What Stays Underneath

It is 3:14 am. The house is holding its breath, and I am finally listening to the things I bury under the noise of the sun. We spend our lives trying to grow upward, reaching for light, desperate to be seen by the sky. We measure our worth by how high we climb and how much space we occupy in the air. But there is a different kind of history happening beneath us, in the dark, where the real work is done. It is the tangled, stubborn grip of things that refuse to let go of the earth. We are all anchored to something we cannot see, held in place by the weight of what came before us. It is not always a gentle tether. Sometimes, it is a strangling hold. We think we are moving forward, but we are mostly just dragging our foundations along with us. How much of who we are is just a reaction to the ground we are forced to cling to?

Anna Cicala has captured this quiet struggle in her image titled Roots!. It serves as a stark reminder that our strength is often hidden in the places we try hardest to ignore. Does looking at these tangled lines make you feel more grounded, or more trapped?