The Weight of Wood

We build walls to keep the wind out. We carve windows to let the light in, but mostly, we use them to watch the world change without us. There is a specific heaviness to old timber, a history held in the grain that remembers the forest long after the tree has been felled. A child’s laughter against such permanence is a strange thing. It is a brief, sharp sound that does not belong to the architecture of the past. It belongs to the air, to the fleeting moment before the sun shifts and the shadows lengthen across the floorboards. We spend our lives trying to anchor ourselves in places that were never meant to hold us forever. We look through the frame, waiting for something to arrive, forgetting that the frame itself is the boundary of our own making. What remains when the laughter stops and the wood begins to settle into the evening cold?

Azam Rasouli has captured this stillness in the image titled A Rural House. The boy looks out from the history of a place, caught between the wood and the light. Does he see the same world we do?