The Weight of Silence

I spent this morning trying to fix a wobbly chair in the kitchen. I kept tightening the screws, but the wood just wouldn’t hold. Eventually, I gave up and sat on the floor instead, leaning my back against the cool wall. It was quiet. For a moment, I stopped thinking about the chair, the emails, or the list of things I hadn’t finished. I just felt small. There is something about being in the presence of something truly massive that makes your own worries feel like dust. We spend so much of our lives fussing over the small, shaky things in our rooms, forgetting that there are giants out there. Things that don’t need our help, don’t need our attention, and don’t care if we are busy or tired. They just exist, anchored in the earth, reminding us that we are only visitors here. It is a strange, heavy kind of comfort to realize how little space we actually occupy.

Ronnie Glover has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Mt. McKinley. It reminds me that some things are meant to be looked at, not fixed. Does this view make you feel small, or does it make you feel like you are part of something bigger?