The Weight of Stillness
When I was seven, my grandfather took me to the edge of the woods behind his house in Enugu. He told me that if I wanted to see the world as it truly was, I had to stop being a person for a while. He made me stand perfectly still until the birds stopped treating me like a threat and started treating me like a tree. It took a long time. My legs ached and the flies buzzed around my ears, but I stayed rooted. Eventually, the forest breathed again. A creature landed on a branch just inches from my face, its eye a dark, unblinking marble that seemed to hold the entire sky. In that moment, I realized that the world doesn’t wait for us to notice it; it simply exists, patient and indifferent, waiting for us to quiet our own noise. We spend so much of our lives rushing to be seen, forgetting that the most profound things happen only when we decide to disappear into the background. What does it take for you to finally stand still?
George Patarkatsishvili has captured this quiet intensity in his photograph titled Parade of Ships. It reminds me of those hours in the woods, where the only thing that mattered was the breath of the earth. Does this image make you want to hold your breath, too?
