The Cold Breath of Silence

The air in the high mountains tastes like iron and crushed ice. It is a sharp, metallic sting that settles at the back of the throat, reminding you that you are small and that the world is vast. I remember the feeling of wool against my skin, damp from the mist, and the way the silence of a high altitude presses against your eardrums until you can hear the rhythmic thrum of your own blood. There is a specific heaviness to the dark, a velvet weight that wraps around your shoulders like a heavy cloak. It is not a lonely feeling, but a hollow one—the kind of space that asks you to stop moving, to stop thinking, and to simply exist in the thinning oxygen. When the light begins to pull away, leaving only the ghost of a glow, the body instinctively pulls inward, seeking the warmth of its own core. Does the earth ever grow tired of holding the weight of the sky?

Ronnie Glover has captured this quiet surrender in his work titled Moonset over Mt Susitna. The way the light retreats feels like a long, held breath that finally releases into the dark. Can you feel the chill of that mountain air against your skin?