The Hold
Is Winter Over?
Every Monday, I choose an image. A stone, a shadow, sometimes a reflection, nothing spectacular, just something that caught my attention. It’s my way of inviting writing, of extending something outward and waiting to see what others will make of it.
If you’d like to play along with my photos too, subscribe.
On Saturday, I return to the image. I offer my own writing and share the texts I’ve received, gathering them like echoes of the same light.
This week, the image held cold and two motionless bodies. I saw thaw in it, the push of life beneath the stone, that movement that begins again even when nothing seems to move.
Suzy Wong offers us a special kind of embrace.
Aamrii gives us an exquisite minimalist line.
And we can always add more texts, French and English, if other players come forward.
Here is mine
Two children frozen on the threshold of a dream. The older presses the younger against his side, one arm around the torso, the other buried like a root beneath the armpit. The younger leans forward. Is he trying to escape this too-insistent embrace, or simply to continue a movement that winter has held back? His mouth, barely open, hovers between a cry and an inaudible laugh. In the silence of the stone, a pulse can be sensed, faint, stubborn, the heartbeat of something alive beneath the cold.
Snow has come to seal their sleep. It falls, settles, erases shoulders, softens arms, smooths the edges. It quiets the world, layer after layer. The bodies merge, become a single white mass, compact, almost without memory. The cold keeps watch. The stone folds back into its original stillness, that place where time has no age.
Then, slowly, water reclaims its rights. The snow cracks, slides away in sheets, revealing fragments. A cheek, an arm, the curve of a back. And in this reappearance, something persists: the inclination of the smaller one, that gesture once thought stilled. It is not a struggle, nor a sudden impulse, but the quiet pressure of a stem beneath the soil. A force that does not name its desire, but pushes because nothing else is possible.
Pause for a moment. Light skims the stone, still cold, yet crossed by a new clarity. Look: the two bodies seem to move, almost imperceptibly. The space between them shifts, like a shared breath. The smaller one advances. Barely. But enough for the motion to be felt, a murmur within matter.
The older does not hold him back. He carries him. His arm, rather than a barrier, becomes a contour, a support. This gesture of restraint gives the movement the time it needs not to break. It is the holding before flowering, the tremor before form.
Outside, bells answer the light. People speak of a rolled-away stone, an empty tomb, a risen body. But that is not where your thoughts go. Your vision overflows the myth: a resurrection without promise, a silent uprising, the secret life of stone. It is what matter does, every year, when the cold consents to withdraw.
In the days that follow, the snow completes its retreat. The movement becomes invisible again. It is not gone, only returned to the stone. In spring, the statue stands there, motionless, offered to the gaze.
But now, you know. Nothing is fixed.
You will return next year. It will be there, in the light, in the insistence. And the smaller one will lean forward again, as if for the first time.
See you Monday!