Rose played her music…

I have been shooting portraits of my friends. It is an intimate thing to make a portrait. A person gives you their eyes. Very often the most happy face reveals sad eyes. And the saddest face smiles. More than anything I see myself, what I was or want to be. 

This week it was Tess and Rose. No one knows how long a life will be but they are probably at the beginning. Tess and Rose are peering forward, straining to see around corners. I am looking back. 

Rose played her music. Doo-wop. She said, “People don’t sing about love like that anymore.” She is fourteen. I put a sword in Tess’s hands and she dressed in vintage clothes I found in an antique shop in Ohio. I imagined Tess’ spirit: Old. Fierce. 

“If I were a sculptor. But then, again, no…” 

From my journal

11 March 2022

Oswald Chambers wrote it: “If God sows you, you will bring forth fruit.” That is, if God plants you, puts you into the soil, roots deep, planted, put. If God does it. Have I tried instead to plant myself? 

I have definitely unplanted me! One tendril of commitment descends and I rip it up and flee, dirt and hearts scattering. 

I can talk good talk, though. I can name the beautiful reality of chivalry, loyalty, that a man can choose to die for love; such a man capable of abandoning mountains and seas and glory to submit to the mundane on behalf of another. On behalf of roots. 

And maybe this is the problem, that I see roots as an abandonment of glory. No matter what is or isn’t, though, I cannot live it the way I name it. I flee.

But Love wants to resurface in me. The possibility lands on me like a puff of air, like the sudden odor of hot bread. I invited a girl to coffee and she said yes, and I wonder if the chance has come again. Like years before, always a surprise. When Lyuba held my face, when Miranda kissed me, when Nicole said “yes,” when Bethany was willing, when I sat in the bay window in West Boothbay Harbor in the gleaming sunshine with Wendy and when Wendy and I climbed to the cliff overlook… then love was strong and I even believed it certain, even if I wasn’t sure when. 

It is strange I have survived above ground so many years. I am a large tree mobile as a butterfly. This is the miracle of the tree without roots. God supplied the water. But God has not let me escape reality: A miracle feeds you in a desert but the desert is meant to lead you home. 

Love is the true idea. The soil, the bed, the table, the hand on my shoulder, around my waist, closing my eyes. Love is the sought after “Unified Theory” quieting the riddles. It is the only philosophy to know and obey. How do I stay true to it when I cannot seem to be true even to myself?

But now love is an old face the other side of a frost smeared window. And I wonder, can we damage the roots irreparably?

Yet somehow despite my inability (or unwillingness), love keeps me and this would-be disaster heals little by little by little. Is the face, the old face behind the glass me? Is that me in their eyes when I make their portraits? Am I actually closer than ever before: More willing to stay this time, home?