The Weight of Departure

To leave is to lose the scale of things. On the ground, a street is a boundary, a wall, a history of footsteps. We measure our lives in the length of a block or the height of a fence. But from a distance, the architecture of our existence flattens. The grid becomes a map, the map becomes a pattern, and the pattern becomes silent. We are suddenly untethered from the friction of the earth. There is a strange mercy in this detachment. The problems that seemed insurmountable from the sidewalk are reduced to mere geometry, lines drawn in the dust by people we will never know. We are only passing through the air, suspended between what we have abandoned and the place we have yet to name. Does the earth look back at us, or are we simply ghosts drifting over a world that has already forgotten our weight?

Oscar Garcia has captured this feeling in his photograph titled 1000 feet Above. It is a quiet look at the world from a place where the noise of the city cannot reach. Does it make you feel smaller, or perhaps a little more free?