The Weight of Still Water

There is a specific silence that belongs to a pond before the day fully wakes. It is not the silence of an empty room, but the heavy, expectant quiet of a place waiting to be disturbed. I remember the surface of the water behind my childhood home, how it held the sky like a secret, mirroring clouds that were already drifting away. When the wind moved, the reflection shattered, and for a moment, the world felt fragile, as if the reality of the water and the image of the sky were fighting for the same space. We spend so much of our lives trying to keep the surface smooth, terrified of the ripple that reveals what lies beneath. We want the stillness to be permanent, forgetting that the water only truly lives when it is broken. What happens to the reflection when the water is no longer still, and does the pond remember the shape of the sky once the ripples have finally faded away?

Siew Bee Lim has captured this quiet tension in the beautiful image titled Lilies. The way the blooms rest upon the surface invites us to consider what remains when the rest of the world is quiet. Does this stillness feel like a beginning or an end to you?