Shayan Afzal

There are seasons of the soul as there are seasons of the world, and this winter, in both body and spirit, I find myself in a landscape barren of inspiration. It is not merely a lack of images but a quiet, creeping dissolution of vision itself, as though the well from which I have always drawn has frozen over in the long, slow hush of winter.

I do not know why. That is the part that troubles me most. In other winters, the light has been different but never absent. I have walked through the cold and found poetry in the bare-limbed trees, in the hush of snow flattening the world into a canvas so stark it begged to be marked. But now—nothing. No hunger to capture, no urgency to create. Only the dull recognition that something is missing, and the quiet, nagging fear that perhaps it will not return.

And yet, I must move. Even in stillness, something stirs, and if I do not follow it, I may not find my way back. So I will press forward, take the camera in hand, point it at something—anything—and see what remains. Perhaps in the act itself, some ember will glow again, and I will remember what it is to see, to feel, to reach out and touch the ineffable.