A Mourning in Amiens

In Amiens there is a cathedral with a spire that soars so high that if you stand in front of it long enough it becomes difficult to tell where the earth ends and where heaven begins.

It is only the beginning of September, but there is a chill in the air and my breath can be seen before me; a hint that soon summer will end. The morning light creeps in from the east, turning the white stones a golden pink. It is still early but the church is open for morning devotions. Silently I slip through the red door, bringing my fingers to my forehead, my heart, and my shoulders in immeasurable gratitude and grace. I have come to walk the labyrinth before leaving Amiens, but chairs filled the space and the altar, only yesterday sparsely decorated with orchids, is full of flowers: vibrant wreaths and bouquets that mirror the beauty of the stained-glass windows that they are surrounded by. Today, there is to be a funeral. A man sits alone in the front row, his arms crossed, his head bowed, he does not look at the photograph before him of a man of similar age. Maybe it is his brother, his friend.  

Not wanting to intrude, I go outside and sit on the steps of the square and watch as a crowd gathers. They stand, shoulder to shoulder, offering their condolences. A stranger next to me reveals that the man who has died was the President of the local cycling and hiking club who was much loved by all who knew him.

A motorcade arrives, bearing the family and the body of the dearly departed. A woman, who could only be his wife, steps out of the car and into the arms of her children and grandchildren. She wails, filling the empty space with her grief, the sounds of her sobs muffled in the embrace of those who hold her close.  

I do not know these people, we have never met and still, I cry. All of the sorrow that I had held onto for the past two years pours out of me in tears that I do not even try to stop or hide.

The bells ring out, echoing across the city, as the casket is carried up the stairs. Behind, the family follows; a slow procession of life and death. As the family takes one slow step after another, the men and women who stand on either side of the stairs raise up the tires to their bicycles and their walking sticks, in tribute to their fallen friend.

And then silence falls upon the square as they enter to say their final goodbyes. And in this silence, I know better than to ask for whom the bells tolls. It tolls for thee.

On Being an Athlete

A memory: a summer in elementary school, racing my brother across the parking lot, the heat rising off of the asphalt, the wind doing what the wind does: both propelling me forward and pushing me back. 

I do not remember who won or lost. What does it matter?

Never had I felt more free.

 In fifth grade, we ran the mile. After walking from the gymnasium to the dirt track beside the school in Keds and Umbros, six minutes never seemed so slow, especially not after reading The Bridge to Terabithia and wanting to be the fastest girl in fifth grade. 

These moments, these days of motion, came to define all of my athletic years that followed, but they are not without their disappointments, heartbreak, or failures. 

Despite having played soccer and basketball since I was five, I did not make it onto either team.

I was too slow, too short, and not as good as some of the other girls. And so, I played field hockey like my cousins; how badly I wanted to be like them. 

One season ended and before another began a petition was passed around to create a girl’s lacrosse team, the first for the school, the first for us. Title IX made it possible. We made it purposeful. I couldn’t not stop smiling, unable to shake the pride in knowing that we were continuing what women before us had started, we had taken up the charge and even so young, we were ready to lead the way. 

That season we probably dropped more balls than we caught and learned the rules by breaking all of them, but from all of our mistakes came a love for this sport that has lasted a lifetime. 

In high school, I rode the bench for almost my entire senior year, watching the games from the sidelines, wishing I would be put in just once. I cried when we won. I cried when we lost. I cried because I never knew if I would ever really play the sport that I loved more than anything else. 

When this doubt and confusion became more than I could bear, I laced my sneakers up and went for runs in the rain, in the snow, and in the sun, hoping to outrun the feeling that I might never be good enough. I found a brick wall and took all my frustrations out on it. If life was going to hit me hard, I was going to teach myself to fight back. 

And because of this, I never gave up. Not that I never wanted to. I wanted to give up every day, but something inside of me said no, not now, not yet.  

It was then that I learned that playing a sport is not simply about showing up, or saying that you are good at something. It is a promise that every player makes to always put up a fight and not go down without one. No. Matter. What. In those formative years sports became a calm in the chaos, a refuge from the ruckus.

When college came, I couldn’t wait to go. But I failed my first semester, unable to find balance between sports, school, and my newfound freedom of being 400 miles away from home. I thought briefly about moving to Paris and then I remembered what happens in the spring when the fields thaw and the grass grows again. I remembered lacrosse. And so, I stayed, committing myself to another season. 

That year, we finished in the top ten, winning more games that we lost, and when it was time to leave for the summer, I couldn’t wait to come back. I couldn’t wait to play again. 

For the next three years, I played and I practiced, I practiced and I played; sacrificing my days and my nights, and sometimes even my sleep to the sport. That level of commitment is expected, and often required, from college athletes. Success is dependent upon sacrifice and the former cannot be achieved without the latter. 

