The Second Act

I traveled to the Azores to fix a story. Instead, I found myself inside a new one

In Search of the Second Act:
A Trip I Didn’t Plan For

A photo essay of traveling solo again.
And maybe the new theme of my life.

International solo travel has a way of opening something up in me. It strips life down to its essentials. A body in motion. A bag. A passport. A camera. A few old questions returning with a fresh face.

Who am I when no one is there to confirm it?

What remains when my familiar way of life fall away?

Can I really be here, on a beautiful island traveling, alone?

I had not really traveled alone like this since grad school, when I traveled to Kenya, then was living in London for an internship at Mother London, and took a weekend trip to Paris. I remember wandering those streets with my Canon Rebel, taking pictures of everything that seemed to hold a kind of grace I wanted for myself. Lovers kissing by the water. Champagne and oysters at café tables. Jazz moving through the air. I had no lover then, no companion, just my own looking. Mostly I walked. That is what I have always loved about travel. To walk a place is to submit to it.

Shabazz Larkin and Lori Bailey, Kenya Circa 2007

Shabazz Larkin, London, Circa 2007

A few decades later, I found myself doing it again. No lover on my arm. No wife beside me, no smart woman managing the logistics that used to overwhelm me. At JFK, I fumbled through my bags looking for my passport and felt, in that small panic, the shape of an old absence. There are some kinds of love you do not only feel in the heart. You feel them in the systems of daily life. In who remembers what. In who steadies the map.

Every Great Story Has a Call to Adventure

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
Toni Morrison

Alone this time, I made my way through. I did something I could have never done as a young, broke, naively-religious, intern, I went in the Air France lounge, a perk of my upgraded seats, and drank a glass of wine, though I do not drink. It felt ceremonial, a gesture toward some version of myself I did not yet know but was trying, however imperfectly, to meet. Around my neck was a new camera, this time it’s a little Fuji X-Half with a red strap, and I used it the way just like I used to when I was a young single man in grad school. I photographed the croissants. The wing outside my window. The evidence of departure itself.

I was flying to São Miguel in the Azores, to stay with collectors I had only known through Instagram. It was not until I saw them standing before me that I understood the strangeness or bravery or stupidity of what I had done. I had crossed an ocean to stay with people I had never truly met in person. There is a kind of faith in that. Or maybe a kind of magic. It wasn’t until I saw there faces that I realized we’d never met before.

The Arrival to a New Land

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”
Anne Lamott

But when I arrived, I was greeted not with strangeness, but with warmth. Ryan. Kathryn. Luna. Tammy. Hugs, drawings, breakfast, small tendernesses offered without ceremony. I had texted ahead that I would be arriving like a wounded dog, and I meant it half as a joke. But there was truth in it. I was tired. Tender. More in need of gentleness than I had admitted to myself.

I had come to the island to write. I was stuck at the beginning of the second act of my novel and needed a breakthrough. That was the center of my intention of the trip for me. But the island had other ideas.

There was the family itself, which charmed me almost immediately. Ryan cooking breakfast. Luna sending me notes from her loft using a slinky. Kathryn and I talking about art and ailments of growing in age. Nova the dog and Lucky the cat curling up near my feet despite my allergies, as if the body too can be persuaded by welcome.

The Island

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Joseph Campbell

There was the landscape, black volcanic rock and an Atlantic Ocean so enormous and unruly that it altered my sense of the sea. I grew up around the beaches of Virginia, but those waters prepared me for nothing like this. Back home, you could measure a waze by comparing it to the size of a car. “Oh look, that one is the size of a truck,” you could say. Here you could compare them to th e size of a house - “ooh that one looked like the size of a 3 bedroom bungalow with a long driveway. The waves and the rocks that they beat on were ancient. Beyond any human idea of control.

Even the drive from the airport to the house became its own lesson. What should have taken forty-five minutes took nearly twice that because I kept pulling over to take pictures with my little Fuji Camera. I told myself to stop. I did not stop. There are some forms of beauty that do not ask permission. They interrupt you and demand witness.

The views were enough to interrupt my plans.

The Wall

“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.”
Octavia Butler

There had been loose talk of a mural before I arrived. The first wall that we were planning was too rough, for the intimate style I was planning. Then we found another, smaller one, just outside my door. Every day I looked at it, trying to understand what belonged there.

