The Stillness of Deep Water

There is a specific, heavy silence that arrives with the first frost, when the air loses its moisture and the world turns brittle. In the north, we learn to wait for this stillness. It is not an absence of sound, but a compression of it, as if the earth itself is holding its breath beneath a layer of ice. We spend our lives trying to find this quietude, searching for a place where the noise of our own expectations finally settles into the sediment of the lakebed. We believe that if we can just reach the water’s edge, we might see our own reflections clearly, stripped of the clutter we carry. But the water is rarely a mirror; it is a witness. It takes the weight of the sky and the jagged edges of the mountains and softens them into something bearable. What happens to the things we leave behind on the shore when the surface finally turns to glass?

Laura Marchetti has captured this exact suspension in her work titled Simply Braies. The way the light rests upon the water suggests a moment where the world has finally stopped moving. Does this stillness feel like a sanctuary to you?