The Weight of Water

We forget the feeling of earth against skin. The way the mud pulls at the heel, a soft, insistent gravity. As children, we understood that to be clean was to be separate from the world. To be dirty was to belong to it. We waded into the shallows, not to reach the other side, but to feel the resistance of the current. There is a specific, heavy silence in the water before a splash. It is the sound of a boundary being broken. We spend our later years building walls, drying our clothes, and keeping our distance from the elements that once held us. We trade the immersion for a dry, safe perspective. We watch the rain from behind glass, forgetting that we were once made of the same salt and silt. Does the water still remember the shape of our feet, or have we smoothed over the surface too well?

Jabbar Jamil has captured this fleeting return to the earth in his image titled Playing in Water. It is a quiet reminder of what we leave behind when we grow tall. Do you remember the last time you let yourself be completely undone by the mud?