Dispatch from the road
Traverse City, Michigan, mirrors, Airport Church, the unsaid.
I am suddenly far from home in a little camper called a scamp. The light is dancing around me. The trees are shaking above me.
Yesterday I woke up at 4 am in Provo, Utah and took my car, then two planes, then a rental car all the way out to a place called Traverse City.
The airport is always a church to me and at Airport Church I watch the people all misplaced and 'on their way' and bottomlessly human. I love Airport Church, because there isn't a lot to do but worship and take the sacrament.
By sacrament I mean some kind of sandwich (club sandwiches are a guilty pleasure of mine; I know from experience you're supposed to feel a little guilty at church, but you're also instantly redeemed, so it all balances out) and a glass of wine or two.
By worship, I mean the people.
All of them.
My favorite thing about airport church is how all these people, including me, are stuck together and crammed in sardine-style but with suitcases. The journeys are often long and the living can't just pause so you always see weird stuff like babies crawling on filthy floors, or people taking their shoes off, or flight attendants flirting with each other.
During my layover in Denver, I heard a toddler let out a wail so unhinged, so loud and full of grief, I thought he may have been acting as the perfect vessel for the collective body of pain that is so loud in our psyches and politics and genocides and brutality right now.
I let the cry ring through my tissues until I was crying too.
In the sky, I listened. I'm always listening. But something about the sky thins you out from your finite shapings and helps you hear better. I asked whoever is listening some questions. I got some answers.
I also read the first several chapters in Zadie Smith's White Teeth*. It's good. Really, really good. The characters are more vivid than any of the ways we allow ourselves to be seen these days. While I read, I think, for the zillionth, trillionth time, about how the most brilliant part of novels is how they let us see the good and bad parts of (imaginary) people and somehow still love them, instead of judge the shit out of them, the way we do to each other and ourselves.
We give them attention in such a way that we invest in their story. This deepens us.
By the time I make it to the rental car counter, most of the effects of Airport Church's Holy Spirit have worn off. I'm counting on the 2.5 hour drive ahead of me through the sunset to let me down easy.
Instead, I find that I am quite irritable and drastically lonely.
I run through my mental Rolodex of tried-and-true sources of connection. The answer is so obvious, I'm embarrassed it takes me so long to find it — Kae Tempest's audiobook On Connection, which I've already listened to multiple times.
Tempest's skill and honesty is cleansing. I'm excited again for what is ahead of me.
I've never seen Lake Michigan before and after I finish writing this newsletter, I hope to find out if it's as aqua blue as everyone says it is.
I'm here to photograph a woman named Liz and her family. I've met Liz over the internet and at conferences over the years and her face looks like earth and shines like sun. It has dots and lines that I try to trace the stories of and doesn't look like it belongs to this time or any time. Liz has always struck me as a quiet, beaming, disembodied heart.
The effect is stunning. I've wanted to photograph her for years.
This morning, at sunrise, I finally do. Liz and Lake Michigan. It was not aqua blue. It was shades of deep gray to green to blue-ish to peach to lavender to yellow.
It's funny how we confuse mirrors for the actual thing they reflect.
Pretending I don't have so much more to say,
Yan
*From the NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
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