The Chasm

What force has formed this masterpiece of awe?
What hands have wrought these wonders in the waste?
O river, gleaming in the narrow rift
Of gloom that cleaves the valley's nether deep,--
Fierce Colorado, prisoned by thy toil,
And blindly toiling still to reach the sea,--
Thy waters, gathered from the snows and springs
Amid the Utah hills, have carved this road
Of glory to the Californian Gulf.
But now, O sunken stream, thy splendour lost,
'Twixt iron walls thou rollest turbid waves,
Too far away to make their fury heard!

At sight of thee, thou sullen labouring slave
Of gravitation,--yellow torrent poured
From distant mountains by no will of thine,
Through thrice a hundred centuries of slow
Fallings and liftings of the crust of Earth,--
At sight of thee my spirit sinks and fails.
Art thou alone the Maker? Is the blind
Unconscious power that drew thee dumbly down
To cut this gash across the layered globe,
The sole creative cause of all I see?
Are force and matter all? The rest a dream?

Then is thy gorge a canyon of despair,
A prison for the soul of man, a grave
Of all his dearest daring hopes! The world
Wherein we live and move is meaningless,
No spirit here to answer to our own!
The stars without a guide: The chance-born Earth
Adrift in space, no Captain on the ship:
Nothing in all the universe to prove
Eternal wisdom and eternal love!
And man, the latest accident of Time,--
Who thinks he loves, and longs to understand,
Who vainly suffers, and in vain is brave,
Who dupes his heart with immortality,--
Man is a living lie,--a bitter jest
Upon himself,--a conscious grain of sand
Lost in a desert of unconsciousness,
Thirsting for God and mocked by his own thirst.
From "Grand Canyon" by Henry Van Dyke,1913

I have always wanted to take a river rafting trip along the Grand Canyon.in fact,every summer,I say I will ,but seem to put it off.This week again ,I was reminded of this dream .I was sitting in my office listening to a mother of a young boy patient of mine.The boy ,for lack of a better explanation had a serious disturbance,a turbulent chiasmic rupture in his mind, his soul,his essence.Despite the many attempts at retrieving,reviving,reconstituting the young boy with the wizardry of modern medicine,the boy seemed to have gotten sucked into a bottomless vortex of internal strife.He was physically present but lost in a wordless mire of pain.His mother watched passively as did I not being able to do much ,barely to contain his suffering.We both watched in fear as he took this ill fated journey.There have been times that all that I could offer was the wordless wisdom , the knowledge , the compassion that I had navigated these rocky,craggy,wild, convulsing rapids once myself as I passively watched someone most dear to my heart get thrown asunder on the same cold hearted ferocious river of life.All that I could offer with all my fancy training and degrees was myself,that I could be a strong ,wise river guide for this mother so she could give courage to her son, that I know how to row so very well against the beating of the currents that try to break us, that life continuously tests our endurance and each time we cross these currents we learn to do it better, with more grace, more discernment.I could not guarantee this mother or this child a safe haven as I have long stopped believing in that.but,what I can offer is some brief reprieve and do some rowing against the current for her and if she watches closely,she will learn and become adept like me and learning to navigate the wild not at all predictable currents of the river of our life....


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