AT THE ROOTS OF STILLNESS

There are places that seem to hold time differently than the rest of the world. Ta Prohm was one of them for me.

The temple sits half-claimed by the forest, its stone walls threaded through with roots that arrived long after the builders left. Some of those roots are as thick as a person, wrapped around doorways and towers with a quiet patience, neither rushing to preserve nor destroy, simply continuing to grow.

I remember the day I sat there with a friend, the air carrying that quiet excitement that comes from finally arriving somewhere once seen only in photographs. We had just made it in time to explore. Everything around us felt impossibly alive: green, gold, and ancient in a way that makes you instinctively speak more softly.

And still, underneath all of it, there was a heaviness that had nothing to do with walking.

I was carrying things that no one around me could see. The kind of weight that doesn’t appear in photos, doesn’t ask permission, and slowly becomes so familiar that others assume you’ve already put it down.

Sitting there, pressed against something ancient beyond my own thoughts, something in me softened.

Not resolved. Not fixed.

Just seen.

As if the world, for a moment, didn’t require explanation.

There is a particular kind of relief in being somewhere that has survived storms far beyond imagining and is still here, still growing, still adapting, roots and stone learning how to exist together instead of in opposition.

And in that stillness, I understood something I hadn’t been able to articulate before: that fragility and strength are not opposites, but companions.

We tend to separate them, as though needing rest cancels resilience. But the tree growing through that temple wall isn’t weak because it had to find cracks to survive. It is alive because it did.

That isn’t conflict.

That is coexistence.

Mental health isn’t always about being okay. More often, it isn’t.

Sometimes it is about sitting at the roots of your exhaustion instead of outrunning it. Sometimes healing doesn’t arrive as clarity or resolution. Sometimes it looks like stillness. Like waiting. Like learning to breathe again without turning it into something you have to perform.

I think about that day often, how close I was to a friend who had no idea what I was holding inside, and how much of it might have been spoken if I had known how to let it out. Most of what I carried that day was invisible. Quiet, private storms that don’t announce themselves. The kind that move through ordinary days without leaving visible damage, until you realize they’ve been shaping you all along.

There are larger storms too, the collective ones that move through everyone at once. And somehow, those don’t make the private ones easier to name. If anything, they make them easier to hide.

Both deserve space. Both deserve care.

Support and safety shouldn’t depend on circumstance or privilege. They should be as reachable as shelter, as necessary as water.

I think about that often when days are set aside to remind us to check in with one another. We don’t need a single day to care, but sometimes a reminder is enough to reopen something we’ve closed without noticing.

If you are reading this from inside your own storm, I hope you find your tree.

A place. A person. A quiet corner of your life where you can sit down without having to explain yourself.

I hope you are surrounded by people who love you without conditions, who do not require you to be anything other than what you already are.

And I hope, slowly, you come to believe this:

Your strength may not be about how much you can endure without breaking. It may be about how gently you learn to return.

Ta Prohm does not resist the forest growing through it.

It holds both.

And somehow, that is enough.

Wellness "Wisdom", Continued ...

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