The Rhythm of the Unpaved
I often find myself wandering the periphery of the city, where the manicured boulevards surrender to the dust and the wilder edges of the map. There is a specific silence that lives in these places, a quiet that isn’t empty but heavy with the weight of things that have been here long before the asphalt arrived. In the city, we are obsessed with the clock, with the next tram, with the arrival. But out here, time feels circular, tethered to the breath of an animal or the slow, deliberate pace of a path that doesn’t care for destinations. We spend our lives building walls and glass towers to keep the elements at bay, yet we remain fundamentally drawn to the raw, unpolished earth. It is a strange, ancient longing—to be unburdened by the noise of the grid, to move through the world with nothing but the rhythm of a heartbeat against a living, breathing companion. Does the city ever truly leave us, or do we just carry its ghosts into the open fields?
Fidan Nazim Qizi has taken this beautiful image titled Ride a Horse. It captures that quiet, timeless connection between the rider and the land, far from the city streets I usually haunt. Does this stillness speak to a part of you that longs for the open road?
