The Language of the Unspoken
When I was seven, my grandfather kept a chestnut mare named Bess in the paddock behind our house. I remember the smell of her—damp hay and something metallic, like old coins. I used to press my forehead against her neck, waiting for her to tell me the secrets of the fields. She never spoke, of course, but she would blink, and in that slow, rhythmic closing of her eye, I felt a strange, heavy gravity. It was a look that didn’t ask for anything. It didn’t need me to be clever or quiet or still. It just existed, a dark, liquid mirror reflecting a world that didn’t rely on words to make sense. As I grew older, I learned that most of the important things in life are communicated in this silence, in the steady pulse of a creature that knows exactly who it is. Why do we spend so much of our adult lives trying to translate these quiet moments into noise?
Armin Abdehou has taken this beautiful image titled Echoes of Nature. It captures that same heavy, wordless gravity I remember from the paddock, pulling us back to a place where we are simply observed by the wild. Does it make you feel as small and as seen as I do?
