Born of Stone and Sky

Some babies learn to walk on carpets. Others on polished hardwood floors, between coffee tables and cautious hands.

I learned to walk in the Grand Canyon.

Somewhere along the Colorado River—maybe in the Granite Gorge, maybe just above it—my toddler feet found balance on uneven ground. The kind of ground that doesn’t forgive missteps, but that holds you just the same. I don’t remember it, of course. But I’ve been told that’s where it happened. That I stood up, wobbled forward, and took my first real steps surrounded by stone that’s older than memory.

But the story starts before that.

Before I was born, my parents spent a month in the canyon. My mother was six months pregnant with me, hiking through snow and sun and silence. It was winter. The trip was intense—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But the stories from that time are the kind that never age. Stories that get passed around campfires, told with laughter, reverence, and just enough exaggeration to keep them alive.

And then, a year later, they went back—with me. A baby girl in a harness, sometimes lowered carefully over cliffs on a rope. Everything was safe, everything was thoughtful, even if some people reading this might be shaking their heads right now. But there, under the stars, by the river, among the mountain goats and the ravens and the condors… I was home.

I don’t have memories of that trip. But my body remembers.

The softness I feel when I’m surrounded by wildness. The calm that washes over me when the air is clean and the energy flows unfiltered, without concrete or Wi-Fi or the hum of someone else’s agenda. That came from somewhere. It started in a canyon deeper than skyscrapers and quieter than cities could ever dream of being.

And maybe that’s why I’ve spent my whole life chasing the feeling of being held by the Earth.

Scrambling over rocks. Sleeping under stars. Listening for wind and birdsong and the voice inside me that only seems to speak when everything else goes quiet.

Somewhere between the stone and the sky, I learned how to move.

And everything since has been a kind of remembering—how to trust my footing, how to listen to the land, how to belong to something bigger than myself.