The Weight of Stone

I keep a small, smooth river stone on my desk, worn perfectly round by water that stopped flowing long ago. It is heavy for its size, a dense anchor of earth that feels like it has witnessed centuries of silence. We often mistake permanence for safety, believing that the places we inhabit will always be there to greet us, like a familiar coat hanging by the door. But time is a slow, patient thief. It hollows out the mountains and turns bustling hearths into dust, leaving us to wonder how much of our own history is tethered to ground that is slowly slipping away. We hold onto these fragments—a stone, a name, a memory of a doorway—because we fear the moment the landscape changes and we no longer recognize the path home. If the earth itself can be erased, what remains of the stories we carved into its skin? Is it the stone that holds the memory, or the hands that refuse to let it go?

Mehmet Masum has captured this profound sense of transience in his image titled Hasankeyf – the Ancient Town. It serves as a quiet witness to a place standing on the precipice of being lost to the water. Does this view make you feel the urgency of what we are leaving behind?