The Weight of Stillness

There is a moment before the storm when the air stops moving. It is not a peaceful silence, but a heavy one, as if the earth is holding its breath to see what will happen next. We spend our lives waiting for the sky to break, for the white to descend and erase the sharp edges of the world. We build our houses on the rim of things, looking down into the blue, convinced that we can measure the depth of what we do not understand. But the water does not care for our measurements. It only waits. It reflects the sky until the sky decides to change, and then it becomes something else entirely—a mirror for the cold, a basin for the coming dark. We are always standing on the edge of a transformation we cannot control. What remains when the view is finally taken away?

Ronnie Glover has taken this beautiful image titled Crater Lake. It captures that final, fragile breath before the world turns white. Do you recognize the silence in the water?