I was 2 when I fell down the stairs and landed on my head, biting my tongue. I can still feel my foot slip, still taste the blood in my mouth, still feel my mother’s arms embrace me on the living room floor.

That was the start. I just kept falling and breaking. The people I loved kept falling and breaking, too. My life’s lesson — just the one, and I seem to learn it over and over — is that I’ll always slip, I’ll never really manage anything with perfection, I’ll never come away from a project or a person and say “Well, I did that/him/her/them utter justice, I served that/him/her/them with unfiltered love and kindness.” I’ve written before about my lifelong struggle with chronic and incurable screw-up-ed-ness, the way I’ve always tried and failed and tried and failed and just kept trying, anyway.

But then, some weeks back, I stepped on my Chromebook. At first it worked just fine. Then the screen started to blank out until I wiggled it just right. Then it began to blank out more often, and the wiggling didn’t help any longer, and so I started bending it slightly to get it back. Then, one fateful evening, I bent it so hard it cracked, shooting a quiver of crooked arrows across the screen.

The thing was so unexpectedly lovely, and so totally and irretrievably broken, that I decided I wanted to see more. I grabbed the screen with both hands and bent it toward me, shattering it. The image that resulted was startling: two black tulips tilting toward the light, or in the wind. Immediately I saw in their fragmented, accidental beauty a metaphor for living: What breaks us can bring us to grace.

As a lover of God and science, I thought of the cosmos — the mad forces that made the universe and spin it ever outward, the entropy that leads it into chaos. Its beauty rests in its brokenness. As a Catholic, I thought of Christ — the savior who could only serve God’s purpose, and save God’s people, by breaking on the cross. His beauty rests in His brokenness.

Maybe ours does, too.

All of us are busted up, all falling and dying from birth. Gravity does a number on our bodies. Loss does a number on our hearts. We live in homes that crumble, love in ways that hurt. This is who we are and how we live, always hoping, often shattering, never sure. But there’s joy to be felt, if we’re patient. There’s beauty to be found, if we look.
.

The mountains. The valley. The scored, striated, soaring granite cliffs. The falls crashing between them. The thinness of the air, the precipitousness of the drops, the windiness of the roads — the way you round a bend or come through a tunnel, then look up and gasp with wonder, then look down and gasp with fright. The world feels bigger in Yosemite. Older. It feels more present. Its time is eternal and immediate, because you can see those millions of years within the rock. You can feel those thousands of years inside those yawning glacial chasms.

My dad brought me and my kids on a nine-day trip to Yosemite, and I’ve already written about our first day there and my first encounter with the ancient and majestic giant (they’re not kidding!) sequoias. But it’s hard not to write about them again, because I fell in love with them, and once you’re in love, all you can do is yammer on like a ninny about your infatuation and infatuee, right? I WANT TO MARRY THOSE TREES. (No. Not literally. Go away.)

Clearly, I was gobsmacked. I continued to be gobsmacked as we explored the park, hiking and snapping pictures that I knew would fail to capture the scope and scene. We saw Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and its towering crags. Lembert Dome and its breathtaking, high-altitude, low-oxygen views of the snow-capped Sierras. Yosemite Valley and its massive bluffs and falls (El Capitan is IMMENSE). Glacier Point and Sentinel Dome, where we summitted with two friends from Fresno, and one of them, hearing me gasp at the view, turned and asked: “What do you see?”

I tried to explain it: how the mountains were different from my relatively cozy Northeastern ranges, which were stunning, yes, but a little smaller and a whole lot more familiar to me. And greener.

These mountains are mostly bald, I said. You can see the time etched in their sides. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s somehow foreign. Alien, even.

Later on, I thought about this a little. In part I was blown away by Yosemite because, OK, I’m just a farty old Northeasterner who doesn’t know the West and its landscape that well. But I decided that wasn’t all of it. I decided that in Yosemite I collided with beauty, fell into it, yielded to it, in a way I’d never quite done before. And I came away changed.

I’m not sure how. I’m not sure I can put it into words just yet (though obviously I’ve been trying pretty hard). Sometimes life alters us in ways that are obvious and immediately graspable; sometimes it alters us without our even knowing; sometimes it WHOMPS us with such thundering force that we know in an instant we’ve been changed, though we can’t say how. In the past I’ve been mutated — keelhauled, more like it — by loss and grief, forces I know and recognize as powerfully transformative, even when I don’t know how and why and what I’m actually becoming.

But this was different. This time, the transmogrifying forces were the opposite of death — or no, not the opposite. Something more. Something closer to everything: the epochal hugeness of it encompassed life and death and creation and decay, all of it, every resounding tear and crash, since the broken earth first spat up magma three million years ago. What terror! What violence! And it’s still there — a window into the trauma that made our world. Because I believe in a creator behind the creation, I looked out at Yosemite and saw a wild genius at work. But even if I didn’t, I’d still be faced with the brilliant, beautiful, savage ingenuity of the natural world. And I’d still be awed.

wow.

I had never been to Yosemite before. Have you? No? Go before you die. I’m serious. I have actually never said that to anyone before: “. . . go there/do this/read that before you die.” It’s presumptuous, behaving as though MY life is somehow vastly more stimulating, action-packed and brimming with profundity than anyone else’s. It ain’t, unless you count eating Nutella off your index finger an electrifying life-changer in the extreme.

But Yosemite. The first day on my first visit, I hiked into Mariposa Grove with my kids and their Pop-Pop and, standing there amid the giant sequoias, wowed and gasped oh my Godded and holy shitted before enormous living things that sprang into being sometime before the birth of Christ. Standing there with them, I felt tiny and young and transient but not insignificant, not worthless, not pointless, simply awed in the presence of something so much greater and older than myself. They seemed wise. They seemed to know all, or at any rate more, reaching into a sky that felt suddenly vaster despite the thickening mist that shrouded their topmost branches.

At a tiny stand of sequoia seedlings, a sign explained that they were due to mature around the year 4,000. Again I wowed and gasped and oh my Godded and holy shitted, understanding my own lifetime as something far less than a moment. And again I felt not diminished but swollen with awe — at the weight of time, the breadth of the cosmos, the miracle of creation and the gift we’re given in simply being able to appreciate it. What if God and the universe had given us beauty but denied us the capacity to see it? What if we were blind to the sublime? If we stood at the foot of a giant sequoia and saw nothing to merit a wow? I couldn’t imagine it. I was already struck with wonder, filled with gratitude and oh my Godding like a prayer book.

And I hadn’t even seen the mountains yet.