The Unspoken Agreement

I remember sitting on a rusted gate in a paddock outside of Proserpine, waiting for the heat of the day to break. A kookaburra landed on the wire just a few feet away, its feathers ruffled by a dry, inland breeze. We didn’t move. There was no need to. In that quiet, dusty stretch of Queensland, we had reached a silent, mutual understanding: I would not reach for my notebook, and it would not take flight. It is a rare thing to be truly tolerated by the wild, to be allowed into the periphery of a life that owes you absolutely nothing. We spend so much of our time trying to capture or command the world around us, forgetting that the most profound connections are often the ones where we simply agree to exist in the same space, breathing the same air, without demanding a single thing from one another. When was the last time you sat perfectly still and let the world come to you?

Sara Plukaard has captured this exact feeling of stillness in her beautiful image titled On The Fence. It reminds me of that afternoon in the paddock, where the boundary between observer and subject simply dissolved. Does this quiet encounter make you want to slow down, too?