The Weight of Still Water

The ice does not hurry. It waits for the sun to decide its shape, a slow surrender that takes centuries to complete. We look at the water and see a mirror, but the water sees only the sky, indifferent to the mountains that lean over it. There is a particular silence that lives in the high latitudes, a cold that settles into the marrow and stays there long after the thaw. It is not a silence of absence, but of pressure. Everything is held in suspension. We spend our lives trying to leave a mark, to carve our names into the stone or the snow, forgetting that the earth is constantly rewriting itself. The glacier moves, the lake fills, and the light shifts. What remains is only the quiet. Does the water remember the ice that once held it, or is it relieved to finally be fluid again?

Ronnie Glover has captured this stillness in his image titled Portage Lake. It is a quiet meditation on the things that linger after the cold has begun to retreat. Can you hear the silence in the water?