The Edge of Everything

Dear traveler, I have been thinking about the way we stand at the threshold of things. We spend so much of our lives walking toward a destination, convinced that the point of the journey is the arrival. But there is a particular kind of silence that only finds you when you stop moving, when you reach the place where the ground simply decides to end. It is a terrifying, beautiful thing to realize that you are small, and that the world does not need your permission to be vast, or ancient, or indifferent. We look out over these great, open spaces and we search for ourselves in the distance, hoping that the scale of the earth will somehow explain the scale of our own hearts. Do you ever wonder if the mountains are watching us back, waiting to see if we will finally learn how to stand still without needing to conquer what we see? What happens to the part of you that stays behind when you finally turn to walk away?

Jack Hoye has captured this quiet surrender in his image titled Yosemite Cliffside. It is a reminder of the space we occupy when we finally stop rushing. Does this view make you feel smaller, or does it make you feel like you belong to something much larger?