I came upon these two trees bending toward one another, their bare branches reaching across the space between them to form an archway. No one built this. No one planned it. The trees simply grew toward what was available, and in doing so, they made a threshold.
The ground beneath is scattered with fallen branches, pale and dry, tangled across the sandy earth like a language I cannot read. Stones gather to the left. Scrub brush crowds the edges. Beyond the arch, the path continues into shadow and thicket, unclear but present. The opening invites without promising.
I am drawn to thresholds. Spaces that mark the edge between what is known and what waits beyond. This archway holds no gate, no door, no barrier. It simply frames a passage and asks whether I will step through. The trees do not insist. They lean toward one another the way long companions do, shaped by proximity, altered by the space they share.
In black and white, the branches become ink strokes against a pale sky. The tangle of deadfall on the ground flattens into texture, a record of what has fallen and been left. The image holds both invitation and uncertainty. What lies beyond the arch is obscured, layered with brush and grey light. The threshold promises nothing except that there is more.
I think about the thresholds I have crossed in my own life. The ones I chose and the ones I stumbled through without knowing. Some were marked. Most were not. Looking back, I can see them only in retrospect, the moments when I moved from one way of being into another. This photograph reminds me that thresholds are rarely grand. They are often made of what bends toward what, of what remains standing when other things have fallen away.
The trees hold the arch between them, patient and undemanding. They have been here longer than I have. They will remain after I walk on.
