The Anchor

Dear Friend, The Lady of the Sea (because I have decided to publish our personal correspondence, and you wish to remain anonymous)

You are on my mind today. I remember you once writing me about Sebastião Salgado and, as you described it, how he became “sick” from all he had seen. I know it has been true of myself–as you pointed out–but I confess I never truly believed it. Or I believed I was well past the horrors and so felt I was free from their torment. But it turns out I have not been past them. And even though ten years have passed since the resurrection of my hope (Afurada. Fado. Luis. The hands. Your friendship), it turns out I have had yet so much more to learn–am learning. 

Last month my body collapsed in El Salvador. I am ok, though dealing with deep, ongoing muscular pain. Even the surgeon who treated me said there is no evidence of spinal injury, but the surgeon believes I have internalized the pain outside me and let it into my muscles, which have convulsed and led to a temporary debilitation of my left leg from my buttocks to my ankle–excruciating pain forbidding sleep. I am in physical therapy back in the US and slowly improving. But I am learning the medicine is in my mind. 

A friend of mine who is a thirty-year veteran intelligence officer talked to me last week and smiled. He said the cure is in releasing the memories of the horror, like letting go of ghosts. So I am learning to let go of my ghosts–these imps that have haunted me since my childhood. Some are devils that attached to me in the horrors my eyes and body have known through my cameras. Some are simply the dents and fractures of living. But I want to be free of them and find that I am letting some old things go that I didn’t even know I held. 

It is strange, but as I learn to move my body and stretch (for my health) it is as if I am slow-motion dancing… and it brings to mind you and your cherished Tango. Maybe God will give my body to dancing after all my resisting what I have lied to myself about, saying to myself to dance is feminine and that I cannot let the feminine inside me. 

But the irony, my eyes are drawn to the feminine, to the soft glow in the night–the moon. And in El Salvador a little girl (how often has the Universe spoken to my spirit through the life of a child!) has again revealed to me the map and the vessel–and her name is Luna! 

Last month I was in the middle of one of the most horrific investigations of my life, visiting killing sites of murderous gangs who actually practiced ritual human sacrifice (sorry to share the graphic thing but there is no soft way to say it). It was on the side of a mountain standing before a killing tree and hearing the story told by the old farmer when my body became saturated. I actually felt a pain in my hip and by that night I was in excruciating pain. 

I have no doubt I adopted that memory as my own and it was too much. After all these years my body told me, No! And the mercy has been found in the midst of a healing pain. 

There was a mercy already being constructed for me in the strange way that God has chosen to construct mercy in my life–in the form of another image and memory. Days before that moment I had taken a young journalist to a remote island in El Salvador to meet a family I have documented for a year–Luna, and her family. There is a lot more to say about that excursion, but one thing that came out of it is an image that grows in importance to me. And this morning when I pasted the image into my journal to reflect on it, I finally saw what it means and I think it is an image for me like the image I once gave to you—“The Bay of No Lasting Sorrows.” 

Here is what I wrote in my journal: “I love this photo. It embodies all my present emotion–it is a journey but anticipating an imminent arrival. The vessel is the whole of the photo’s geography–the world of her, the boat. But in the right side of the frame there is a tiny, delicate revelation— land! Is her vessel passing by? Is she viewing what she will miss? She has one hand firm on the anchor. Is she holding on to everything she had trusted when there was only sea? Or is she preparing to cast her anchor and land on that revealing shore? One hand grips the edge of her world. Clearly she is looking to shore. Her body is relaxed, comfortable in its architecture. But it is the posture of an agile animal ready to leap–for in fact, in a minute, she did leap. She leapt into the shallow sea and sprinted ashore! She holds an anchor. She, too, is an anchor. Grounded in deep waters, buried in sea mud–her spirit, the chain tying her vessel securely for her continued journey–for every earthly arrival is simply a preparation for a future departure.” 

Thank you for being my friend. Ten years ago I began a new journey. But maybe now I am beginning the true spiritual journey—meaning, the journey that matters most—meaning, the journey of letting go of all the little creatures I have allowed to make a home in my memory. Perhaps I am clearing the decks and preparing for a journey I have not even dared yet to imagine. I give you, here, another image: “The Anchor.”