The Rings of Time

I spent this morning trying to clear out the old shed in the backyard. It is one of those tasks I have been putting off for months, mostly because I knew what I would find: boxes of things that don’t belong to my life anymore. As I moved a heavy, rotted plank, I saw the way the wood had begun to soften and return to the earth. It felt strange to look at something that was once so sturdy and realize it was now just a temporary guest in the garden. We spend so much of our lives building things up, marking our territory, and insisting on our permanence. Yet, everything eventually yields. There is a quiet, heavy kind of grace in the way nature simply waits for us to finish our business so it can reclaim the space. It makes me wonder if we are ever truly the owners of the ground we stand on, or if we are just passing through a story that was already being written long before we arrived. What remains when the structure is gone?

Siew Bee Lim has taken this beautiful image titled Live and Let Live. It captures that same sense of quiet transition and the heavy weight of what we leave behind. Does this scene make you feel a sense of loss, or something more peaceful?