Christmas With The Chans

JWise Photo of the Day

Elizabeth and Alfred Chan owners of Little Rangoon Taste of Burma

From China King in Chandler to Szechuan Palace in Phoenix over to Totties Asian Fusion in Scottsdale today on Christmas day, we have had the opportunity over the last couple of months to try some new foods. These are our guides on our path into Dim Sum and more traditional Chinese food: they are owners of Little Rangoon – Taste of Burma restaurant. They are Alfred and Elizabeth Chan. Most of our time with the Chans who are from Burma has been as diners at their restaurant. On the rare occasion that their own restaurant is closed such as on a holiday, we have been able to join them for lunch such as on Thanksgiving and now today on Christmas. Sadly, I don’t foresee another holiday coming up any time soon, but, since their restaurant is closed on Mondays I have met them a couple of times then. Today, Caroline and I visited Totties with Alfred, Elizabeth, and their daughter Rosalind and were treated to more than a half dozen items prepared by Tottie herself for us to sample, along with a dessert sampler tray of nine different ice-creams and a kabocha squash custard – all was yummy. Our thanks go to Tottie and her family for welcoming us to such an opulent treat today.

Over the past few years, we have met some great people including Sonal Patel and her immediate family along with her extended family which seems to be nearly every other Hindu in the Phoenix area. We have enjoyed our time shared with Rob and Jerry out at Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm as we do the rare moments with an old friend down in Tucson, Arturo Silva. Recently a Turkish friend and his German girlfriend stepped back into our lives for a short few days – how we wish we had far more time to spend with these two. But this is our problem with these people who we come to enjoy being with, we have too little time to divide our attention among these really wonderful friends but would like to let them know how much we appreciate this rare ability to laugh with one another.

On Monday, the Chans and I will be meeting for lunch again, hopefully at Great Wall Cuisine on Camelback in Phoenix and then going to Alfred and Elizabeth’s to watch part of the original Chinese five-hour version of Red Cliff with Tony Leung (one of Caroline’s favorite Chinese actors, the other is Andy Lau). So, Sonal, if you are reading this, when are we going out on a Monday when your shop is closed?

What Form The Alien?

JWise Moments

Native American embracing the alien - Artwork by Dion Terry

Maybe on this day, as on so many other previous days over the last year, you find yourself sitting around the proverbial fire as you and the generations before you have done. The chant of history runs through your mind’s eye in song and vision, and your dream of how life might unfold, or maybe you contemplate the legacy of a people who have lived with what they were given by the earth. But today, you are visited by an alien. Maybe the alien looks like you, maybe not. What does an alien look like anyway? For us, the alien has a big head with large dark eyes, but to the man next to the fire, was his alien my ancestor? Was he an alien man with ideas of domesticating nature, enslaving his fellow man, and allocating the resources of the land to those who shared his privilege? Just how strange is it to sit around the fire with that alien? Does he share your pipe or reject it? Does he share knowledge and stoke the embers in the fire to help keep you warm? Or did the alien give you the short end of his stick, a kind of anal probe? Are you living with your alien? Are you your own alien? How is it that we invite the alien into our lives? Is the alien’s story your story? Or do you just allow it to be because you have become too weak to remember your own? Without tradition, without history, without community, we allow the alien to overtake us, infect us, and subsume us. Our lives are short, experiences fleeting, and opportunities rare. Why would we happily allow our freedom to be taken away, to sacrifice the chant of our story for the song of the alien? Maybe it is time for us to subvert the alien, to take back the chant, to sing our own song, to celebrate the land we live upon, to smell the flowers, and to help the alien see life from a new point of view.

But do we still have a point of view? How can we find what we have lost if we don’t know what was ever lost in the first place? Who do you trust when there is no one else left to trust? Are all voices of truth masks for yet another subversive message from the alien? We cannot turn back time, we cannot return to old ways when we are trying to find new ways, and maybe we cannot find the truth of which new ways may lead us in the right direction. Could it be that our fear of sharing the pipe and stoking the fire has led us to this place of immobility, stagnation, and the detriment of our spirit? It might be we will have to light a bonfire beneath our complacency. And that if enough fires are burned to clear away our mental cobwebs, a light will shine to guide us. I do not speak of literal fire, it is a metaphor for putting your mind to the light, to burn away the underbrush of conditioning, to cut a path to who you can be. Should it remain a priority of our lives to continue acting as slaves to the alien? Who is the alien? The alien is the Other. It is that which whispers across a screen informing you what externalized manifestations of consumer consumption are most likely to help form you into a fully realized, satisfied, and successful winner. It is the surface of appearance that beguiles us into following whims that promise salvation through the sacrifice of money for a quick fix of consumptive pleasures. But when this fails, when false identity buckles under the facade, and we are left empty and lonely, there are prescriptive medicines, so instead of finding the spirit of self, we can further turn away from awareness to a cloud of dizzy acceptance that our situation is best met through baptism in the serotonin pool of bliss.

