The Breath of High Places

The air at high altitudes has a specific texture, thin and sharp, like cold silk against the back of the throat. I remember the smell of crushed wild thyme under my boots, a scent that clings to the skin long after the sun has dipped behind the jagged spine of the earth. There is a particular silence in the mountains that isn’t empty; it is a heavy, velvet weight that presses against the eardrums, demanding that you slow your pulse to match the rhythm of the stone. My hands ache with the phantom memory of gripping rough, sun-baked rock, feeling the heat radiate from the surface into my palms. We are so rarely still enough to let the landscape imprint itself upon our marrow, to let the vastness hollow us out until we are nothing but breath and horizon. When was the last time you felt the earth pull the tension from your shoulders, leaving you light enough to drift with the clouds?

Sarvenaz Saadat has captured this stillness in her work titled Taleghan. It carries the same quiet, expansive weight that I remember from the high valleys. Does this view make you want to stand still and simply breathe?