The Texture of Silence

I spent this morning trying to peel a stubborn label off a glass jar. My fingernails were sore, and the paper kept tearing into tiny, useless strips. I eventually gave up and left it sitting on the counter, half-covered in jagged bits of white. It looked messy, but there was something honest about it. We spend so much of our lives trying to smooth over the rough edges of our experiences, wanting everything to be clean and finished. But maybe the truth isn’t in the smooth surface. Maybe it is in the grit, the layers that refuse to come away, and the parts of ourselves that remain weathered no matter how hard we scrub. There is a quiet strength in things that have been worn down by time or weather, a history written in the texture of a surface. We are all just collections of these marks, aren’t we? What happens when we stop trying to peel away the past and just let the texture be?

Keith Goldstein has captured this feeling perfectly in his image titled Barking 2. It reminds me that there is so much beauty in the things that have been shaped by the elements. Does this image make you want to reach out and touch the world, or just sit quietly and watch it?