Life is Beautiful

I am preparing for my talk at Ted X Bellingham entitled, "Remember to Live." It is drawn from words Kaitlin Kenny had written in her river journal through the Grand Canyon. The phrase, on its face, may seem sad given that Kaitlin died on that trip. But there is also another way to look at Kaitlin's words. Life is beautiful, no matter what we bear, or how long we bear that life for. Remember that, and remember to live.

This short piece, featuring the oldest holocaust survivor, captures that message. It was created by the group Everyone Matters.

Heading Back to the Canyon - Closed or Not

On the eve of my return to the southwest, I want to share this film with you. It is in honor of several things. First - the Grand Canyon - that magic place that takes up a huge part of my heart and life. Second - Kaitlin Kenney - the beautiful young woman who lost her life in the canyon in January this year. I have learned a great deal about life and beauty and hope and faith through her life, and I thank her and her family for that. And finally, this is for all those thousands of people who had planned to see the Grand Canyon, but can not because of the government shutdown. I am right there with you. The trip I planned is not likely to be the trip I will have, but I am open to what comes.

For the Grand Canyon. For Kaitlin. For you.

The Soul's Journey, a Film By Naseem Rakha

This Porous World

 My experiences related to the canyon have been on the order of a spiritual awakening which has left me as porous as the canyon's sedimentary strata, where rain water cleaves and carves and emerges later as beautiful clear springs.

I take power naps. Total shutdowns that last twenty minutes—max. I lay down, close my eyes, and off I go. During yesterday's nap I dreamt I was walking within a pink fog. There was no telling where I was, it was just pink, pink, pink hovering over and around me. A myopic's sunrise? I didn't know. Then I heard water, and soon saw a small clear stream covered in parts with the tiny pads of bright green duck weed. And then there were frogs, dozens of them hoping from one round stone to another.

I love frogs.

And so the dream was good in its dreamy, pink-ceilinged-froggy kind of way. Then a piece of pink fog broke off the roof of my dream and fluttered to the ground. A flamingo feather? Cotton Candy? I leaned down and picked it up. It was a leguminous shaped flower, like a sweet pea, but as small as a baby's eye tooth.

I looked back up, and now I could see beyond the pink to the hulking outline of the canyon. I must have learned about the redbud trees at Indian Gardens in the Grand Canyon somewhere. Maybe I read about them in Canyon Crossing (a book I recommend anyone with an interest in the canyon read.) Maybe I noticed them when I was hiking the Bright Angel Trail in February. Though I doubt that. They would have been fairly nondescript without their blooms or heart-shaped leaves. At any rate, it doesn't matter how I knew about the trees, what mattered was that my dream took me to this desert oasis. A patch of green half way to the river, half way to the rim. Native people sheltered here for more than 10,000 years before the white guys came. The native's planted crops, even orchards.

In the pink-tinged dream I could smell the creek water, taste it in the dry air, hear my feet crush the brittle remnants of last autumn's leaves.

After twenty minutes I woke, put on my glasses and looked out the window of my Oregon home. The hail that had fallen earlier still covered the ground, the sky was still gray. I heaved a great heavy sigh, feeling sad and stupid, longing for the canyon like a regular person might long for a human being.

Redbud trees at Indian Garden on the Bright Angel Trail taken by Willie Holdman

I walked into the kitchen and saw the mail had come while I was hiking at Indian Gardens. Among the bills were two packages for me.

The first package was from from Brian Kenney. It included the program from his daughter, Kaitlin's, memorial, a short note, and a cd the family had put together of music that reminded them of Kaitlin. I read the memorial, thinking of the route that had brought me into this family's life. I have had several people write to tell me they thought the purpose for my residency at the Grand Canyon was so that I could write the essays I did. To be a vehicle, so to speak. Someone who knew the canyon and could speak to loss. Put it in a frame that could be held and reckoned with. I don't know. I don't know much about anything, really. Not much at all.

My son put the cd in our stereo. That cd is playing now, and I am captured by a song I had never heard before. If I was a Raven is sung acapella by Bonnie Paine.

If I was a raven
I'd fly off to the heaven
I'd fly to all my love ones
If was a raven.

If memories are worth saving
I'd savor the feeling
Of knowing love and loving
I'd remember the feeling

Some say up on that mountain
There is many a raven
They call out to the living
From somewhere far beyond them

From the sweet love that has flown on.