Today, I am not certain or even a little sure where my path leads as I let go of the hand of the alien to grab another alien hand, my own. But I do know that as I walk along into uncertainty, I am in the company of the many ancestors who came before me and who also walked into an uncertain world and hope for the future. It was from this sense of curiosity and ability to explore one’s limitations that humankind embraced an alien world and found an earth that was habitable and conducive to supporting the dreams and ambitions of the alien creature that walked its lands. The earth is no longer an alien to us nor we to it; it must surely be the time for us to sit down around the fire, keep one another warm, share the pipe, and create new chants of how we can come to love one another.

A New Language for Survival

JWise Thoughts

RTR as she wants to be known posing at Starbucks for our interview on December 17, 2009

Dr. Aslinger emailed yesterday, telling me of a grad student he is mentoring he would like me to meet. I suggested the same Starbucks as a suitable location, and with a brief description of the woman, I sat down to await her arrival. While she is willing to share the nature of her studies and what avenues of interest she is exploring, she was apprehensive of having her name shared on my website so as to maintain her privacy and not divulge to the world at large just who it is raising some of the questions she is exploring I will simply refer to her as RTR for the rest of my blog posting.

RTR set the stage by first telling me about her studies in order to establish a background for how she plans to attack her theories. Now nearing thirty years old, RTR received her Bachelor’s in Filmmaking from USC, then worked for a short time in Germany in the advertising industry. It was during this time that she became aware of the Max Planck Institute. Through conversations with students from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, she started exploring how the brain processes language and affects cognitive behavior in regards to how this could be incorporated into her filmmaking. Back in Germany, talking with yet another student, RTR learned of an undergrad project at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden where students looking at how cells form tissues were contemplating if pigments could be programmed with genetic information in order to have them self-assemble art.

RTR’s original interest in film began with the observation that there were a handful of movies being made that contained a kind of psychedelic spirituality, such as Dune, Contact, AI, Altered States, and 2001 – A Space Odyssey. While Dune, with its reference to spice, piqued her interest, it was the time dilation scene with Jodie Foster in Contact that struck a chord. RTR felt that this particular scene exemplified a move from suggestive psychedelic spiritual hints to overt references to a particular entheogen. This interest was to lie dormant during the intervening years of working to make a living, but that was about to change.

Germany was leaving its mark and effecting great change in RTR’s life and outlook upon the arts and reality, but it was time to return to America. Trading the camera for a new bookbag, RTR returned to her studies and finished her Masters in Computer Sciences for Biomedical Informatics to lay a foundation for a better understanding of genomics and computational biology. As a grad student still unsatisfied with the limits of her knowledge, she has since embarked on a lengthy education process, currently working for a Professional Science Master in Nanoscience and her Ph.D. in Molecular / Cellular Biology.

The aim of this multidisciplinary trajectory is to find answers or, at a minimum, to create a better allusion to an artistic model for film or video, allowing us a glimpse into her view of the human relationship to the universe. The crux of her quest is to gain an understanding of the complexity of the mind and its capacity to be fed by an enormity of information and influences contrasting with our place in a slow-moving world where mountains don’t move; forests stand witness for decades if not centuries and clouds drift by – why should your minds have such innate ability for an environment that seems to plod along? RTR believes there is more to things than what meets the eye, ear, nose, sense of touch, and thoughts we appear to crawl through. She would like to find the key to the existence of a more primitive or intuitive language she suspects we may yet carry embedded in our instinctual knowledge, a language that exceeds the limits of our current understanding and lays bare the maze of survival information and ability to dream to our conscious mind.

