Chasing down the muse -- Cherril Doty

Cherril Doty

Creativity requires both falling into the unknown and standing in

one’s own center.

This anonymous quote immediately comes to mind as I sit down to write

this column after 16 days on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

Falling into the unknown while having the sense of finding the very core

of myself aptly describes what this trip down the river and back into

time and through time was for me.

Caught up somewhere in the jumble of the past 18 days and reentry, I

emerge from the adventure filled with the magic, wonder and awe that only

comes from this level of immersion in the process of living.

Between Lee’s Ferry put-in and Diamond Creek take-out, the Colorado

River flows for 226 miles. The river has been the sculptor of the Grand

Canyon. The story of nearly two-billion years unfolds on either side as

one rafts down this seductive river of voluminous silence. This is a

silence that stretches and twists and turns, a silence that fills up the

senses, a silence that seals new friendships -- with places, with people,

with self.

Each day fills with expectation and anticipation of nothing less than

MORE! -- neither knowing nor caring exactly what that “more!” entails.

Giving over to the experience -- this, too, a sort of falling into the

unknown, of giving up parts of myself to source the true core of self.

Fairy tales of the mind reflecting the magic of this monumental place

run wildly rampant, as swift as the river’s current itself. In the

silence of the days, images and ghosts of images everywhere glut my

senses to the brim. Colors and sounds and textures fill my mind and

heart. Yellow columbine, ferns and soft green moss -- cool, dark -- a

respite from the blazing desert sun. Rushing waterfalls appear out of

nowhere in the midst of arid red desert. Cumulus clouds chase gathering

nimbus across a blue sky.

Pale aqua waters of the Little Colorado and the Havasu rivers spill

into the verdant green of the Colorado, rock cathedrals, bighorn sheep,

falcon, deer and the lonesome coyote. Anasazi granaries show evidence of

the people who have come long before us. And those “voices” in the river

that seem to call out to me and absorb into my soul -- dreamlike, deep

and yet, at once, fleeting.

Floating unbound in this spacious healing silence -- the silence of

simply being and then sitting at the river’s edge in early morning

sunlight as a yellow-green oriole alights on a nearby willow branch to my

left. I gaze across at dark granite rock ledges that are apartment-like

homes to lavender-winged swallows who emerge from nooks and crannies to

catch a breakfast of bugs just over the rolling surface of green water

and I remember another silence -- the one filled with light and pale

green bubbles when nature’s river wave grabbed me up and I was plummeted

out of the paddle boat into the water -- falling into the unknown and yet

swimming in my own center as I encounter my own demon aversion to water.

Then, the clarity created in the experience itself as golden sun beams

down.

The rush of not yet fully understood creative energy is engendered in

me at every turn. There is so much to say, to impart in words and images

that I simply don’t know where to choose to begin. What will be the

result of this “Chase after the Muse” as she speaks to me in the colors

of joy, in the thrill of the chase?