Awake, I wondered whether we might win or lose, if I was to beat my opponent, or be beaten by them, and if I was enough. 

If anything would ever be enough. 

Asleep, I dreamt about lacrosse. 

But the doubt remained.

Even after I was selected as the player of the week, even after I became an All-American, even after we made it to the Final Four, even after having been nominated to the Hall of Fame, this doubt has stayed with me. It has never gone away.

For the heart of an athlete is always two things at once: fierce and fearful, timid and tenacious, strong and scared. It is what makes success all the sweeter. It is what makes defeat bittersweet.  

These emotions of the heart are like the wind. They either force you forward or hold you back. 

The good thing about being an athlete is choosing for yourself which way the wind blows. 

But what happens when that choice is made for you? What happens when the playing field is made uneven just to satisfy a minority at the expense of a majority? 

Female athletes should never be beholden to whichever way the political and social winds blow.

Our girls deserve more than that. 

This Fall From Grace

Under the new moon, the tide rose beyond its usual littoral line, edging closer to the cliffs that drop from sky to shore. On a January morning without wind, I went to witness what happens to the water when it rises; what emerges, what submerges, what is hidden, and what is revealed. 

 As I returned to the stairs that led from the beach to the parking lot, a young man, no more than twenty, was walking in my direction. Upon seeing me, he reached frantically for his mask before racing behind the barren shrubs that offered such little protection from the threat he perceived me to be. 

 Now, I am not an imposing figure. I stand so close to five feet tall that my twelve-year-old nephew will surpass me in the months to come and while I weigh more than I look, I have never used that weight to intentionally step on another being. 

 There were so many words that I wanted to say to him as I passed; words of comfort, words of assurance, words of safekeeping. But words failed me, just as they have failed me for this past year. Besides, what can be said when the very humanity that you believe in most is slowly being stripped from all of us only to be replaced with its opposite? 

In their stead, anger and rage, to which I have never been immune, simmered to the surface. And so, I walked up the stairs, the same question echoing with each heavy step: What have we done? What have we done?

For this is no way to live. This is not life.

 Had this been the first and only time that something like this has happened, it might have gone unmentioned. But since last March, I have lost count of how often this has occurred. To not speak of these unnerving instances is to avoid the dystopian reality into which humanity is now thrust, where many of the measures that have been put in place to protect us do not protect us at all, and have done far more harm than good.  

It is difficult to smile in situations like this, but it is easy to understand what fear, constantly perpetuated by the mainstream media and those whose emergency powers have given way to our greatest human emergency: the loss of our humanity, might do to the psyche, especially that of impressionable young minds who are still acquiring the skills necessary to maneuver through this beautiful mess called life. 

 But it is not just the immediacy of these actions that must addressed, it is also the long-term effects that these lockdowns, school closures, cancelation of sports, and other social activities will have on our youth, particularly young men such as this. 

 Prior to the pandemic, psychologists expressed their overwhelming concerns over the ever-rising rate of suicide in young boys. These past twelve months have only brought more attention to these tragedies, with more stories of sadness and suicide emerging every day. It is enough to give anyone pause: eleven-year-olds who hang themselves, teenagers with guns, millennials who abuse drugs and alcohol because they feel defeated and have nowhere else to turn; all losses of lives taken before they were fully lived. 

 And now, almost a year later, and still out of school, these children, especially the boys, continue to fall further and further behind.

When, if ever, will they have the opportunity to catch up? 

What will become of these children who were raised in fear? 

Are they not vulnerable too? 

And in their vulnerability, what will their futures hold? 

Will there be a future for them at all?

As I made my way to the top of the stairs, I finally understood why it was that Holden Caufield wanted to be the catcher in the rye. 

 How could anyone not want to prevent this loss of innocence, to stop this fall from grace?

As It Was in the Beginning

Eight years, thirty excursions, and thousands upon thousands of exposures later, Genesis by Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, on view now at the International Center for Photography, portrays the world as it was in the beginning of time. Spanning oceans, continents, and people, Genesis is Salgado’s photographic love letter to the planet, expressing a devotion, pure and deep, to the beauty, majesty, and mystery that remains. Salgado notes, “Some 46% of the planet is still as it was in the time of Genesis, we must preserve what exists.” Therefore, it is not without irony that the photographs of Genesis chronicles a world without man or a world where man is in alliance with the earth rather than attempting to conquer it.

 As with his previous projects of epic scope and depth, Migrations and Workers, Salgado journeyed across the globe on foot, in boats, canoes, small aircrafts, and even in hot air balloons, in order weave together the story of creation and plead against its destruction. Here,he sings the songs of the earth: its lamentations and its exaltations, its eulogies and its elegies, its symphonies and its silence.

