Several years ago, I enrolled in a college photography class with a friend. This was something I had been meaning to do for about thirty year but had never made  time for it before a breast cancer diagnosis shifted my priorities.  Until then, I had been very busy being busy, bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of professional, mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, all the while wishing Tom Petty would show up on my doorstep one day and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers.

A pleaser, I wanted to be the photography instructor’s favorite. I was off to a promising start – like me, she preferred Nikon over Canon. Like me, she had breast cancer and neither time nor patience for pink ribbons. Less technician than artist, she had a penchant for Photoshop and its post-processing capabilities that she knew would made us look more competent than we were.  Her dead-pan dead-on sense of what was important inspired me to do my homework and to never miss a class even though I dreaded disappointing her, or even worse, boring her.  And, she was often bored – to the point of openly bristling at our predictable photographs shot straight-on, subject in the center. What did we know of the rule of thirds?  She would sigh and stress that there was no magic in great photography, that it was “just light.”

“It is just light, and you just need to find it.”

Trying to relate – and reminding myself that it was also about composition – I told myself that photography  was “writing with light.” I wanted to learn how to do it and to one day take just one photograph of the variety Amyn Nasser admires – a magical, grand photograph:

I believe in the photographer’s magic — the ability to stir the soul with light and shape and color. To create grand visual moments out of small and simple things, and to infuse big and complicated subjects with unpretentious elegance. He respects classic disciplines, while at the same time insists on being fast, modern and wild.

Determined that her students would create at least one grand moment – a moment of vision – in our often pedestrian pictures, my photography teacher assigned as homework over that Thanksgiving weekend, what she coined a “prepositional scavenger hunt.” It would require us to shoot from various angles, to shift our perspective – against, across, beyond, beneath, around, behind, below, between, inside, outside, on top of, toward, through, upon . . .  It would require ‘a good eye.’

So it was that I found myself on that Thanksgiving morning, wandering the grounds of the Arizona State Capitol,  and pausing beneath a canopy of shimmering green and pink. I forget how long I sat there, looking skyward and thinking – just thinking.  I remember that it was long enough for prepositions and perspectives to give way to gratitude and grace – Amazing Grace –  and thoughts of Astral Weeks and Van Morrison in full flow at The Hollywood Bowl on another November evening more than a decade ago.

There, he mystifies those gathered before him the way he does when he seems younger than the grumpy old man he can appear to be. His rendition of Astral Weeks/I Believe I have Transcended is immaculate as he teases out the song he once described as “one where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” from the album of the same name described by legendary rock critic, Lester Bangs, on the tenth anniversary of its release:

Insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.

Now, over fifty years  since its release, people like me continue to find their own understandings of “Astral Weeks.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Gavin Edwards says it is “still the sweetest slice of mystery in Van Morrison’s catalog.”  Naturally then, I serve it up every November, especially around Thanksgiving.

Sitting in Phoenix in the shade of trees that do not grow in Belfast, I could not be further from Cyprus Avenue which boasts over 85 trees sprouting from wide cement pavements to providing light and shade. Pine, maple, sycamore, lime, beech . . . Once upon a time, this avenue would have been a place beyond Van Morrison’s station as a working class boy from Hynford Street:

Cyprus Avenue was a place where there’s a lot of wealth. It wasn’t far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think.

Eventually, the avenue of trees would  belong to him. It would belong to all of us.  For his 70th birthday, Van Morrison would play a concert on Cyprus Avenue, and pilgrims would come from all over the globe to experience it, to share his ‘sense of wonder.’

In the spirit of the holiday season, I could maybe say that it was the  Thanksgiving holiday that had something to do with my moment of transcendence as I gazed at those pink blossoms shimmering above me. That would not be true. The celebration of America’s most significant holiday does not come naturally to me, even after over thirty years here. Christmas is still the holiday that warms me, so I know whereof she speaks when Carole Coleman, an Irish woman living in America, apologizes to her American family and friends,

With apologies to members of my American family joining us for Christmas, we will be doing the turkey thing all over again  five weeks from now.

No,  it wasn’t thoughts of Thanksgiving that took me where I went that November afternoon in a green space in downtown Phoenix. It was a yearning. Looking up, losing track of time and place, I could find my footing again, knowing full well I would lose it – and rediscover it – again and again. And, fearless, I was grateful for it.

May the spirit of Thanksgiving hold us aloft. 

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