The Weight of Water

The river does not hurry, yet it arrives. We spend our lives trying to hold the water in our cupped hands, forgetting that to hold it is to stop it. To stop it is to lose the very thing we sought to keep. There is a particular ache in watching something move that cannot be caught. We build walls, we mark boundaries, we name the currents, but the water remains indifferent to our geography. It simply flows, smoothing the stone, wearing down the edges of the world until everything is soft, until everything is quiet. We are made mostly of this same restlessness, this constant shifting toward a sea we will never fully see. If we stood still long enough, would we finally understand the language of the stream? Or would we simply disappear into the current, becoming part of the motion we once tried so hard to measure?

Silvia Bukovac Gasevic has captured this quiet persistence in her image titled Springtime Flow. It reminds me that some things are only understood when we stop trying to hold them. Does the water look like home to you?