A week ago tonight, after I published last week’s post, I drove to Denbigh Docks and the sky did something I am still not over.
Apparently, I bounced from spot to spot like a woman who had lost something. I snapped shots up the boardwalk, down to the pier, out along the pilings, back again. The sky went to fire and then the fire doubled itself in the water; I could not stand still nor did I want to.
A photographer named Brandon was shooting from the boat ramp. He watched me. Afterward, he wrote to me, and what he said was that he saw an unmistakable look of innocence and wonder in one moment, and seconds later the focus of a professional thriving in her element, and that for lack of a better phrase he would go with his first thought.
Beautiful chaos in motion.
I did not know how to answer him. I’m sure I rewrote my response a few times. He took a photograph of me standing out there in the middle of all that color, and I had taken nearly the same frame minutes before without myself in it. He oversaturates because he likes the blue. Mine is what the sky actually looked like. Both are true expressions of the evening, but I’ll get there.
I have been teaching my sixth graders about parts of speech and conflict this week.
A sentence needs a noun and a verb. Somebody doing something. Without the verb, the subject just sits there, existing, going nowhere. A story works the same way. It needs a character and a conflict, somebody facing something because conflict is the action of a story the way a verb is the action of a sentence. A character with nothing to face is not a story. It is a person standing in a setting.
I reminded them this is why we read stories in the first place. It is not only to escape, though escape is real for twelve-year-olds and forty-three-year-olds alike. We read because every single one of us in that classroom is a character with a conflict, and watching other characters face things is how we learn to face ours. Stories are resilience models. They are practice.
I did not plan to preach that lesson to myself this week, but as I found myself unpacking analogies about sentence structure and stories, I suddenly saw my own sky chasing ventures this weekend in a new light, literally and figuratively speaking, from storms to clear skies.
Partly cloudy forecasts tempt me all day. Quite frankly, clear skies bore me.
There is not much drama. You wait all evening for the final ten minutes for the light to drop enough to expose a frame, and then you never know whether there will be any after-show at all without clouds to refract.
A partly cloudy sky, on the other hand, gives you an hour. Sometimes more. The sun drops behind a deck of cloud and you wait, genuinely uncertain, and then it breaks out and throws crepuscular rays in every direction and you are running. It builds suspense. It is unpredictable. I am thrilled and amazed, every time, like it has never happened before. Partly because it hasn’t, not in that same way, not with those crepuscular rays in those shades in those directions.
The sun is the subject of that sentence. The clouds are the verb. I didn’t take my analogy to the third level for my students, but by third block, I was filling it in. The verb is to the noun in the sentence as the conflict is to the character in a story as to the clouds are to the sunset in a landscape.
The character is the light, and the conflict is whatever is standing in front of it, and without something in the way there is no story to shoot.
Storms are a different problem entirely, which is that they cannot be trusted. On this peninsula, there are too many variables. The cluster shifts east and misses me, I chase it and end up inside the rain, where the whole sky lights up at once and there is no single strike to catch, or it fizzles out before it reaches the spot where I have been standing patiently for an hour. Lightning is astonishing to witness and better to catch, and it is never, ever promised. You can plan for it. You cannot count on it.
The sun is different. The sun is consistent in its variety. It comes every morning and it goes every evening and the only question is what it will be wearing.
I built a whole summer on that miracle.
Saturday morning, it was completely cloudy and it stayed that way. The sun had set before I’d gotten to Jamestown Beach the night before, well before its scheduled time, so this was my second time finding hope in the dark, moody clouds.
Wind came through and woke my skin instead of the sun. A heron called out around six, but it may as well have been midnight out there, so I sat down on the sand next to him for fifteen minutes and then went looking for whatever pictures the dark would give me. I walked to the Coleman Bridge and back. Dark birds against a pregnant sky. The market setting up. A prayer circle. The LOVE sign. Seven o’clock, nothing. Seven twenty, nothing. It was the first morning in many months that I never saw the actual sun at all.
I wrote down one line about it in my journal: the sun did not come up, but light defeated dark. It held me for a few hours.
Saturday afternoon, I went hunting for lightning and got none. I left Arts in the Park at Buckroe Beach with Mary Beth to walk at Fort Monroe until I gave up waiting for a storm to come, drove to Yorktown, then Denbigh, rerouted to Riverview and then back to 17, begging God aloud for a strike or a sunset and getting neither. I lost my voice yelling at a sky that had nothing to say back.
