The Roughness of Being
The smell of damp earth after a long, humid afternoon is a heavy, velvet thing. It clings to the back of the throat, tasting of minerals and ancient, slow-moving time. I remember pressing my palm against the trunk of a banyan tree when I was small; the bark was a map of ridges and deep, jagged valleys, a surface that felt like it had been carved by centuries of rain. There is a specific, quiet tension in waiting—a stillness that isn’t empty, but coiled. It is the feeling of muscles pulled taut, the way the skin stretches over bone when you are poised on the edge of a sudden movement. We spend so much of our lives in this state of anticipation, our senses sharpened to the rustle of a leaf or the shift of a shadow, searching for the sustenance that keeps us tethered to the ground. Does the earth feel our heartbeat as clearly as we feel its pulse beneath our feet?
Tanmoy Saha has captured this raw, tactile patience in his image titled Looking for Food. The way the creature clings to its world feels like a memory of my own skin against the rough bark of the past. Can you feel the stillness held within this frame?
