The Secret Place

Saturday, October 23, I stopped at an unmarked location with a small parking area...I think around the Grapevine Canyon area. Folks were complaining about the fog and clouds and rain...but I found this stretch of the Grand Canyon to be the most spiritually beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life.


How can they complain about the sun not being out, I thought. And then I realized, that's so human. We complain about the sun not being out, about our life not being anything but rosy and smooth.


Yet it's often through the dim fog of life's challenges that the sun's rays pierce through, exposing the most exquisite views of life we could have ever hoped for.


I couldn't believe what I was seeing. As the fog rolled by and the clouds shifted, the light began streaming in, dappling the distant landscape with graceful beams of light that you could trace from the heavens. God was surely having a good day in the art studio!


I was beginning to feel that I must have discovered a distant land...a secret place of the Most High. A place were the divine essence of us must hang out and transmit beauty, grace and light.


It seemed so other-worldly, unearthly. If you could picture the Kingdom of Heave, to me, this seemed to be it!


I began to wonder how much of my own life I had dismissed as foggy, dismal and gray.


Doesn't this rock seem to be a spiritual entity keeping guard at the gates? A Buddha or an angel, or even an Indian Shaman spirit....an intermediary between the human and the divine?


How can anyone be wanting for a more spectacular day? The irradiance of this place was moving me beyond words...into a place of pure feeling and energy.


A place where hopes and dreams are reborn.



A place that touches the depths of the soul.


A place that chases out all that is or was haunting you.


The clouds make the light appear to be thickening and thinning. But really it's just our perception. The light is constant. The sun is constant. The good is constant.


"And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold..."


"...it was very good." Genesis 1:31



Let there be light...


...and there was light!


What chased the clouds away?


A Maxfiled Parrish painting, for sure! We're just missing the girl with her arms in the air...well, that would be me when I'm not holding the camera!


I didn't ever want to leave this sacred secret place. And maybe, that's the real secret...that we don't. We carry it with us in our hearts...whether we are shining or cloudy.