At the core of her thesis is that our DNA is not as simple as it appears. Not that it is overly simple with what we already know regarding the four building blocks that make up DNA (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine – ACGT), but she thinks it is far more complex than we have yet considered. Specifically, she believes that encoded in our chromosomes amongst the 3 billion base pairs that define our genome is more information that we are yet to discover. This is where Dr. Aslinger’s work comes into the equation as with his theory of a particle of time tinier than any theorized particles to date and his ideas regarding fractal energy, RTR has begun exploring a hypothesis that our 3 billion base pairs of DNA contain a fractally encoded data state holding the collective survival information that proved efficient to any and all species since life appeared on earth billions of years ago.

She is curious if this embedded information acts as our compass for the evolution of humanity on levels that are subconscious to us but are at work in order to propel our species forward and hopefully not make the mistakes of earlier life forms that weren’t well adapted to survive. Specifically, she has looked at the human mind with its capacity to perform at between 10 trillion and 20 quadrillion calculations per second (this is open to interpretation with no definitive answer to precisely how fast the mind operates) and that we have storage capacity in the neighborhood of 100 terabytes. Consider that 20 million books in the Library of Congress would represent approximately 20 terabytes of data, that 144,000 songs encoded in the mp3 format would require one terabyte of storage, and that 10 million photos would require approximately 20 terabytes of data storage, and you see that considering we may be able to read three to five hundred books over a twenty-year period and that the average person might listen to and remember two to five-thousand songs, there is an incredible amount of storage capacity in our mind that we are not able to withdraw and playback with the precision of a computer but for some reason, we have this capacity and maybe it is being used for something.

Then there is the question of the speed of calculations that the mind is capable of while our senses and thoughts seem to go about at a rather tepid clip. Why have this processing power but not have the ability to render our memories in the waking clarity of our visual perception when a piece of silicon called a graphics chip running at a magnitude slower than our brain has the accuracy to display dynamic data sets of changing imagery combined with sound and action? RTR believes that, in reality, our mind is interpreting a massive data set, filtering life lessons learned over the eons, and that these instincts guide human endeavors to work from past failures to ensure the survival of our species. Somewhere in our evolution, information was being fed piecemeal to our slower senses that are limited by gravity, the need for food, sleep, and a short life span to act in a way that would sustain an ever-expanding population. Earlier species may have destroyed their environment by eating more than the biota could supply, and so the lesson learned and subsequently encoded into our DNA is that for our species to survive while our population is skyrocketing to the tune of billions, we would need to develop systems of food production able to sustain such a mass without requiring each individual to participate in growing their own food. Similarly, a shelter for a fragile species is at a premium when tool-building skills do not exist, so maybe a slow focus was necessary to allow humankind to work out the complexities of how to build ever-expanding demands on a secure shelter to ensure the protection of a species from the natural elements.

RTR went on to explain that over the last thousands of years, our growing knowledge of mastering natural resources and creating new artificial resources has put us on a trajectory to either save this organic creature from destroying its environment and potential or succumb to the apparent destructive forces that at times forces species into extinction. RTR told me how happy she has been to meet Dr. Aslinger because she can see that the approach of 2012 and the possibility of a mass awakening of our awareness to our real potential may be becoming a requirement for our survival as it appears that our conscious mind is overwhelming our subconscious instinctual needs for survival and that we risk failure of yet another life form – ours.

Working within this new framework of hypothesis, RTR would like to share visually through a medium most of us watch, television and film, that we are wasting our potential and risking our survival by not understanding the complexity of what we are trying to accomplish as the breathing, thinking, imaginative creatures we are.

On a final note, RTR is fearful that we may have an inherent propensity towards stupidity and ignorance and that this, too, may be part of the knowledge built into our DNA. Maybe the Egyptians, Mayans, or if they existed, the people of Atlantis, found that their knowledge of the world proved destabilizing to their successful continued existence and that in our current state of awareness, we are but pawns moving sentient life out of the organic form and into an artificial life form not affected by lack of water, food, warmth, and cold. Maybe the highest embodied form of a being with a physical presence will have to be a silicon and electron-based piece of hardware that can be imbued with the qualities of a soul, but that can exist under harsh conditions while still being able to catalog, dream about, and share the immense beauty that can exist on a world that is but a trillionth of the entirety of our universe. Or are we doomed to build the inheritors of our legacy as we extinct ourselves due to our myopic view that centers the individual as a cornerstone in their own mini-universe where we can consume and destroy what suits us? Can we awaken to our shared adventure and work in a coordinated, enlightened, and knowledgeable way that will allow a three billion-year history to succeed in creating a kind of heaven on earth?

