The Weight of the Path

I keep a pressed fern inside a heavy dictionary, its edges brittle and the color of a winter dusk. It was plucked from a forest floor that no longer exists, replaced years ago by the grey, unyielding reach of a highway. When I touch the dried frond, I am reminded that we are all architects of our own displacement, carving lines through the wild places that once held our silence. We move forward with such purpose, laying down stone and tar, yet we leave behind the ghosts of the trees that stood there first. There is a quiet, aching loneliness in the way a road cuts through a valley, as if it is trying to connect two points while severing the earth beneath it. We trade the soft, damp moss for the permanence of the path, but what do we lose when the horizon no longer breathes? Is there a way to walk through the world without leaving a scar upon it?

Arnaud Vlaminck has captured this heavy, lingering silence in his work titled Road Through A Dying Landscape. It feels like a map of everything we have traded for the sake of moving on. Does this path lead us home, or merely further away from what we once knew?