 These photographs, in black and white, capture the unfolding of life, sometimes slow, sometime fast, in some of the most remote corners of the earth. It is a world of contrasts: propinquity and distance, calmness and chaos, survival and extinction and yet, despite all of its contradictions, it is a world in harmony with itself.

 In Genesis, it is as if Salgado has captured the light from the first day of creation and the light from each day since. These often-heroic landscapes convey that all is right and perfect and true and just in this world. That places such as these still exist attests to the perseverance of our planet. There are places of convergence where mountains meet the sky and where glaciers meet the sea. There are places of divergence where the earth has been split wherein resides the giant sea turtles of the Galapagos and grow the baobab trees of Madagascar. And there are the places in between where an iceberg rises like a fortress in a sea of solitude, at once impenetrable and impermanent, everlasting and ephemeral.

 But the viewer need neither stand on the top of a mountain nor at the edge of a precipice to understand all that Salgado means to communicate through these photographs. Perhaps it is the intention of the artist to take us far away in order to bring us closer to ourselves.

For Genesis serves as a reminder that our homes are not always the places where we lay our head to rest but also the planet upon which we tread our feet and that this home must be protected because it is our only shelter.

 Standing before each photograph it seems as if the earth has stood still, if only for a moment, and yet, in this stillness, one senses the rise and fall of the tides, the rivers, sometimes black, sometimes white, and sometimes blue, carving their passages through valleys and canyons, and the sands ceaselessly shifting sands across time and space.

 But do not mistake this stillness for acquiescence, for in Genesis there, too, are revelations. There is a violence in these images, which speaks not only of the tumultuous nature of this earth, with its constant upheavals and undulations, but also of the danger of humans further distancing ourselves from the source of all things. Thus Genesis becomes a mosaic of the world, attempting to reconnect all of that has been broken with what is unbreakable.

 That this planet, desolate and solitary, is also inhabited by life is nothing short of miraculous. In Genesis, we find a Right Whale as it emerges off of the Argentinian coast, the water cascading like diamonds off of its tail, the claw of a marine iguana, sequined and silver, glimmers against the rocks of the Galapagos Islands, and the gorillas of the Virungas, numbering far too few, as they play in the hills of volcanoes. These are the real treasures of our existence

 Here, we also learn that there are tribes that still live, as they have for generations, perhaps even millennia, amid the tundra and the bush, amongst the animals who provide them with nourishment and warmth, and beneath the skies above, never forsaking the traditions of their past in order to partake in the very things that may destroy their way of life and the life of this planet.

 It is in the portraits of Genesis where the true beauty of nudity is discovered, found in the gentle curve of an exposed breast, in genitals shrouded in gourds, and in men, women, and children, bare of bottom, yet adorned in golden bangles, beaded necklaces, and feathered headdresses.

 In the Surma village of Regia in Ethiopia there are men whose bodies boast of the ritualistic scarification of their skin. These are the only scars made visible by Salgado. The real scars, the ones from which the earth may never heal, remain invisible beyond the frame.

 What makes Genesis successful is not its lack of accusations that what was may not always be, but rather its compassionate counsel to reach for and hold onto what is; what is beautiful, what is sacred, and what still exists.

 From the frozen lands of the Arctic Circle to the deserts of Namibia, from the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the glaciers of Alaska, Salgado measures all that remains against all that has been lost. If Genesis is a reflection of life as it was in the beginning then reflect we must on how it will be at the end. So, let us be not proud like the lion but let us be like the elephant and never forget that there is still beauty and magic and wonder in this world and that this world is indeed worth preserving. 

You Find What You Seek

“She is going to find her spirit.” He pipped from across the deck.

It was a Saturday. Three days before my departure.

“”What did you say, Moo?” I asked through tears. I had heard what he said but I wanted to hear it from him again: my nephew, my god monster, the love of my life. And so I pulled him in close to me, as close as can be. 

“You are going to go find your spirit, that is why you are leaving.” He said in the voice that echoes, how it echoes in my heart. And then he offers that smile, that mischievous grin that will both get him into trouble and get him out of it.                                                       

Only the month before he had turned five. Under the warm April sun I wrapped my arms around him, wondering when it was that my arms had grown so small because it could not be so that five years had passed since the day he was born and he was already this big.                                                                                                                             

Time does this, moving so swiftly that you spend more time in your memories than you do in the present moment, so much so that when asked what time it is, what day it is, what year, you ask only one question in return: What does it matter?                            

I held him this way, unwilling to let go just yet, and thought that maybe it was not that my spirit had been lost, but I was in search of something: words, ruins, art, adventure. All of me wanted to learn what happens after love. I needed to know what happens after war.                                                                                                                   

And maybe I had never learned any of these things before. Or maybe I had learned them everywhere. But only in pieces and it was only now coming together.

There was but one thing I knew before departing on this journey:

You find what you seek.