By Carrie Jacobson

It wasn’t until I traveled to the west that I understood how small we humans are.

Here on the East Coast, we have built buildings and cities and skyscrapers. We have surrounded ourselves with structures that, compared to our own bodies, are enormous.

And these are what we see. These are our measurements. These and the trees, and the hills that roll us along, up and down, through our structures and our East Coast lives.

I remember standing in the sagebrush desert of Idaho for the first time, and sensing for the very first time in my life, the enormity of the sky and the earth, the incomprehensible distance between them and the minute speck of it that I took up.

Suddenly, my ratios changed. I was not 1/2 the height of one story, which was, at most, 1/100th the height of the entire building – I was 1/millionth the size of what I was seeing, 1/billionth. I was nothing.

But ah, we easterners, we city dwellers, we foolish souls who measure ourselves against our own constructions! How we are deceived.

I love the feeling of being the size of a mote of dust. I love the universe of sky stretching away overhead to some place I can only imagine, and the run of earth beneath my feet connecting me to the other side of the country, the other side of the world. I love feeling that feeling, and reaching for it in my paintings.

Tags: Carrie Jacobson

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