The Velocity of Being Small

When I was seven, my sister and I discovered that if we ran fast enough through the tall grass behind our house, the world behind us seemed to vanish entirely. We were not running toward anything in particular; we were simply testing the speed of our own legs against the stillness of the afternoon. There is a specific kind of joy that belongs only to children, a frantic, unburdened energy that treats the ground as if it were made of air. We did not know then that the trees we wove through were dying, or that the fences we vaulted were leaning under the weight of years. We only knew that our lungs were burning and that the wind felt like a secret we were finally allowed to keep. As adults, we learn to walk with caution, measuring the distance between our feet and the debris of the world. We forget that it is possible to move through broken things without letting them break us. What remains of that speed when the path is no longer clear?

Luis Alberto Poma Criollo has taken this beautiful image titled Waiting for the Moment. It captures that same frantic, beautiful motion against a backdrop that asks us to look closer at what we are running past. Does this image remind you of a time when you were fast enough to outrun the world?