The Geography of Waiting
I walked across an empty marshland late last November, kicking at the brittle rushes and wondering how long a landscape could look dead before giving up entirely. A botanist friend walked beside me and smiled. She knelt down, parted the dry reeds, and showed me the green crown resting just below the frost line. Life has an astonishing stubbornness. It does not require applause to survive the winter; it only requires a fraction of an inch of soil and the patience to wait for the rain. We spend our difficult seasons fretting over our dormant periods, when perhaps we are simply doing what the lilies do: storing sunlight in the dark.
Photographer Shahnaz Parvin reveals this profound natural resilience in The Emergence of the New. It is a quiet reminder that every ending is an incubation. Does this image bring comfort to a season of patience?