The song, of course, made me think of Kaitlin Kenney, and the canyon and its ubiquitous ravens, and my own desire that when I die my ashes be scattered in the Grand Canyon so that I can be part raven and part river. Part pinion, part cacti, part ponderosa pine perched on a shelf of the rim. Part canyon dust that may one day be part canyon wall.

I turned my attention to the second package, a blue plastic bubble-wrap envelop. Grand Canyon return address. Inside, I found a beautiful letter from my friend Kristi Rugg, the ranger who I hiked part of Hermit Trail with and who dropped me off at South Kaibab for my decent to the river. She had written an ode to the canyon. Beautiful heartfelt words about humans' connection to place.

"Generations of people have made Grand Canyon home. The Hopi emerged from its depths, and to it they return when their time here is over. Tiyo, the first person to travel through the canyon's depths by way of the river, found wonder and mystery so far removed from the outside world, sheltered in the unforgiving walls. When he emerged he was changed. He found love, discovered new information, and met his connection to the wildness, Spider Grandmother. Similarly the Diné, Havasupai, Hualapai, Paiute, Apache, and Zuni all have ventured down to be connected and be uplifed.

You are counted among those...the people who find their hearts somewhere in the granite and sandstone....."

In addition to the letter there was a small box. Inside, was a little bear carved from pipestone. Kristi said the bear it is meant to symbolize the devine. Which may explain my ache. My experiences related to the canyon have been on the order of a spiritual awakening which has left me as porous as the canyon's sedimentary strata, where rain water cleaves and carves and emerges later as beautiful clear springs.

I am not talking holy-roller, church-going, give-me-god kind of awakening. I am talking about a sense of connection, to land, to people, to story, and history, to the sky, to water. To life. A sense that there is more to this world then I will ever know or understand and that there are no answers. Nothing definitive. And that nothing, not one thing exists in isolation from another.

Vasey's Paradise Grand Canyon river mile 30

And now, just now, as I write those words, I get an email from my rafting buddy, Bert. He tells me a friend of his knew Kaitlin's family. And the day before that my brother calls to tell me he knew their parents. Years ago, when he lived in Chicago, he would occasionally go to Denver where they worked for the same company. My brother lost touch when he left that job, and he did not put my writing and his connection with the Kenny's together until he saw the mother's name on my Facebook site. He remembers her talking about Kaitlin playing the violin and taking up dance. About them going to music festivals. Kaitlin would have been six or seven then. Just a child.

I close my email, and hold my bear, and listen to Kaitlin's music. I have no idea about much of anything. No answers. No certainties, but this—love is a good thing. It pries open our hearts and makes us available to the world. Porous people with the ability to see and connect in ways we can not when we approach our days with pain, fear and anger.

There is a good path. It has redbud trees in bloom right now, a small stream with duck weed and frogs, and all you have to do to walk it is be open to what comes.

I hope to go back to the canyon in October—to hike to the river under the full moon. I hope to be there in April next year to hike to Indian Garden and lay beneath the redbuds. I hope to raft it in every season of the year. Silty red of monsoon to clear green of winter.

Maybe this is what Georgia O'Keefe felt about New Mexico. She had to be there. It was her muse, the place her heart soared. That's what I feel when I'm at the canyon—a wild soaring heart.

-Naseem Rakha 4/7/13

For the People Who Love Kaitlin Kenney

Kaitlin Kenney prior to running Hermit on her birthday, January 6, 2013.
© Sophie Danison 2013

The night before I hiked into the Grand Canyon I was contacted by a friend of Kaitlin Kenney's. He had read an essay I had written about Kaitlin entitled The Way We Die. Kaitlin had gone missing while camped on the banks of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. She had just turned 21. The young man found me though Facebook and we chatted. He told me Kaitlin was his first love. They had been together for three years, and that even after their romance had ended their friendship remained strong. He said he was having a very difficult time since Kaitlin's disappearance. He described her as "a magic maker, an unconditional lover to all and a bright shining light in a weary world."

This young man was not the first to contact me since writing the essay about a young woman I have never met. Since it was first posted, I have heard from other friends and relatives of Kaitlin's. All of them struggling to reconcile themselves with the loss of this young, smart, and clearly vivacious woman. And with each contact I feel touched by and pulled into Kaitlin's story.

So, while chatting with the young woman's dear friend, I offered to do something for him while down at the river.

