The Weight of the Sky

I remember sitting on a stone wall in the Scottish Highlands, waiting for a fog to lift. An old shepherd named Hamish sat down beside me, his hands stained with the dark earth of the valley. He didn’t look at the mountains; he looked at the space between them. He told me that we spend our whole lives trying to fill the silence, terrified that if we stop talking, the world might just drift away. But the mountains don’t care if we speak or stay quiet. They hold their ground, indifferent and immense, reminding us that we are merely visitors in a landscape that was here long before our first words and will remain long after our last. There is a strange, quiet comfort in realizing how small we are against the backdrop of something ancient. It isn’t a loss of self, but a relief from the burden of being the center of everything. When was the last time you felt truly, wonderfully insignificant?

Moslem Azimi has captured this exact feeling of scale in his beautiful image titled When the Moon is Near. It reminds me of those moments in the mountains where the earth seems to reach up to meet the heavens. Does this view make you feel smaller, or does it make the world feel a little more open?