The Small Sublime

We go into nature and we say it makes us feel so small, so insignificant. There are the paintings by Turner and by Friedrich with endless skies and deep unfolding ravines. There are the poems and the novels, bouncing daffodils and restless seas.

What a strange thing to chase, this feeling of smallness, this being a speck of dust in the big Universe.

What about the things that make me feel big? Powerful? It makes me feel immense, like the actual scale of myself has increased, when I think that there are two men on earth who I built inside me.

I’ve been taught to be small and not take up space so sometimes when I see myself from the view of my children I am afraid. All double chin and ugly angles until I see in their eyes a portrait without standards, without judgement. It sounds simple, but for a woman, it is almost impossible to see your own self in this way.

When my newborn nurses, looking up at me like I am God, a towering provider of milk and love, I feel enormous. My hand is a huge clumsy mass next to his little head, but he is not afraid, just curious as he follows it and then grateful for a caress. He is falling into the love of being held by me. He looks out at the view from my arms and is suspicious of all that unsafe space beyond me. I am his realm and horizon. We too have felt the horizon reach its arms around us as the sun sets on the world around us.