TIME FIRE

JWise Moments

Dr. Justin D. Aslinger scientist and author

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with an extraordinary young scientist who may be the emerging new voice for Protophysics. As I attempt to share a condensed version of how our discussion progressed and some of the topics we covered, there may be gaps where the depths of our talk swung beyond my comprehension. The scientist I’m referring to is Dr. Justin D. Aslinger.

It was a random moment at our local Starbucks where I bumped into Dr. Aslinger and noticed he was reading “Protophysics of Time: Constructive Foundation of History of Time Measurement” by Peter Janich. As I have an intense interest in the subject of time, I struck up a conversation. The doctor tried explaining the dilemma of protophysics, which attempts to ascribe an absolute background geometry to space-time without knowing the correct formula of geometry for measuring or describing space-time accurately, part of the reason why protophysics never gained traction with the scientific community.

He went on to describe his efforts in the field of explaining space-time to help guide humanity through the hurdles we face as we approach the year 2012. Two-thousand twelve is the window we will walk through to become aware of our inherent perdurantistic qualities, which means our currently disconnected temporal parts will awaken to the fourth-dimensional reality and thus will acknowledge our existence in a new measure of knowledge of time as a physical dimension similar to the microscopic world we have come to know through the sciences only in the last couple of hundred years. Currently, we are stuck in what the Mayans could have regarded as the Endurantistic age, only believing in the third dimension and disregarding any potential reality that might exist outside of our immediate observation. Although many people would say they believe in god and that god may have an impact upon their lives, they do not connect science, the physical world, and the spiritual realm into a continuum of reality and existence we could be consciously aligned with, but this is precisely where 2012 is taking us.

Dr. Aslinger is also trying to create a paradigm-shifting software tool to help society with this transition called Time Fire. T.I.M.E. F.I.R.E. is an acronym for Temporal Immersive Multidimensional Enlightenment For Intraspecific Rebirth Emergence – a mouthful for sure. What this means is that we, as the human population, must escape the boundaries of time and space limitations of our current set of senses to become cognizant of the multidimensional world in which we will peer across time through space and thus be reborn within our species as a newly enlightened sentient human with access to the fourth-dimensional world we actually exist in.

One of the first steps on this path will be the introduction to his new theory of time. In Dr. Aslinger’s conception, time is a particle that is dividing like cells in a human body. This division is an exponential process where one particle gives rise to 4 new particles, then the five collectively produce 20, becoming 25, followed by 125, 625, 3,125, 15,625, 78,125, 390,625, 1,953,125, 9,765,625, and so on until after 23 iterations we are now over three quadrillion particles of time and so on, again and again, moving forward with time – a hyper exponential model should be apparent to anyone at this point through this kind of mitosis theory of time. According to this model, time is divided in every instant, although the Dr. admits he does not know what that instant is or how yet it could be measured.

He also tried to explain space-time in relationship to infinity, saying that over the course of the life of the universe (approximately 14 billion years) that, time is all matter, including the more mysterious and as of yet unexplained dark matter. Dark Matter (which comprises 95% of the universe) is responsible for the gravitational effect on visible matter because, in reality, time is a physical phenomenon similar to an atom, and as we learn more of Aslinger’s theory of time, we will come to understand that time is the very building block of all matter, both visible and unseen in the universe. Anyway, what happens is that as time particles have been dividing over the previous 14 billion years, they have stretched the universe to what we understand as infinity. If we could build a spacecraft that could take us to the edge of the universe at the precipice of infinity, in that instant, we would recognize the edge of space-time, but the by then immensely exponential division that would occur in the next instant would again push the border of space-time to yet another immeasurable expansion of the universe.

So what are we doing here in time? Time is the substrate used by the brain much like a train traveling down a rail, allowing the brain to act as a temporal imaginative mapping edifice translating dimensional morphogenetic transitions (changing or interpreting an ever-changing moving forward reality). Time is the universe the brain rides upon, the brain is an interpreter of time, all things are time, made of time, in time, and everything, and all things are manifestations of time as all things exist within time, made of the very fabric of time. We are surfing or swimming within the particle soup of time. As time moves forward, we, too, are being thrust forward with every instant that comes into existence from times march forward.

