The Weight of Silence

I woke up early this morning, long before the sun had any intention of showing itself. The house was so quiet that I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the steady, rhythmic breathing of my cat at the foot of the bed. It’s in these moments, when the world hasn’t yet asked anything of me, that I feel the most like myself. We spend so much of our lives shouting over the noise of our own schedules, trying to be heard or seen or understood. But there is a different kind of power in the stillness. It’s a reminder that the earth keeps turning whether we are busy or not, and that there is a vast, ancient beauty in simply existing. I wonder if we are ever truly comfortable with that silence, or if we are always waiting for the next sound to break the spell. What does it feel like when you finally stop trying to fill the quiet?

Farhat Memon has captured this exact feeling of vast, undisturbed peace in the image titled Land of the Long White Cloud. It feels like a deep breath taken in the middle of a very long day. Does this scene make you want to stay in the quiet a little longer?