The Weight of a Second

I once spent an afternoon in a garden in Oaxaca watching a hummingbird hover near a hibiscus. I tried to track its movement, but my eyes were too slow; it was a blur of iridescent green, a frantic heartbeat suspended in the humid air. Then, for a fraction of a second, it stopped. It didn’t land, but it held its position, locking its gaze onto a single point. In that tiny window of stillness, the world seemed to hold its breath. We spend so much of our lives rushing, our days blurring into a singular, frantic motion, that we forget the power of the pause. It is in the quietest, most fleeting moments that we finally see the intricate details of the life we are living. We are so often defined by our velocity, yet we are truly revealed only when we stop to look back at ourselves. What would you see if you finally stood perfectly still?

Ana Sylvia Encinas has captured this exact feeling of suspended time in her beautiful image titled Hummingbird’s Eye. It is a rare, intimate look at a creature we usually only experience as a streak of color. Does this moment of stillness change how you view the chaos of your own day?