Kiss Your Cameras For Me.
It was the most unexpected surprise. I had traveled all the way to Turkey for a mystical dream come true - to dance five days with the Sufi dervishes. The journey there was one of those arduous treks where nothing flowed quite as smoothly as I wanted. For starters, while dragging my luggage between platforms I watched the A train pull off without me, sentencing me to a twenty minute wait in the five am sweltering heat of July, helplessly sweating into the clothes I would be forced to wear for the next twenty four hours.
I slept in fits and starts. Every time I fell asleep a baby or fellow passenger woke me violently. There was a layover in London, a train to a friend’s, a car back to the airport. Another flight. When I finally touched ground on Turkish soil, I expected relief. Friends of my host were to pick me up and drive me the last leg. I greeted them excitedly, they greeted me indifferently. I had imagined being welcomed with loving arms as an honored guest, sharing notes on how excited we were. Instead, they spoke to each other in Turkish, while I sat silently in the back so tired I could barely string a sentence together in English. Something had been lost in translation, something cultural and beyond my reach. I felt lonely and off center. As omens go, not the best of beginnings.
But of course the journey started long before that. It started two months earlier in a psilocybin ceremony in Brooklyn. It started four months before that at an ecstatic dance retreat in Brazil. It started five years ago when I dove into dreamwork and started letting my dreams be me guides. I guess it really it started ten years ago, still grieving the death of my mother, staring into the ocean on a beach in Ocean City. Where, having just completed a yoga teacher training, in a moment of absolute clarity, I decided the best way to dedicate myself to my spiritual practice was to go back to wedding photography.
What’s important to know is that this trip was not about weddings or wedding photography. I had traveled half way across the world to drop into ecstatic trance, to whirl for hours on end. I didn’t even bring a camera, not really. A friend had gifted me a little toy film camera to play with, so I brought that and two rolls of film. No one here even knew what I did for a living. No one cared. Here, your credentials were based in what kinds of healing art you study and it takes too long to explain how wedding photography qualifies.
The name we use for this ceremony is Sema. Our Sema was to last for five days and nights. The musicians would start playing, they would change every hour, but the music would never cease, and as long as two Semazans were circling, we went on. Sometimes we whirl, sometimes we walk the circle. And always there are people sitting around us in support. When we enter the space, we bow, then we kiss the ground. When we pass the musicians, we bow again.
Sema means many things, but mostly we say it means to listen. So I listened, and I did what I do best as a photographer, I watched. I can’t tell you all of what I witnessed. It’s too sacred. But one thing that caught my heart deeply: each time I watched the musicians pull their beloved instruments from their cases, and each time they put them away, they gave them a little kiss. A gesture of love, so small yet so mighty, imbuing the inanimate with life. As Semazans we bow to the musicians, as musicians we bow to our instruments.
It took me days to settle. Shedding the layers of travel and landing back into myself was a chore. Rather than the bliss I had experienced whirling in Brazil, each time I whirled, I found myself nauseous and shaky. I tried to surrender to the discomfort. I did surrender to it. Slowly I found my rhythm, I walked when I couldn’t whirl.
The energy was intense and indescribable. The music, otherworldly. I could sit and soak in it for hours. I did. Then I would retreat to my room, curl into my pajamas and gush with my roommate about how magical it all was. It was during one of these breaks that we heard a bit of a commotion. We could feel that there was something happening outside of the Sema, but it wasn’t clear what. A passerby asked if we were going to the wedding. What an odd collision of vocation and passion I felt. To be here, so far from the world I know, and suddenly feel compelled to grab my (toy) camera, kiss it and stand in sacred witness. Only in dreams have I photographed a wedding with so little notice. Only in dreams would I show up to a wedding with a toy for a camera. Only in dreams have I photographed a wedding with two brides, and two grooms. Here, where I can’t even understand the words. Yet, where nothing is lost is translation, where I know exactly what to do and where to stand. Here, I find myself completely centered and at home.
