The Weight of the Current

To move across water is to accept that you are being carried. We spend our lives trying to anchor ourselves, driving stakes into the earth, building walls against the wind. We want to believe we are the masters of our direction. But the river does not care for our intentions. It moves with a heavy, ancient patience, indifferent to the small vessels that skim its surface. There is a particular kind of solitude in being alone on the water. It is not the same as the silence of a snow-covered field. It is a shifting, fluid quiet. You are suspended between the sky and the depths, a brief mark on a vast, moving history. We are all just passing through, rowing against a tide that was here long before us and will remain long after we have reached the other side. What is left of a journey once the ripples fade?

Greg Goodman has captured this stillness in his photograph titled Mekong Monk. He shows us a man finding his own rhythm within the flow of the river. Does the water carry him, or does he carry the water?