Desert Quartet

The desert makes me feel small. I welcome this feeling.

To be dwarfed, from time to time, by the magnitude of our surroundings, helps calm the disrupting anxiety that what we do matters so much. Any notion of self-importance dissolves when I walk on the other-worldly shores of Antelope Island and the bleach-white vistas of the Bonneville Salt Flats.

The desert landscape reminds me we are merely human: Soft, humble and temporary. I am at the whim of the same forces that laid out those canyons and chiseled those abrupt, life-giving mountains. Nature does not care whether I live or die. It is not inherently cruel or coddling. I both love and hate her for it.

In the Utah desert, I enter the whole of nothingness. I feel both minuscule and held.

Fine Art