The Weight of Beginning

How much of our history is written before we have even spoken a word? We arrive into this world as blank pages, yet we carry the heavy, ancient architecture of those who came before us. We look at the smallness of a beginning and mistake it for insignificance, forgetting that every mountain was once a pebble, and every long, weary life was once a soft, unformed breath. There is a profound vulnerability in being new—a state of total surrender to the currents of time. We spend our later years trying to reclaim the simplicity of this initial state, searching for a way to hold the world without the burden of knowing its edges. We are all, in some sense, still reaching out, trying to grasp the air, trying to find a tether in a vast and shifting reality. Is there anything more terrifying, or more hopeful, than the first time we reach for something that is not ourselves?

Jerry Caruthers has captured this quiet truth in his image titled Loving Hands. It serves as a gentle reminder of the fragile threads that bind us to one another from the very start. Does this image bring you back to your own beginnings?