Breath
By Griffin Messer
I was fourteen years old when we took our trip to the Grand Canyon. That was the first of three trips that Dad and I took, each falling in the summers between my high school years, each time taking our sixty-something-year-old friend, Scott— Peter’s dad—with us. I took more iPhone pictures in those weeks than I’d taken in my entire life beforehand. The Grand Canyon beckoned, and beckons still, years later.
My grandmother has always told me that I am a special gift. Those words appear on every birthday card, which come in envelopes that have personalized return labels, because she still mails things, and which occasionally come on her own stationery. Apparently, she needs that as a pastor’s wife, but she’s never limited herself to telling me with birthday cards. Once I was older, she explained that it’s because I came right after her dad died and that I started the next generation of life in the family and that I was a ray of sunshine from bleakness, a breath from breathlessness.
It’s a 79-degree day in October, which isn’t too strange because October in Ohio is more temperamental than a sit-com mother-in-law, but it still feels significant. I'm sitting in the park that I rediscovered when I was ostracized by my church family because of a life of mistakes that I had already lived, to which I had already died. Death is really just separation. The last two weeks have been cooler, signaling the shifting seasons, but today—and if the forecast is trustworthy, the next few days—will choose to defy what will come. With a glint in some metaphorical eye, the earth itself stares with indignation and spite for the approaching fall from glory. Readying itself for the final fights before Winter. I am twenty.
Even the flowers behind me—which are part of a children’s garden that was sponsored by people that care much more about this city than I ever have—show signs of fall. Peter cared about this city. The Torenia Deep Blues are holding on to life with a tight grip, but the Torenia Pinks, which in their glory glow with a blushing white, have shriveled to gray, suffocated by cold mornings.
I was six years old when my grandparents brought me to a butterfly garden. The sun blazed brightly off of butterfly backs. I like to think that my youth was a relief to them—some tiring breath of fresh air.
They say that the Grand Canyon is a gift of the Cenozoic Era, which they say started 66 million years ago and continues through to today. The National Parks Service attributes it all to vigorous cutting, like a lumberman splitting logs or a fracking rig piercing deep into the earth. The Colorado was a carver, I suppose. She still is.
There is a purity in the scenes of that canyon. Something wild. Something righteous. On our descent, we watched as a hailstorm approached from the West and dissipated before it reached us. Moody gray clouds, which were shallow, rolled forward. A march, an advance, a charge of gray against the light. We saw the haze beneath that signaled their music, their cannons. Yet, they were completely confined inside the canyon ecosystem. No one on the rim was hit by hail, and the air around the rim was close to twenty degrees cooler than the bottom of the bowl, even in May. We took shelter under an outcropping by the trail in anticipation of the storm that chose to sigh and back down before confrontation, breaking apart for the return of the sun, bringing colors of the canyon back to life.
I was eighteen years old when I stood in the cave that they say Christ came out of. I think it would be fair to say it was underwhelming—it didn’t strike me much at all actually—and I’m still not sure whether or not to believe them. It is a cave, that much I know, and Christ might have laid here and he might have walked out the mouth that I eventually walked out of, but I don’t know why they believe it’s that one. The walls are paler than I imagined them, but that’s because I’ve always pictured the cave as something like shale or graphite, rather than limestone. I wonder what His first few moments back from the grave were like, after he’d crushed the head of that snake. Were they quiet, with a gentle rise and fall in his chest, or were they wild, as he burst alive, gasping for air like he'd just come from deep underwater?
Now that I’m older, I wish that I had paid more attention to those early moments with my grandparents. Grandma and Grandpa formed my adventurous spirit before I knew that an adventurous spirit was something that could be formed. Sometimes that only meant that we went to the park near their house, which has large corners of sail cloth for shade even today, and which has a pond with a path I could ride my bike around, and in which all they ever had to do was watch from afar and live vicariously, but other times it meant that we went to see cowboy and Indian reenactments because Grandpa loves Westerns and I got a patch that I never actually sewed onto anything and which eventually got lost for more than a decade in the back of the top drawer of my nightstand, but it didn't matter because we both came alive together on those days.
In the Grand Canyon, as the air sinks to deeper and deeper levels, it compresses. Compressed air releases heat. How much more room do I have to compress before I have to release?
More than the tomb, the Garden of Gethsemane struck me. Looking back that was only because I found silence and stillness there and I didn’t realize how much life I find in silence and stillness—in stopping to breathe—until years later. Yad Vashem struck me too, but that was only because I didn’t understand yet how humanity could have messed up so badly, how we could have let something like that happen. There is a room there full of mirrors. Mirrors and darkness except for a few candles which are reflected for an eternity. Mirrors and darkness and the names of a million children robbed of air with life quickly following. Their names scream for justice because they can’t scream anymore. They stopped screaming eighty years ago. They stopped screaming within twenty minutes. The tragic pendulum swing of silence and stillness. A hall of infinite candles and stolen breath.
The cobwebs that had encompassed the right side of the tree that gives my shade have passed away in the week between my visits, but on the left side, the webs now flourish—boasting today’s catch with a broad smile and a puffed chest.
