Like a foot massages, sour cherries in season, and the way the sun glows off his perfect tan chest, the Grand Canyon is endlessly astonishing to behold, no matter how many times one has been there before. It does not matter whether I am driving along the rim as the painted desert sun stretches shadows into grotesque proportions or if I am on donkey back wobbling down too-narrow crumbling cliffs, this crevice in the earth's cleavage, this crack in the crust's back, never ceases to elevate me to giddy rapture.

A day trip from Las Vegas, I remember hiking down into the gorge in the unforgiving arid summertime heat. I climbed down and in down and in, witnessing history on visual display like geography's birthday cake: white layers on top of yellow on top of red, dripped in black.

I remember, too, one New Year's Eve (2005 to be specific) watching the sunrise over the elevated horizon, making peace with my 2004, and speeding back to Los Angeles 100 mph, passing aromatic pines and grazing elk as I buzzed the dawning park exit, in the hopes that that evening I would make a date with a new prospect perchance to steel a kiss from his hauntingly full lips as the clock struck twelve and turned my life into an eternal glass slipper.

But by far, my favorite way to experience the most natural of wonders, is 36,000 miles away in an airplane on a clear day, like today. One can actually see ice melting down the Rockies, collecting into streams, snaking through the landscape, cutting grooves into the planes and hollowing, over lifetimes over centuries over aeons, hollowing out the masterpiece we call the Grand Canyon – one of my top three pleasures in life.

And it is not just the vastness of this cavern making "civilized" living for miles radius impossible. It is not just the ancient stories written on its wise walls. The Grand Canyon’s allure lies in that when I am contemplating it, I am contemplating nothing at all. What was washed away, what was carved through – the absence of earth is what the canyon is. Perhaps we all are just remnants of what we used to be – born blocks of soft clay, chiseled away at by experience, no longer whole, but gaining shape, wisdom, beauty and definition in maturity. The Grand Canyon and I: precious sculptures defined by what isn’t there.

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