The Quiet After the Storm

I spent this morning trying to untangle a knot in my favorite necklace. It was stubborn, a tiny mess of silver links that seemed to have a mind of its own. I sat by the window for twenty minutes, just pulling and nudging, ignoring the pile of emails waiting on my laptop. There is something about a tangle that demands your full attention. You have to be patient, or you just make it tighter. It made me think about how we spend so much of our lives trying to keep things straight, trying to force everything into a clear, logical line. But maybe the beauty isn’t in the straight lines at all. Maybe it is in the messy, reaching branches that don’t know where they are going, or the way things look when they are stripped back to their barest, most honest shapes. When we stop trying to fix everything, do we finally see what was there all along?

Mikaeel Javanbakht has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Black Trees. It reminds me that there is a quiet, steady strength in standing still when the world feels a bit tangled. What do you see when you look at these silhouettes?