Interestingly, I start to surmise that if time is moving forward and it is a physical presence, then due to the ever-increasing abundance of time from its exponential division, isn’t it also possible that with all of the previous time particles that are now abundant throughout the universe that we should be able to travel upon that rail of time, forward and backward? After all, isn’t the Hubble telescope photographing light that has traveled across time, showing us that for us at this moment, the past is right before our eyes? Sorry about my naivety regarding relativity and probably a basic law or two of physics, but I am but a layperson trying to tread water in Dr. Aslinger’s world.

In a previous paragraph, I referenced people’s belief in God and the spiritual realm. This area was also of particular interest to me, and I asked Dr. Aslinger to expound his thoughts in this regard, to which he obliged. He believes we have a multi-dimensional soul, a soul that extends beyond the physical boundaries of our bodies, and that this idea of the soul is, as of yet, an undiscovered energy, fractal energy. This new energy is a mechanism of communication and existence for entities beyond our perception who live in that substance of time in a spectrum of light and energy invisible to us humans due to our blindness to the fourth dimension. Our souls are actually energy fields that radiate beyond ourselves (some see this as auras) and, through the grid of time, influence and accept influence from other waves of fractal (soul) energy. Our karma plays a pivotal role in how the shape, form, and frequency of our energy are manifested. This manifestation is best described within chaos theory and strange attractors, where chaotic motion gives rise to these strange attractors that vary in detail and complexity. So, as our soul and karma are forming during our lifetimes, our actions help shape the soul, detailing how complex and intricate our energy or soul should appear as it matures. Conversely, this shape also acts as a strange repelled, keeping those of bad karma or soul away from our personal space. This doesn’t always hold true, though, as chaos and fractal energies are pulsing, flowing, influencing, and changing with the expansion of time.

Other souls without organic beings are ethereal bodies whose shape arises from taking a dimensional form built upon and encased within time (as we are) organized by a coalescing of fractal energies (just as our bodies utilize plant and animal matter in the generation of energy that drives our nervous systems and generates heat within our organic shell). From this plane of existence, which some scientists see as the multiverse or parallel universes, higher energy (older) souls travel the surface of multidimensional reality and, on occasion, collide with our plane of thought. The multiverse and its individual iterations are possibly other planes or frequencies of higher-order time. Higher-order time may be an ascent that the soul climbs over time on its way to true enlightenment or nirvana, culminating in Godhead. This might explain divine inspiration, communing with the dead, artistic and scientific inspiration that appears to arise out of the blue as this spiritual energy collides with our world and our souls.

How does one influence the shape of their soul to make the transition to 2012? We must work to improve our soul health. Love, nature, and experiential growth come together to show us beauty, which inspires confidence for the growth of maturity. We must embrace these cornerstones and recognize how we impact the natural order of things via this shared quantumspace (the simultaneous space occupied by the energy of all things occurring in the same moment of time). When we improve our soul shape and good karma directs us towards love and beauty, we are also improving life in the universe, the universe that we will move into as we give up our organic form. In 2012 we may begin to see into this world, into this quantumspace and then we will begin to understand how our negativity, war, feuding, and fear retards our souls’ growth and its impact upon the ethereal bodies who are trying to elevate our collective knowledge so that upon our new birth into what some will call heaven we will enter a universe of life that is being painted by the very experiences we share through our fortuitous moments as an organic being collecting images being created by imagination and our constant transfiguration of reality, art, and nature.

Through fear and an inability to embrace new experiences, we drain the energy of soul growth needed to transcend our current physical/organic being. Living in repetition, watching television reruns, listening to the same 1000 songs we’ve listened to since childhood, when the world has a collection of over 3 million songs, going to the same place for vacation year after year, watching one more iteration of men throwing a ball down a field instead of playing the game themselves, limiting our diet to the foods we already know, and not waiting to learn about, foster, nurture, and embrace love – our soul stagnates. We must love ourselves, life, and others. We must love animals and plants, water and sky, mountains and deserts, our imagination, and our human potential. We must throw off the voices that instill fear, consumption for the sake of finding identity, and your fear of the unknown. We ultimately enter a great unknown where time is infinite, and your new experiences may be infinite too, but it will be our soul growth and maturity of spirit that will dictate how that human energy bestowed upon us will transition to the fractal energy universe of time that is building a home in space for those of us whose souls are equipped and ready for the shock of seeing reality for what it may really be.

Going Home

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Bright Angel Lodge at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona

Attention: Well, this is embarrassing. I didn’t post anything at all about this day we were driving home after signing the big check to raft the Colorado River, so here in late 2022, I’m adding what I can. You’ve been warned.

