beginning and end

In 1954, my mother donned her red uniform and stood still whilst a proper

photographer from St. Vincent visited the family on the hill where they

lived at Mount Pleasant. She retells the story to me each time we look

through our family album that is coming apart that its edges. The loose

plastic clinging to the surface of the photographs trapping air and dust

beneath, near the faces, skin and water. I ask her if she remembers the

day, she looks at me with disbelief on her face; most of the time my

mother can barely remember yesterday. I guess she was nine or ten in

the photograph found below.

The more I study this photograph the more I find myself in it. Not in any

of the faces that litter the steps but in her gesture and being, it is

uncanny, at that age I could replace her and no one would be the wiser.

She is at the top standing with her hand on her hip, her wild frizzy hair

making some Holly expression. They are all gathered together for this

important moment, it wasn’t often that photographers came to Bequia

and navigated to the top of the island. I can barely imagine what it looked

like back then: sparsely populated, rolling hills of dry sour grass, small

wooden houses with kitchens and tanks as extensions, thatched galvanized

roofs, pineapple skirts on mothers, schooner filled harbors,

wharf-less shores.

Yet I am privy to this world, to scenes that would be impossible for me to

recall. I can sit years later and talk about that specific moment, and all the

moments that spiral out of its center because of the existence of this

photograph and numerous others. I can recall the scent of the sea and the

wind as it captures me in the moment of positioning myself where that step

used to be. The faint scent of rotting mangoes, cashews and plums rising in

the air, and the evening turning a piercing warm before the sun drops

beyond the horizon line like a heavy globular God. All of these things

I envision in a single unchanging moment, time inside me standing still.

I find myself now at the end of the beginning of this unquantifiable thing;

the journey has been at times treacherous and enlightening, but I have had a

companion, my work. There is an omnipresent advent light protruding forth

from the horizon in my dreams, usually it is tangled up in some diluted and

deluded fantastical realm or in the arms of a nightmare. I am seeing things

that have been hidden from me, hopes and dreams buried by previous

encounters with hostility, anger and insecurity the many revelations and

Revelations, the alphas and omegas.

Yet I remain at the crux of understanding the freedom of this light, its

action, fluxes and waves. In the beginning there was light. I am learning to

embrace its life and rays; I am beginning to believe, as an act of generosity

and as an active gift of love.