When uncertainty meets beauty
26
With Dave’s encouragement, I pick up his camera and never look back. Focusing through a lens, my eyes see for the first time.
The rapture is all-consuming. Not one to carry a camera, even throughout my travels abroad, the immediate infatuation surprises me. In the past, cameras were a nuisance—interrupting life with solicitations to smile and say cheese. They took me out of the moment and more, into self-consciousness—the delight of losing one-self in play suddenly extinguished by a compulsion to mark the moment. But while my eyes assumed pragmatism, the rest of my body needed song. Uncertainty and beauty, sorrow and wonder, shared a home in my flesh—but without a tool, the poetry of their variance remained buried.
Now, with camera in hand, I am not robbed, but invited into the moment. I can finally say what my body is longing to say. Composition, light and Bresson’s “decisive moment” reveal the lush, visceral collision within.
One stormy Saturday, fifty-foot swells off the Oregon coast make the news. With no plan for the weekend, Dave and I grab his camera, hop in the car, and head west. The sunset highway ascends into a corridor of Doug Fir as we listen to his latest mix CD “Sturgeon Moon”—songs to usher sturgeon, sap and spirit into the dark season with tracks by Sigur Ros, Bob Dylan and Magnetic Fields. When we pull into the sleepy coastal town of Depoe Bay, Dave shuts off the engine and we watch the sky fall. In Oregon, there are as many kinds of rain as there are days of it. Today, a fine mist envelops but it feels as if it will never really rain, or shower, or drizzle, or pour.
We get out of the car and walk up a steep hill for a better view of the giant waves. Mist shrouds our bodies. From our vantage point, the ocean is a vertical backdrop and the town of Depoe Bay, a theatrical set. The actors have all gone home. The tech crew are turning off the last lights. I feel a terrible, somber ache as the scene unfolds. Loneliness. Heartbreak. Disappointment. Doom. And then the small droplets of mist feel it too—it starts to rain, hard. I tuck the camera under my jacket to wait it out, but Dave runs back to the car to grab an old tee. He knows I need the shot. He always knows what I need before I do.
With his arms and a Nike tee my encouraging shelter, I compose. Adjust. Wait.
Click.
That night, when I open the image on my computer, the melancholy returns. But this time, it comes up for air. And in the surfacing, there is breath, wonder and beauty. I submit the photo to a photography contest and win first place, catalyzing an unexpected, unplanned career in photography.
I begin as a photo assistant at a local studio, shooting primarily weddings, portraits, and some fashion. A stepping stone. I straddle between commercial and documentary photography for a few years, but ultimately, pretty pictures are not enough. I want to see what I feel. And my feelings are found in unedited, unrehearsed, unpolished life. It is here that Dave and I develop a new language together. Ping-ponging images back and forth, we create a photo blog called XYXX. “A visual conversation between two iphones and two lovers.” Words, our original seduction, evolves into spontaneous, colorful communion. Our megapixel dialogue is more intimate than anything I’ve ever known.
And so much fun.
I feel happy for the first time in my adult life. I adore Dave. I’m both enlivened and grounded by our creative, playful intimacy—the antithesis of my navel-gazing past. I make a good living working both sides of the camera. I travel a lot, engaging and creating with interesting, accomplished industry folk. I dream into new, bigger projects in both photography and film and bring them to life.
Dave and I don't envision being together forever. In the first five years, our relationship is more akin to an experiment or deeply satisfying hobby. The love between us grows but is also bound by walls of reservation. Dave does not “look good on paper.” Divorced. A daughter with intellectual disability. 13 years between us. You might think a perfectionist would run the other way. And quickly. But instead, Dave restores me. I crave his complicated, messy life and the way he meets it. His amour is scuffed and dented, sword hanging somewhere between defeated resignation and Zen-like surrender. His embrace is a white flag. Feet planted in his battleground, my nerves concede—the deep, purple bruises of life are OK in his presence. There is nothing to resist, nothing to fix.
The perfectionist’s grip weakens. Find a stable career. Create a ten-year plan. Find a good husband. Have babies. Create a twenty-year plan. Succeed with all plans. I can’t seem to succeed with any practical plans. And just when one solidifies, my body tells to me otherwise—the untamed, powerful unconscious buried within my humors is running the show. And with Dave and an ever-evolving creative tool-kit near, I learn to listen to her.
When I’m working, I don’t question this new, creative path. The joy it brings doesn’t beg examination. But during restless nights, I wonder if I’ve failed my lineage. Wasn’t I suppose to be a healer? I was born with so much privilege. Am I doing enough to give back? Photos and film don’t heal cancer. Am I leaving this world a better place?
I recall a quote by author, theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
But are there limits to this reasoning? Would Howard have praised a daughter’s pursuit of art over more quantifiable, humanitarian service? Then again, I have been shaken out of numbness watching a great film. Poetry can tap a forgotten well within. Literature opens empathic portals to another’s experience. A photograph or painting has saved me from my petty existence. Medicine is one—sometimes even insufficient—dimension of healing. Is there an entire universe of vitality I’ve missed?
Is it possible that anything can heal?
Have you missed earlier chapters? I recommend starting from the beginning!
Like you, I also remember the healing balm and incisive truth that swept my being with the fresh breeze of Howard Thurman's quote. I still go back and forth between feeling that surely I could be of better service to the world and tending to what makes me come alive. Yesterday, I saw a video from 2018 of Matisyahu leading 3000 Palestinians and Israelis in singing the chorus of his song Unbroken Hope. Afterward, I was thinking we need more artists, poets and visionaries and less politicians and military strategists.
Omg your are amazing! Well done you and you 2 are so cute and ooooz love!