Whispers in the Stone

I once sat with an old stonemason in a village outside of Florence who spent his days repairing walls that had stood for centuries. He told me that he never felt like he was building anything new; he was just holding a conversation with the people who had come before him. He would run his calloused thumb over the rough edges of a block, tracing the marks left by a chisel three hundred years ago, and he would smile. He believed that if you worked with enough patience, the stone would eventually tell you what it had seen. It is a strange, humbling thought—that our own hands might one day be the bridge between the present and a future we will never inhabit. We spend so much of our lives trying to make a mark, forgetting that the most enduring things are often those that simply wait for us to notice them. What do you think the walls around you would say if they could finally speak?

Fabrizio Bues has captured this sense of enduring dialogue in his beautiful image titled An Ancient Temple. It feels as though the stone is still breathing, waiting for someone to listen to its story. Does this image make you feel like a visitor in time?