The Mirror of Morning

I remember sitting on the edge of a small dock in Ontario, waiting for the wind to die down. An old man named Elias was sitting nearby, whittling a piece of cedar. He told me that water only tells the truth when it is tired of moving. He said that if you wait long enough, the lake stops trying to be a lake and starts being a mirror, showing you exactly what you brought with you. We sat in silence for an hour, watching the trees double themselves in the glass. It is a strange, unsettling thing to see the world repeated so perfectly. It forces you to look at the sky and the earth at the same time, realizing that the boundary between them is thinner than we like to admit. We spend so much of our lives looking forward, rarely stopping to see if the ground beneath us is holding a secret. What do you see when the world finally stands still?

Claudio Bacinello has captured this exact kind of stillness in his beautiful image titled Chilko Lake Reflection. It is a quiet reminder of what happens when the noise of the day fades away. Does this view make you want to sit by the water for a while?