Before I got 13 chapters into Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts, I never wanted to visit the Grand Canyon.

There was no appeal in seeing in person a big hole which I had already seen in a million postcards and textbooks and Discovery Channel mini-docs.

But in this travel memoir by the author of Blue Like Jazz, this natural wonder is alive for me for the first time. And while I’m not sure if I want to retrace the steps of Don’s physical journey (the trip to the bottom sounds like it might as well be a hike to the moon), I do envy the metaphysical journey he makes. Deeper into the canyon, and deeper into himself.

Stripped of other wants and trivial things, he’s left with just his own mortality and his own mind and a desire to push past his own distaste for journaling to record this as an Eben-Ezer stone in his life.

As much as I have a desire for outward travels – Bryan and I chatted lightly the other night about borrowing an RV and hitting the road for three or four weeks one summer, see the America that had been concealed to us, I’m starting to respect the need for inward journeys too.

I want to see sunrise over Macchu Picchu but I also want to know where my anxieties and fears have their roots. I want to see where land terminates into that great expanse of ocean, and I want to plumb the depths of this strange, unexplainable love that keeps me, even against my best efforts, keeps me.

Thanks Don for sharing this journey. Even though I thought some of the metaphors were a little forced and some of the description a bit over the top, they were still good words, and they were yours, not mine anyway. It’s what you’ve helped stir up which counts more and I think if you were here, you’d agree with that.