Sure, we arrived at the Grand Canyon yesterday knowing things were snowy, but somehow we missed the weather report that said snow overnight was expected. We’re not prepared for this in our little Kia.

Road out of the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona

I want out of here ASAP. We were assured that the road was graveled recently and that we shouldn’t have any problem but that doesn’t mean we weren’t white-knuckled and severely puckered about this escape from White Hell.

Heading towards Flagstaff, Arizona

Cold black pavement, that’s what we need, and more of it.

Wintery day in Arizona

If it snows past this point, it’ll be snowing in Phoenix when we get home. Good thing that never happens.

Going Rafting

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

A snowman standing sentry on the Rim Trail at the Grand Canyon National Park on December 12, 2009

And then the malevolent snowman whispered unto me, “Yellow ice custard, dripping from a cold mule’s eye. Snow igloo canyon wife, digitalis priestess, Boy, you been a naughty man you let your thermals down, I am the iceman, they are the icemen, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob”. Then he winked and said, “Seriously, I am not dead, I’m merely frozen.” I don’t know if I got the shivers because I was cold, enlightened, or maybe a little crazy. But here we are out at the Grand Canyon National Park.

On the snowy Rim Trail at the Grand Canyon National Park on December 12, 2009

After the snowman gave us instructions to follow the long and winding snow path that leads to your door, we were soon walking rim-side bundled up and warm with my tripod gently weeping. Along the trail, we can’t help but notice all the cold people begging the question, where do they all come from? Ok, enough of the Beatle’s homages. We are here in the Grand Canyon for serious business. Today is Caroline’s birthday.

Snow covered rocks at Mather Point in the Grand Canyon National Park on December 12, 2009

Up before dawn, we left Phoenix around 6:30 for the 217-mile (351km) drive north to the canyon. Snow and cold greeted us not far from Flagstaff and stayed with us for the rest of the day. Along the canyon rim, the roads were snowy but drivable without chains – slowly. Our first stop was at the visitors center, followed by a short walk that took us out to Mather Point (this photo is just above). While we had on long undies, down vests, gloves, and hats, it was immediately obvious we would need to don our shell pants and jackets, fleece jackets, and the all-important balaclavas. With cold ears burning at your skull, all the core warmth in the world will be for nothing. All wrapped up, we were ready for a serious hike.

Snowy Grand Canyon shrouded in fog on December 12, 2009

First, though, we slowly drove to the Bright Angel Lodge, checked in, and lunched at the El Tovar before embarking into the cold outdoors. With a canyon full of fog, temperatures of 29 degrees (-1c), and a wind chill of 23 degrees (-5c), we were not about to slog down the Bright Angel Trail to Indian Gardens on this fine frozen day. Our options were sipping hot chocolate at the lounge in the El Tovar Hotel or a casual stroll 2.8 miles back to Mather Point along the Rim Trail and a bus ride back. We knuckled down and took the cold, hard adventure.

Caroline Wise signing our deposit check to raft the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on a Dory in 2010

Speaking of adventure. Yes, we are in part here since today is Caroline’s birthday, but we also have taken ourselves cliffside to commemorate the signing of a check that is a deposit on an upcoming Grand Canyon adventure, which, for the two of us, will likely be one of the greatest experiences of our lives. It was just our luck that two people canceled their reservations for an 18-day dory trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. After many a conversation with nearly all the girls who work for the wonderful company OARS who answered all my questions, sent me literature, and dealt with even more phone calls, we finally received our invoice with instructions to send in our deposit. Not satisfied with just signing another check, I needed a momentous location to bear witness to our probably-once-in-a-lifetime grand adventure; what better backdrop than the Grand Canyon itself?

Late afternoon view into a foggy and snowy Grand Canyon on December 12, 2009

Now, with the ritual accomplished, there was little to do besides take in the foggy, mysterious beauty of the canyon on a day like no other we had seen while visiting this National Park. Other visitors shivered and walked briskly; we lingered and inspected the wintery details around us, staring into what should have been an abyss, where occasionally the fog would lift, and hints of the breadth and grandeur of this place that lay shrouded in winter hiding below would be exposed only to fall back into obscurity as air currents changed and fog once again blocked our view but opened new horizons of imagination of just what the many faces of the Grand Canyon can show those who desire to witness their beauty.