I’m alone in Moab, Utah, eating a rare steak cooked over a wood camp fire. I can hear the Colorado river rushing fast and deep, just fifty feet away from me. It’s dark, but starlight outlines the vertical red rock walls that tower above me as my cook fire flickers in the warm dry wind, illuminating the canopy of scrubby trees that form my camp. Staring into the flames and eating the flesh of a large animal, as countless men have done before me, I pondered the discoveries of the day.
Earlier, I came to a realization that I believe in heaven. I know empirically that it exists, because I saw it. It wasn’t a vision or hallucination, or the fevered dream of a zealot. I took photographs and recorded video. I could take you to these places. From one place I could see though time. Not as in metaphor, but the actual timeline of our planet, cracked and split open by cutting rivers and ground smooth from glaciers advancing and retreating over numerous Ice ages, recorded in vivid color and frozen in layers metamorphasized sedimentary rock.
A thick Green layer of rock from a time when this part of the continent was blanketed with fir forests and colossal reptiles thumped about. Gray, lavender slit layers from deep and ancient seabeds once filled with teaming billions of fossilized invertebrates who swam and died in tropical seas. Yellow gold sandstone from when receding oceans pulverized ancient coast lines. Where long windswept beaches rippled with dunes, and continents crept into the arid latitudes becoming parched deserts.
Thick layers of tall red rock formed over eons as murky deltas and river ways deposited layer upon later of silt from continents whose shape we speculate about. These periods repeated again and again, representing millions upon millions of years of imperceptible geological time. Whole oceans filling and receding, entire species rising, ruling and vanishing again and again.
Heaven is here for us to see. Staring down into these gorges, time in both directions is revealed. The past predicts the future where we too will one day be little more than a layer of geologic history. But there is grace in that. A hallowed truth in the temporal nature of life and how fortunate we are to poses the light of consciousness just long enough to witness a flash of it. On a two wheeled multi-terrane rover, I left my home and came to this cathedral. It was here I found my own faith. As the sun was setting and I was descending from another sublime, red rock gorge all these beliefs were corroborated. On the side of a large red boulder were the symbols of the ancient people who lived here long before us. The bear-shaped being, a skeletal insect like creature. The face of a long deceased shaman.
With no stanchions or ropes to protect the petroglyphs like treasured antiquities. The massages from ancient men were just there, like a “JIM WAS HERE.” graffiti carved into a stone. I didn’t need to know the anthropological meaning of the marks to read their plain truth. The ancient people who lived in these canyons understood the magic of this place. They didn’t need scientific method or advanced technology to know about the cycle of things and their place in it. Their narrative struck at the heart of the same truth.
Long after our institutional knowledge is lost to a certain, forthcoming extinction event as it has occurred time and again, the subsequent beings luck enough have the gift of consciousness will also feel the magic of places like this. They too will peer through god’s eyes at places where a hole in time is as real as the rocks they stand on.
You can read more about Jim Downs and his two-wheeled adventures at: Moto Stella
