America’s great gorge is a landscape of imagination as well as geology, both beautiful and brutal, vast and intimate. For Austin folksinger Steve Brooks, it turned out to be a spiritual teacher. In a week backpacking its inner reaches, with four other UUs, he learned a series of lessons – about pain, transcendence, his place in the universe and why so many world religions emerged from the desert. They’re lessons, he finds, that might be as useful above the rim as below it.