The Weight of Unspoken Things

It is 3:14 am. The house is holding its breath, and I am sitting here with the realization that we spend our entire lives trying to build walls against the inevitable. We want things to be perfect, to be still, to be finished. We want the edges of our lives to be as clean as a line drawn on paper. But the earth does not care for our geometry. It shifts when we are not looking. It grows over our intentions with wild, tangled green things that refuse to follow a map. I think about the things I have tried to keep in place—the versions of myself I have tried to preserve—and how they have all been weathered by time, just like everything else. We are not meant to be static. We are meant to be eroded. The question is not how to stay perfect, but how to remain standing when the ground beneath you decides to change its shape.

Andrew R. Braley has captured this quiet, imposing permanence in his photograph titled Perfection. It reminds me that some things are simply too vast to be contained by our small, human definitions of order. Does the mountain feel the weight of the sky, or is it just waiting for us to stop looking?