived this day once before.
We spoke.
Nothing of consequence— which is to say, everything necessary.
And then the thought arrived with equal parts whimsy and angst:
why are our lives intersecting here?
She will remain— serving, walking, returning, knowing which streets curve and where to her laundry.
I will leave— to my kitchen, my coffee, my purple toothbrush, which performs its duties faithfully without ever asking where it is in the world.
Meanwhile—
each of us continues as the center of a system no telescope has fully mapped:
families in orbit, memories in storage, songs that arrive unannounced, conversations that replay with slight editorial improvements.
Entire infrastructures built without engineers.
Whole histories proceeding without witnesses.
We sit across from one another for less than an hour— long enough to exchange currency, not long enough to exchange lives.
She brings the food. I thank her.
This is recorded nowhere.
And yet—
somewhere in the vast accounting of everything that happens and is immediately forgotten,
our meeting persists as a minor, precise event—
like a crumb on a table, like a word almost remembered, like the brief and mutual illusion that we have interrupted each other’s lives.
Meanwhile, her life continues in all directions.
Mine does too.
Both of us, at intervals, certain of our centrality.
Both of us, entirely surrounded by things we will never know.
Iris Lennox 