The Weight of Stillness

The tide does not ask for permission. It arrives, it recedes, and it leaves behind a surface that mirrors the sky with a terrifying, flat precision. We spend our lives trying to anchor ourselves to something solid, yet the world is mostly fluid, mostly transition. There is a specific kind of loneliness found in the space between the earth and its own reflection. It is a quiet that does not offer comfort, but it does offer truth. To stand before a horizon that has dissolved is to realize that the boundaries we draw—between land and water, between then and now—are merely habits of the mind. We are always standing on the edge of something that is about to disappear. Does the water remember the trees once the tide has pulled them into the deep, or is the memory held only by the silence that remains?

Mostafa Monwar has captured this fleeting boundary in his work titled Silent Trees in a Watery Unset. The image holds the same heavy, quiet air that precedes a long winter. Can you feel the stillness rising from the water?