The Mount of Olives and the steps leading to the Eastern Gate stand out above any other site I saw during my week in the Holy Land. That’s because that’s where He will come back. That cave, which they claim held death when death was beaten, doesn’t do a thing without the man who might have walked out of it, whose last breath didn't come as he yielded up His spirit, who will never have a last breath. That cave represents a blink, a moment of rest for the shadows.
Today, signs of life surround. When I arrived, there were only three people in the dog park behind me, and no dogs to be seen, despite summer’s 79-degree second wind. Yet since, that number has grown and those delightful canines that humanity can’t seem to detach from bring me joy from afar. Joy and life are close companions.
One Summer, when I was nineteen, our family vacationed in the Smokeys. All of Dad’s side went, including Grandma and Grandpa. I started almost every morning of that week sitting on a balcony overlooking densely forested mountains, drinking wisdom from a pastor of more than 50 years, who is completely content sitting on this balcony every morning for hours, who says he wishes he had taught his children as much in private as he had taught his congregation in public, who has found peace in the slowness of age, all while I drank cups of coffee, which were small gifts to start my day well, which were delivered each morning by my grandmother, who is also a gift. That summer was for rest before the coming storm, which would batter us for months before giving way to the Sun again. After weeks spent replaying conversations with pastors and with deacons and with mentors and with fathers who all seemed to have betrayed me, we went to my grandparents for advice and for comfort. Their peace and understanding, their unconditional love and the wisdom that seems only to come with age and experience, their grace brought a refreshing spiritual sigh of relief.
Towards the end of our longest canyon hike, Bright Angel approached. Or rather, we approached it and its lushness called. It is a blaze of green in an otherwise bronze environment. Those Douglas firs stood heralding us all the way back to the canyon wall and to the switchbacks that always look like less effort than they actually are. They always leave you breathing heavier than you think, but the scenery is worth it.
Torenia flowers should be placed in partial to full shade. I wonder if God breathed life into Adam in full shade. The darkness is not dark to him.
Signs of death remain alongside life here in this park. The tree above the picnic table where I sit has refused to turn, but one in the dog park has gone almost entirely to a burnt orange. There are hints of its former green beneath, but its shell—its corona—has only moments left in this stage of life. If trees could be people—and a firm faith in the fantastic allows me to suspend my disbelief and wonder that they could be people—–then the man in the dog park (by which of course, I mean the tree with the burnt orange outer skin) might be having his retirement party at the end of the week. By no means is he dead, or really even approaching that stage, but the signs of age are undeniable, and he is ready for rest.
Five years after the Grand Canyon I realized my similarities to Scott’s son. Similar strengths, similar weaknesses. Both excelling with people, both finding joy in showing high schoolers Jesus, both making people smile, but also both suffering silently—struggling deeply in those all of those moments. I wonder if our struggles were the same. Was it a decade long addiction to pornography for him, like it was for me, or was it something else? Regardless, we both kept ourselves in the dark, hiding from caring eyes in full shade and canyon outcroppings. I hope that’s where our similarities stopped. Peter lost to the rattlesnakes, smothered by them so deeply that he couldn’t find freedom. Rather than fighting for air while drowning, screaming for life when he felt furthest from it, he decided to submit—to accept breathlessness. He suffocated himself with a bag and a helium tank.
After the storm, but before the angels, Dad, Scott, and I mixed more peach tea powder into our dwindling water bottles and moved on. I ran and jumped and explored before returning to our three-man caravan just to run and jump and explore again in search of spaces no one had ever found. Across the Tonto—which runs up the canyon one layer higher than the river—Dad kept me in the line and beat the bushes with his poles to scare out rattlesnakes. I’ve still never seen a rattlesnake.
There is a tree to my left which is well on her way to the same finishing ribbon as the man in the dog park. She has run her race well, with endurance. She remains mostly green, but the tips of her branches have started to turn to yellow and even to orange in some places. It reminds me of the tips of my mother’s hair, which she has dyed consistently, which isn’t near as gray as she believes it is, and of the fringes of my father’s beard, which he lets grow out whenever we go on vacation, which he has to keep clean-cut and in uniform any other time because of the badge and order he swore an oath to more than two decades ago. They've said they'll retire to Arizona because the air is dryer out West.
A new pair of dogs joins the park. An elderly couple in matching Oxford blues tours the gardens marked ‘Field Trials’ that sit across a small ditch. They walk slowly—no, gently—hand in hand, quietly enthralled. They seem to have found something which I am only grasping at, which I come closest to reaching when I sit under this tree, or on a balcony in the mountains, or in the Garden, in these places that I find a release, an exhale. Yet somewhere in those pauses, in those moments that release finally comes and I can let life swallow up what I have left and light breaks through the branches, there is an inhale. The next breath always comes after we let go of the last one, but it is a choice.
The wind, which has been abnormally bold all day, slows for a moment of stillness, catching its breath, savoring.
Griffin Messer was born and raised in small-town, Ohio. Today, he spends his free time exploring local state parks, raising a tyrannical puppy, hosting friends, and cooking for his wonderful wife. His work can be found in the Havik Journal, Ekstasis Journal, and others.