It is not easy to get to the Colorado. It takes either a river trip or an 8 mile hike down, down and down. I was leaving to take that hike the next morning, so I offered to make a memorial for his friend: a simple stone cairn built on a point with a good vista of the river. I offered to put this young man's name beneath the stones, then he asked me to include another name, and then while hiking down, I thought it needed to be more inclusive still.

I hope I have not invaded anyone's privacy, but for what is worth, here are pictures of what I made for Kaitlin. Perhaps it is the kinship I feel for anyone who loves the Grand Canyon. Or the kinship I feel for those that raft the swift cold water that carved it. Perhaps it is me, my age, or that I am a mother and a sister and a daughter, or that I still clearly remember that deep locked in connection of first love. Whatever it is, this is for the people who love Kaitlin.

Rock cairn made from Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granate

The cairn is on river south, across from Bright Angel Camp near Phantom Ranch

This went under the cairn

The Way We Die - Kaitlin Kenney

Mile 33 Colorado River - approaching Redwall Cavern

Deep in the Grand Canyon, search and rescue teams have scaled back efforts to find 21-year-old Colorado woman, Kaitlin Kenney. She was half way through a month long river trip when she went missing last Saturday. The group she was with had camped at Tapeats Creek, mile 134.5 on the north side of the Colorado River. When they woke, Kaitlin was gone, and search teams have found no sign of her. It is believed Kaitlin probably fell into the river sometime in the middle of the night.

The Colorado is deep and swift and filled with boulders. But more dangerous than any of that is its temperature. The river is deadly cold. Even in the summer it is cold. The water, most of it, is flushed from the bottom of Lake Powell, and stays about 46 degrees year round, warming only a little during the monsoon when un-dammed tributaries pour in their silty cargo. But it's not summer in the Canyon. It is winter, and even at its base—more than a mile below the snow-spackled rim, it's cold. The last time people saw Kaitlin she was wearing a long coat, thick pants, a hat and scarf.

From pictures it's clear Kaitlin was a beautiful girl with long brown hair, big brown eyes, and a genuine smile. From newspaper descriptions we know she played the fiddle, and was studying Anthropology and Native American Cultures at the University of Montana. I would imagine that this trip must have been a kind of nexus for her. A coming together of dreams and passion. The canyon is America's oldest museum. The walls date back almost 2 billion years, and the arid climate encumbers decay. Native American foot paths, tools, baskets, even stocks of grain can still be found. There is not a single section in the 277-mile-long river trip that does not call out with story and fill a curious mind with wonder. And then there is the granddaddy of all amphitheaters. Redwall Cavern sits at mile 33. Kaitlin would have likely reached the gigantic lens-shaped cave during the first week of her journey, and because she was a musician, and because so many others have done it, I would imagine that Kaitlin Kenney would have played her music inside that stone dome. John Wesley Powell estimated 50,000 people could fit in there. I'm not sure he had that right, but I do imagine that playing an instrument inside that space must feel akin to playing in one of the world's oldest and grandest cathedrals. And Kaitlin would have had that.

Mile 33 Redwall Cavern

People die in the Grand Canyon. In 2010, twelve people died: dehydration, falls, drownings. In 2011, twenty-one more died.

I almost died there. A careless decision to "swim" Hermit Rapids. There are 10 big waves on Hermit—a few of them almost 20 feet tall. Jumping into that icy-water without a wetsuit was a fool's move, and I remember being convinced I was about to die as my lungs seized and my body was thrust beneath the heavy water. But what I also remember, strange though it seemed even then, was feeling that if it was my time, then I was okay with that. If I am about to die, I thought, then the Canyon was the best place for it to happen.

I had found my soul-spot deep in those walls. My life had found its sense. The rim-world and all its problems and indifference and caustic battles over money and time and resources, felt obsolete. I never wanted to return. And so death—if that was what I faced, was best done there—where life felt its fullest.

This, of course, is no help to the friends and family of Kaitlin Kenney. And it's not meant to be. There is no quick-release from the grip of sorrow. Loss, when it happens, becomes part of what we wear. But eventually grief's shroud softens, and the weave becomes thin, and light filters through, and we are occasionally able to set that sadness down. And maybe, in those moments, the young girl who decided to spend a winter month in a canyon, can be remembered, as she said in a postcard to her mother, of having the time of her life—right up to the moment her life was over. 

-Naseem Rakha 1/16/13