The Rings of Time

I remember walking through the woods behind my grandfather’s house in Suffolk. He stopped by a fallen oak, its trunk split open like a heavy book. He ran his calloused thumb over the rings, tracing the years of drought and the years of rain. He told me that a tree doesn’t just grow; it keeps a diary of every season it has ever survived. When we clear a space, we often forget that we are erasing a history that took decades, sometimes centuries, to write. We see a stump and think of it as an end, a clearing, a blank slate for our own plans. But standing there, smelling the damp, exposed wood, you realize that the silence left behind is heavy. It is a quiet protest against the speed of our own lives. We are so quick to build, yet so slow to notice what we have displaced in the process. What remains when the things we took for granted are finally gone?

Siew Bee Lim has captured this quiet weight in the image titled Live and Let Live. It serves as a gentle reminder of the stories we lose when we stop to clear the path. Does this scene make you look at your own surroundings differently?