The Silence of Snow

I woke up this morning to a house that felt unusually heavy. The radiator was hissing, but outside, the world seemed to have held its breath. I spent ten minutes just staring at the frost patterns on the glass, tracing the lines with my finger. It is strange how we spend our lives rushing to fill the gaps, to add noise, to make sure we are heard. Yet, there is a specific kind of power in the places where sound goes to die. In the deep cold, everything sharp becomes soft. The edges of the world blur, and for a few minutes, you aren’t an employee, a friend, or a person with a to-do list. You are just a witness to the stillness. It makes me wonder if we are actually afraid of the quiet, or if we are just afraid of what we might hear if we finally stopped talking long enough to listen.

Harry Ravelo has captured this exact feeling of stillness in his work titled White Valley. It reminds me that sometimes the most profound things are found in the places where nothing is moving at all. Does the silence of winter ever make you feel more like yourself?