People occasionally ask why I return to the canyon so often. My wife, with genuine curiosity. Friends, with a teasing edge. Even my kids, wondering what could possibly be up there that isn’t already seen, walked, and done. “What’s the draw?” they ask. And the irony, of course, is that the people asking are the very ones I return to, again and again. All for similar reasons.
Yet, I never seem to give the same answer twice. The truth is, I’m still learning what draws me in. It’s not just the scenery—though there’s plenty of that. It’s not even the peace and quiet, at least not entirely. The draw is layered. It builds over time, like something slow and faithful. We return to the things we love—not because they’re always beautiful, but because, over time, they’ve become so.
It’s not an easy question to answer—not because I don’t know, but because the knowing is layered. There’s the beauty, of course. The hush of pines. The bend in the trail where the river surprises you, again, even though it always bends there. Water where it was dry yesterday.
But there’s something else, something trickier to name. Something like love.
It takes me to a recent experience: watching Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella with family members. Cinderella and Topher duet their way through what may be one of the supreme philosophical riddles: “Do I love you because you’re beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?” It’s framed like a love song, but the question lingers long after the melody fades. It presses at the tension between perception and affection—whether something is inherently lovely, or if love itself makes it so.
Love like that has more facets than the diamonds we offer to prove it.
That line circles back now as I think about the canyon—not just its beauty, but my history with it.
I’ve learned from the miles I’ve walked there.
The hours on my mountain bike.
The frequent afternoon drives, because it’s always someplace to go—or sometimes just an excuse to head up the canyon midwinter, hoping to offer help if someone’s slid off the road.
The prayers I’ve offered.
The insights received—along with God’s many blank stares.
The way the canyon has met me when I’ve needed it most—not with answers, but with presence.
Over time, affection changes perception—coaxed along by familiarity, shared experience, sacrifice, and sometimes storm and struggle. Just like a face becomes more beloved with years, a landscape too becomes more itself the longer you dwell in it. Which is to say: maybe the canyon is beautiful because I love it.
In college, I wrote a poem I titled Love’s the Accusation. A good try by younger, single me—a me yearning for something I hadn’t yet experienced. But not worth quoting here. At the time, love felt like a complicated transaction, a kind of emotional IOU. Someone says it, hoping to hook a reply—the oldest form of emotional bait. The title came from that place: the tension between offering your heart and fearing the silence that might follow—or being pinned down by someone else prematurely.
Now, with years behind me and love weathered into something more durable, I still think about that phrase. But not as an accusation. More like a question. Can love exist without needing to be returned? Can it just show up, again and again, expecting nothing?
Do I love people, places, even things, because they’re beautiful? Or is it the slow accumulation of shared moments—the patient, quiet shaping over time—that makes them beautiful to me?
Maybe that’s what the canyon teaches me. How to love without needing to be answered. How to keep returning—not for confirmation, but for connection.
“What you seek is seeking you,” Rumi wrote. And so I keep seeking.
And Emerson’s line, “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience,” reminds me that patience may be doing the deepest kind of work—quietly, invisibly, beneath the surface of both trail and relationship.
Nature doesn’t rush meaning. It simply offers itself.
Some mornings, the trail is soft and golden, still wet from last night’s rain.
Other days, it’s shadowed and smoke-thick.
A glistening garter snake might cross your path, and you pause—grateful it’s not a rattler.
Yellow pine pollen might burst into the air like breath.
You might pass no one, or everyone.
Or find yourself in a snowstorm pulling a sedan out of a drift, the driver—bare-legged in shorts and flip flops—grateful for the extra gear you stashed in your back seat to help someone like him.
It’s never the same trail twice—and that’s part of the point.
The same could be said of the deep, abiding connections I feel with loved ones. Some, I met along the way. Others, I’ve known their entire lives.
Carson McCullers once wrote, “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” But the canyon is no longer unknown. It’s known now, deeply. And that knowing carries its own kind of longing. I go back not to be dazzled, but to belong.
And I go home for all the same reasons.
“Place is not just a backdrop for the human drama. It shapes it,” Wallace Stegner said. If he had added just one word—connection—he would’ve said everything. The canyon has shaped me—not all at once, but season by season, return by return.
It’s taught me that growth isn’t always forward motion.
That beauty deepens with presence.
That love, when it’s real, doesn’t require performance or reply.
So no, I can’t always explain why I go back. But maybe it’s this: the ones who ask me why I return—to the canyon, to familiar places—are the same ones I return to. In a world full of obligation and noise, both the land and the people I love reveal their beauty through presence, through staying. Nature changes slowly—cloud by cloud, season by season. So do we. Love takes root the same way: not in grand declarations, but in quiet, repeated return.
The reason I return?
Not to be heard.
Not to be answered.
Not to be owed.
Is it because I love it?
