The Weight of Unknowing

It is 3:14 am. The house is holding its breath, and I am sitting with the version of myself that existed before the world taught me how to be careful. We spend our lives building walls to keep the unknown out, forgetting that the unknown is the only place where we were ever truly awake. As children, we walked into the woods not to find a path, but to see what the shadows were hiding. We didn’t need to name things to love them. Now, I look at the ceiling and wonder when the curiosity turned into a chore. When did we decide that knowing the destination was more important than the dirt on our hands? The dark doesn’t offer answers, but it reminds me that the most honest parts of us are the ones that are still looking for something they cannot yet define. If I could go back to that silence, would I recognize the person I was before the maps were drawn?

Elena Zakharova has captured this quiet intensity in her work titled Exploring The World. It reminds me that we are all still searching for something just beyond the trees. Does the forest look the same to you now as it did when you were small?