When the lights went out after four months chasing the light, I realized I still missed my family. Perhaps I am not as far along as I thought, and that the light had been holding me and healing me, twice a day. I could not see how real that work was until three days of clouds set it in front of my camera lens.
Where I’d wanted to be that night was Denbigh Docks, and I had a reason. Three years ago that night, we’d had our first best night as a family there. I still remember the shades of blue in that partly cloudy sunset with my stepdaughter and our two dogs silhouetted against it. I had wanted to take a comparative photo in the same spot with my dog, Tito.
Ultimately, my family only went to Denbigh three times, all in that first year. I started going alone in March, and the first time I went it was because I missed them. Every time since, a dozen nights now, I have gone because the cloudy sunsets over that marsh are the best I have found and the locals know and welcome me. It became mine. And then one bad Saturday missing sunset and lightning, my mind made it theirs again for a few moments, and I let it be.
Sunday morning, I got a name for what I had been missing.
Pastor Colin preached out of John 13, and he stopped on the word glory, which appears five times in a single verse. He asked whether we actually know what it means. We sing it constantly, but do we know it? He defined the glory of God as the fullness of God’s character on display. All of who He is on one landscape at once — holiness and nearness and might and justice and judgment and mercy and grace, not one at a time, all of it, together.
That is exactly what a sky is.
That is why a clear one is not enough for me and a cloudy one keeps me out there for an hour. I have been photographing the fullness of a character on one landscape every morning and every evening of this summer without once having the right word for it.
Then he said the glory of God is displayed most clearly at the cross of Jesus Christ, and something in me stilled. All of who God is, hung on a cross just above the horizon. He bowed His head and the sun went out. On the third day, the Son rose.
I photograph that ball of light disappearing and reappearing twelve hours apart. I have done it nearly every day for a year and a half. I did not know what the reflections were reflecting, not fully.
Somewhere in this summer I stopped receiving the sunrise as a gift and started expecting it. God gave me light every single morning, including mornings the forecast promised rain, and I came to assume the miracle. Three days of cloud put me in check. I was not grieving the weather… I was grieving glory, I just did not have the word for it until a Sunday morning in September.
Last night, I broke my own rule and went to Denbigh under a clear sky.
With no clouds on the western front, there was no drama. By my own definition, there was no conflict out there and therefore no story; I went anyway to give the clear sky a fair hearing.
I climbed up on the boardwalk rail to get my favorite composition, the one that threads through the bows of the cypress, and I took a breath and noticed I was not running. Nothing was about to break through anything. Nothing was building. It was still, the stillness was unfamiliar, and it was not unpleasant.
When the light is too bright to shoot, I learned to switch to shutter priority and drop my exposure down until the sun stops blowing out the frame and collapses into a point, and the point throws spikes. A starburst. I stopped trying to manage the light and let the camera stare at its source.
I did that, standing on the rail, and I looked at the starburst on my screen. It looks like a cross. It has been like a cross to me for a while now, and last night I finally had the sermon to put underneath it.
The light went out of the world on a Friday and the dark lasted three days. I know something about a Friday when the light goes out, though mine was a small rehearsal of it. What I have been calling conflict — the cloud in front of the sun, the thing standing in the way, the drama that makes the shot worth an hour of my evening — was finished at a cross a long time before I got here. That is the singular conflict in the greatest story resolved on our behalf.
In essence, a clear sky is not an empty one. It’s a sky with nothing left standing between me and the light.
Brandon called me beautiful chaos in motion, and he was right about the woman he saw that night. She was undone with joy, running the boardwalk, half wonder and half work. He also wrote that happiness is only truly lost if you choose to stop chasing after finding it, which I have thought about every day since, particularly on the days I was chasing and finding nothing.
But last night, on the same dock, in a sky with no chaos in it at all, I stood still on a rail with my exposure down and my eye on the source.
Beautiful chaos in motion and beautiful stillness in the same week, in the same woman, at the same spot on the same water.
Both are true expressions of the same experiences. One is oversaturated for the blue. One is how the sky actually looked.
I will take the drama when it comes because I love it and because the clouds are where the story lives. I am also learning to stand in the clear ones without needing something to fight.
Writer's Growth 