The Weight of Still Water

Water does not forget. It holds the shape of the sky, the jagged edge of the stone, the slow passage of the clouds. We walk past the river and assume it is merely moving, a traveler passing through. We forget that it is also a mirror, waiting for the wind to die so it can show us what we have been hiding from ourselves. There is a specific silence that falls when the surface becomes glass. It is not the silence of an empty room, but the silence of a held breath. In the north, we know this stillness. We know that beneath the frozen surface, the current continues, indifferent to our gaze. The world is constantly being reshaped by forces we cannot see, yet we insist on looking for permanence in the stone. Perhaps the truth is not in the rock, but in the way the water accepts the sky, even when the sky is heavy with the coming winter.

Tisha Clinkenbeard has captured this quiet tension in her image titled River Reflection. Does the water reveal the truth of the land, or does it simply offer us a place to rest our eyes?