The Weight of Air

There is a moment when the ground ceases to be a certainty. We spend our lives measuring the distance between our feet and the earth, trusting the friction, the gravity, the solid resistance of the world beneath us. Then, there is the leap. For a heartbeat, the body is no longer a creature of the soil but a guest of the sky. It is a terrifying suspension. The wind does not care for your trajectory, and the cold is indifferent to your grace. You are simply a shape moving through a void, untethered from the habits of walking. We look at such things and call it courage, but perhaps it is only a temporary surrender to the inevitable pull of the return. To leave the surface is to acknowledge that we are always falling, even when we are standing perfectly still. What remains when the gravity finally reclaims its own?

Cameron Cope has captured this suspension in his image titled Thredbo Big Air. It is a quiet study of a loud moment, held in the thin, sharp air of a mountain. Does the silence of the descent feel like freedom to you?