The Weight of Breath

The morning does not arrive all at once. It comes in layers, a slow thinning of the grey. You stand at the edge of the water, and the air is heavy with the dampness of things not yet awake. There is a silence here that is not an absence of sound, but a presence of waiting. We spend our lives looking for clarity, for the sharp edge of a horizon, but the world is rarely so kind. Most of what matters happens in the blur, in the space between the reeds and the rising vapor. To see something clearly is perhaps a misunderstanding of how we exist. We are all just shapes moving through a fog that refuses to lift, holding our breath until the cold settles in our lungs. If you stay still long enough, does the mist become a part of you, or do you become a part of the mist?

Ronnie Glover has captured this quiet transition in his image titled Misty Morning Duck. It reminds me that some things are only beautiful because they are fleeting. Will you sit with the silence for a moment?