When I Was Little 

We follow gravel trails through a thinning ponderosa forest.

Limestone boulders, eroded white as the full moon, and piles of fallen pinecones act as honor guards along our path.

There is anticipation, the familiar excitement of exploration bubbling up like champagne.

Abruptly, the forest falls behind and we stand atop the Southern Rim. I can’t comprehend the view. My mind tries to convince my eyes that it’s a canvas, a mural, a hyperbolic facsimile of what truly cannot be. 

What god reached down and scooped clear this quarry? What drunken giants painted the jagged and broken lines across its face? 

And, 

I felt,

small.

In the entirety of the eighteen years I’d trekked across this Earth, I’d been at its center. 

But confronted with a Grand Canyon’s grand depth and grand heights across a grand distance—the scales shifted.

I was, unprepared, 

like a fish shown the ocean as it’s thrown from the aquarium.

Trapped, 

freed from a genie’s lamp, but tethered to another’s will.

Paralyzed, 

as the world rose up around me.

And tiny, 

Just  another pebble on the canyon’s edge.

The world didn’t get bigger,

the universe didn’t shrink.

Nothing changed 

but my perspective.

N. Schlegel 4/8/2022