Every morning I walked to a nearby coffee shop and ordered a one-euro espresso in my rough beginner’s Portuguese. Um café, por favor. I listened for bom dia and obrigado and thought about language, about history, about why there were grown men drinking beers this early in the morning at a coffee shop. And how it could only cost one euro, and tase so good. It was weak coffee, and a small cup. But it had that international charm of coming from a smile and a wave.

Every day, I tried to write the novel, but jet lag clouded the ideas. My days were blurred. The first night i slept for 12 hours, the first day lasted for two days. Still, somewhere in that confusion - stillness arrived. And the second act began to reveal itself in meditation. That was true in the novel, and it felt true in my life as well. That’s when the trip started getting metaphysical.

The Second Act

“come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

Lucile Clifton

Because what is a second act if not the moment after the life you assumed would continue forever has already ended? I had thought I would always be married. I had thought I would always inhabit that particular architecture of family. And so to sit inside this other family’s tenderness on a remote island in the Atlantic was to be deeply inspired and moved by its beauty and pierced by it too. Sometimes I looked at them and wept in secret, not only because what they had built was beautiful, but because some things has a way of illuminating your losses as much as your longings.

There is a Portuguese word that doesn’t exist in english. It comes to mind, saudade, which means to long for something that has yet to come. I remember learning this word from a friend in grad school - I’m not sure if I’m using it right, but the word keeps bubbling up in my consciousness.

So I took pictures of them. On walks. At meals. In passing moments. Playing in dormant volcanos that smelled like sulfur and in the lawn with the dog and with moms. I wanted to remember what a new tenderness looked like.

The Mural, The Master & The Mystery.

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison

And finally, the mural came to me. I decided to paint Muddy Waters and his wife Geneva. I have long loved the photograph of them, the closeness of it, the easy romance, the unguarded dignity. Ryan and Catherine are artists, and Ryan has been building a children’s project rooted in hip hop pedagogy. I wanted to leave behind something that felt like company. Something musical. Something Black. A gesture of recognition on an island where Blackness is not that common. Maybe those painted figures could greet the next Black person who came through. Maybe they could greet everyone. Everybody needs a little reminder of the Black Magic that changes the world.

Painting Muddy and Geneva in the Azores felt, to me, like a way of connecting the American South to the global South. A small bridge made of image and intention. A declaration that our stories belong in places where they are not expected, perhaps especially there.

A New Mission

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is. It’s to imagine what is possible.”
Bell Hooks

I had never painted a mural before. My work has mostly lived on canvas, in private collections, behind doors opened by invitation. But walls are different. Walls speak to the people - all people. Not just the rich ones that can afford my work. Walls enter the weather. Walls belong not just to an owner, but to a place. And perhaps this is where I am headed now.

In truth, my first mural was in my mother’s kitchen. As a little boy, I drew a city skyline in Sharpie across her wall. I did not yet have the language to call myself an artist. I was simply a child compelled to mark the world around him. It took nearly forty years for me to write on another wall, and now I wonder if this is part of my calling. To paint walls with the qualities I most want to cultivate in myself and encounter in the world. Love. Compassion. Joy. Equanimity. The four boundless qualities I have been studying from the Buddha and through my teacher Pema Chödrön.

I want to paint those qualities wherever I can.

The Invitation to Change

“The amateur waits for inspiration. The professional sits down and works.”
— Steven Pressfield

So yes, this is an invitation and a shameless plug for my work. If you have a wall in Nashville, in Texas, in Virginia, in Paris, in Cape Town, anywhere, and you want something on it that carries love, joy, compassion, and equanimity, I would like to paint one for you too. I’m on a mission to paint 100 walls. Will yours be number 2?

What Remains

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

James Baldwin

But it is also a reckoning. I came to the Azores to solve the second act of my novel. Instead, I also found myself standing inside the second act of my own life. I found a family and friends, a new chosen brother, sister, moms and niece I had not expected. A mural I had not planned. A softness I did not know I was seeking. And now I am left with the larger question. Whether I can meet this chapter of my life with the same curiosity I bring to a place I have never been. Whether I can offer myself the same compassion I am trying to offer the character I am writing. Whether I can slow down enough to truly read the story I am already inside.

For now, the story remains full of surprises. That may be another way of saying it remains full of drama. So much drama in the LBC.

And I am grateful that, for a little while, I stopped long enough to see it.

Bom Voyage for now, or better yet - Boa Viagem.

Here are a few songs from Portuguese artists that kept me company on my trip. :)
Enjoi

Love, Shabazz Larkin