Winston, Long Island Sound, NY - 8.10

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GPS

Sunday, in gusty Long Island Sound, we were emergency-ready when a roller-furling mainsail came off-track out there. The winds kept changing and we came-about at least four times.  So, the genny went back in and the mainsail came down completely and I literally sat on it all the way back to the slip. Then the arduous work of putting it back on the track inside the mast had to be done - well, this is sailing too.  We packed it in for the day after the sail was back in order.  No one hurt, no damage - that's always the thankful review.  It could have been disastrous but wasn't due to experience. 

I was so proud of Winston who just sat and observed the pandemonium on the boat.  Not a bark or a squeak came from him.  But this is a photo site - why am I (still) writing about a puppy?

I promised before I'd curb my enthusiasm about him. However, I am learning something new that I believe people who have had children or happy relationships already know.  I've had dogs before but in the country with a kennel/house life.  Winston has to socially behave because he lives a city life and he has to understand the boat too - and as a Labrador should, he loves water.  All these things considered, right now he needs constant, diligent training.  He's picking up the commands of what's expected well for one so young.

And, he's a rock star.  I'm the phantom at the other end of the leash.  So, strangers of every ilk approach us anywhere we go - I'm not used to this attention and this little dog tolerates it or sits on my feet if he senses trouble.

What I didn't know until I went to Long Island last week is how much this dog matters to me and how much I matter to him. Sounds so simple but it seems I have gotten a glimpse of what it might have been like to have children.  Here's where the photography comes in - I have to restrain myself from posting the pictures I've been taking of Winston.  Now I understand "the wallet syndrome" of parents showing pictures of children and grandchildren.  I never did before. I'm allowing myself to photographically brag a bit for a spell.  It's been fun for me and something new.

How is it we go through life and we discover there's been these gaps of  fundamental experience that others have taken for granted since early adulthood or even childhood?  Maybe that explains why photography is essential to me - I've been looking and looking all these years to find, return, and show love.  Attempting to show it in my photography by how I see through a particular lens; I think I may have succeeded in a way. If I have, maybe I've created something artistically significant and lasting after all.

But now, what's really new to me is that I'm learning to feel mutually loved and to accept it as fact.

It's very hard for me - always has been, as an adoptee, to feel mutually loved; this is the heart of the bewilderment of any us.  We never quite know if we're where we belong or if we matter, really.  In John Irving's The Cider House Rules, the protagonist Homer Larch, an orphan, says it so well, "we're here to be useful."  We know, more often than not, where we don't belong.  Moreover, whole chapters of our lives are often lived in circumstances where we are not appreciated,  just merely "useful," taken for granted despite our best loving efforts.  So, for me, photography "fixes" my location, not unlike a GPS, and validates what I see as meaningful and existential, so at least I belong to the location or the moment. That in the place of love or kindness, there's at least beauty. It's just lucky that I am an artist.

And when, as adoptees, we find something or someone who we feel we do belong; it's among the most impressionable and important experiences we'll ever have.  We will remain loyally attached to those people, animals, and/or moments and places for life at considerable risk if necessary. The epiphany is the authentic revelation in our hearts, this real love, that is the answer to what we've been looking for.  It happens seldom in life, as we know immediately this is special. The struggle upon having found this love is first identifying what happened to us as love - since at first we don't recognize it, then feeling we deserve it, let alone have it - which then calls us then to manage our fears, which are considerable.

To me, that's why God chose Moses, the quintessential adoptee, to lead and inform the Jews from Egypt that they were loved and chosen.  It just may take an adoptee to point the way to what authentic love is since we are, by design, keen observers, usually seeing matters from an outsider's perspective. It is no small matter for an adoptee to truly fall in love. When it doesn't work out, it's so painful because the initial shock, once understood, is so visceral and connected. This sort of knot can never be untied; feeling this real connection is all we ever wanted - all I ever wanted, anyhow.

  So, Winston's been a teacher and practice for me to accept and believe that I'm mutually loved, it's okay to feel it, and that this time, it's here to stay.  The only requirement is an unprotected open heart because without one, you'll never experience the joy of real love.  I believe now more people than not have never taken the big risks to feel mutual love and the courage it engenders, despite outward appearances, marriages, children.  Once you've felt it with someone or something, there's no alternative to it - it's all you want; it's what we're given to give life deeper meaning.

My sermonizing about matters of the heart now and then are more edifying to me probably than to you the reader, but maybe not.  As an artist, my experiences bounce off what I create and vice versa - especially with my photography as I document where my feet take me - it's not a deliberate venture, hardly planned - like a journal.  That's how love - the really transformational variety (where we're changed by it) comes into our lives too - as a surprise, from the most unexpected people, animals, and places.

Winston, my little Labrador, a surprise gift, is here leading the way for love's best offerings, a sign for what's yet to be. He belongs to me.

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