There was a crescent moon over the pier this morning, hanging high and silver while the sun came up red down the empty boards.
I tried to get them both in one frame. I always try. The distance is too wide, and it cannot be done, not with the lens I own anyway. They share a sky for a few minutes every so often until one of them wins the morning and the other fades out; no photograph will ever hold the two of them at once. The sun’s light defeats the moon every time.
A year ago, I wrote about being unequally yoked, about what it is to love God and to live beside someone who does not, and how the sun and the moon can occupy the same sky without ever occupying the same light. I could not know then how the story ended. I only knew what I could see.
This morning, the moon was still up there, faint and far off, and I did not try more than once for the shot. I turned back to the sun coming up over the water and let the moon disappear.
Friday morning, I sat down at the water’s edge and wept. An unexpected wave of grief leveled me, and I simply had the urge to cry out before God. I sat in that blue half hour before dawn and let my tears slip into the river, let the wind caress my shoulders, let the waves lull me like a rocking chair. I followed a heron’s cry through the sky until he settled a few yards off. He perched with his head bowed like mine. We were both looking to be fed.
The sun rose in all God’s glory, and little by little, the light reached my soul. I needed an extra measure of grace for the weekend ahead. I’d spend the day off preparing for the final property pickup, marking lines in the garage between his belongings and mine. Take. Leave. Separate.
My body ached by evening when I finally turned my attention back to the skies. With all that rain, there wouldn’t be a sunset. There might, however, be something equally satisfying.
I drove to the pier an autopilot at the opposite side of the day. I set up at the same spot where I had wept that morning and waited for lightning instead. A few minutes before the sun was supposed to set, one bolt came down over the Coleman Bridge and I got it. The heron was standing exactly where he had been standing at dawn.
My phone spent that whole day showing me memories from three years earlier. The same date, a beach, one of the best days I ever had with him.
A night of lightning where a sunset should have been. It tasted exactly right.
The house is lighter now, and I mean that three different ways.
It’s lighter in the absence of him, a burden of weight I could not measure until it was gone. It’s lighter in the most literal sense because the enormous dark furniture is out of the rooms and the windows are no longer blocked, and I walked through my own house this weekend startled by how much sun comes into it. It’s also lighter in spirit, a space where faith and hope can grow.
I did not know. For three years I lived in reds and blacks, in Jack Skellington and Spiderman, in heavy pieces that ate the corners and stood in front of the glass, and I brightened what I was permitted to brighten and I prayed over every room in that house when I moved in because I felt something there that unsettled me. I worked at it, and I thought I’d made peace with the parts I could not change.
This weekend, the rooms emptied out and the light came in. I finally understood I had been living under something, suffocating in the dark weight of a house you can’t recognize while you’re inside it.
I gave up nearly everything to keep the peace. The kitchen table I painted with my own hands and the chairs I reupholstered. Things I chose, things I made, things we purchased to enjoy life together. I handed them over one after another because peace was worth more to me than furniture and I have learned what it costs to argue about objects.
I did not give up the firepit.
We built that fixture brick by brick in the backyard, and there was no world in which I was going to stand there and watch loose bricks get carried off to a storage unit for no reason but to unbuild what had been built. That wasn’t taking something: it was undoing something. I have spent my adult life making things beautiful in whatever house I was given, and I was not going to help anybody take one of them apart.
Sunday’s message was about representation.
We drive around with our church’s sticker on the back of the car, and the moment we cut somebody off in traffic we are not just a woman in a hurry, we are that church, to that driver, forever. That is the small version. The large version is that we are reflections of Christ whether or not we have signed up to be, and people are reading us constantly, and most of them will never open a Bible but every one of them will read a life.
This struck me differently on the cusp of the week I’ve had because I realize I am not anonymous anymore.
There is not a shoot in Yorktown or Newport News or Gloucester in the last month where somebody hasn’t recognized me. A lady asked me at the beach if I was the one who chases the light. A ranger at Riverview stopped me last night, and by the time I left he had named me back — author, two books, schoolteacher — and I told him my next one is called Sanctuary in the Storm and it is about chasing the light when the sanctuary you’ve built gets threatened. A weatherman I admire asked me when I realized I had a gift for photography. A student’s mother called out across the sand, half laughing, asking if this is really what I do before teaching sixth graders all day.
Yes. This is really what I do.
In essence, the only people who ever thought I was not light are the people no longer in my house. Everyone else, the rest of the world I walk around in, seems to have arrived at the opposite conclusion. Even I came to believe the assessment made at close range, but that might not be the truest distance to measure.
My friend Jerry asked me a question last week that I keep turning over: Would I rather be the best photographer in the world or the best writer?
“Neither,” I told him. “I want to capture the world, make meaning of it, and connect souls.”
It poured out of me unrehearsed, something of a mission statement after my summer of chasing the light. That’s my ambition. Photographs and books are not two different projects to me. A sunrise set is a memoir with the words taken out. Something happened, I was there, this is what it meant, and here it is for you.
People have started asking to buy prints. Enough of them have asked that I am doing something about it. In February, I knew I was a writer. I did not know I was a photographer.
And I know exactly what is going on my own walls once they are painted. Sunrises on the eastern side of the house. Sunsets on the west. The sunrise room is for living, for the piano and the paints and the books and the exercise mat, a room whose entire purpose is somebody is doing something meaningful in it. The sunset room is for the end of the day, for sitting down, for letting the light go.
I have spent seven months standing at the edge of the water photographing other people living their lives. Families on the sand. A father and son paddling into the sun. A mother taking a picture of her baby in an innertube. I have been good at the edge. I have been useful there. Still, I have been outside the frame… and I am planning a room for the express purpose of being in it.
The moon was gone when I packed my bag this morning.
I stopped trying to make the sun and moon fit into one photograph a while ago. It’s not bitterness or a verdict. I don’t know how anybody’s story ends. I know what I saw for three years, which is that a person can be drawn to light without ever wanting its source, and that no woman alive can be somebody’s God without suffocating under the job. He needed something I was never able to be. I still pray he finds it.
I cannot hold the two of them in one frame anymore; I have stopped injuring myself trying.
I used to look to a man to make me feel alive. Now, I turn toward the sky. God meets me in foggy sunrises, in fiery sunsets, and a single strike of lightning. The moon is lovely, but it does not shine. It can only reflect the true source of light.
There is room for the light now. In the house. In the frame. In me.
Writer's Growth 