Be Water, My Friend

Thoughts on finally flowing toward yourself

I woke up at 2am with sand in my bed.

Not from that morning. From the night before. From watching the sunset on the beach, the last light of the day melting into the water while I stood there with my camera thinking I never want to leave.

The sand in my sheets. The salt still in my hair. The ocean already inside the room with me before I even opened my eyes.

I laid there in the dark for a moment just feeling it. And then I thought, in four hours I'm going back.

I didn't go back to sleep.

At 3:45 on a Sunday morning I got in my car and drove to Nauset Beach alone.

No cooler. No floaties. No goggles. No beach towels for anyone but me. No one asking for anything. No one needing anything.

Just me, my camera, my tripod, and the Atlantic Ocean waiting in the dark.

I have lived near water my entire life.

I don't think I ever really looked at it until now.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to do exactly this. Bring my camera to the beach the right way. Set up my tripod at the water's edge. Watch the light change from nothing into everything. Photograph the waves and the sky and the colors that happen in those first quiet minutes before the world wakes up.

I have wanted this for years.

But there were always floaties to carry. Goggles to find. Coolers to pack. Little hands to hold and little voices needing things and a beach bag so full there was no room for a tripod, no room for a camera, and honestly no room for me to be anything other than the person everyone needed me to be.

I love that person. I love my family. I love the chaos of a beach day with kids and sunscreen and sandcastles.

But that woman with the camera who wanted to stand at the water's edge at sunrise?

She had been waiting a very long time for her turn.

I have been a photographer for 18 years.

Eighteen years of walking into other people's most sacred moments. Newborns still folded into themselves, fresh from somewhere holy. Women stepping in front of my camera trembling, hoping to finally be seen as they truly are. Families gathering in the golden hour, trying to hold onto something that keeps moving.

I have spent eighteen years making sure other people felt seen.

And somewhere along the way, in the most loving and also the most quietly exhausting way, I forgot to turn the lens around.

The workshop was called Sunset to Sunrise. It was hosted by Expressions Gallery down in Chatham, and when I signed up I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time.

Not nervous. Not obligated. Not responsible for anyone else's experience.

Just excited. Purely, simply, electrically excited.

For me.

I drove to the beach in the dark feeling something I can only describe as immense gratitude. Gratitude that I had finally stopped hemming and hawing and just did it. Gratitude that I had chosen myself, quietly and completely, in a way that didn't require anyone's permission or anyone's applause.

I was so proud of myself I could have cried right there on the highway at 4am.

When I got to the beach the sky was still dark. The waves were already doing what waves do, completely indifferent to whether anyone was watching, completely magnificent anyway.

I set up my tripod at the water's edge.

And for the first time in eighteen years of holding a camera, I had absolutely nothing to take care of except the light.

No one to direct. No one to make feel safe or beautiful or seen. No settings to worry about except my own. No moment to wait for except the one the ocean was already making without any help from me.

I stood there in my pink hoodie with the Atlantic coming in around my feet and I felt something settle in my nervous system that I don't have a perfect word for.

Joy, maybe. But quieter than joy. Deeper.

Like coming home to myself.

After the sunrise we went back to the gallery.

Ten complete strangers. Salt in our hair. Sand on our shoes. Cameras full of whatever the morning had given us. We sat together in that space at six o'clock in the morning and one by one people began to share why they had come.

And the room got very quiet very quickly.

There were people there who had recently lost someone. A parent. A spouse. Someone whose absence had left a space so enormous that the only thing that helped was standing at the edge of the ocean with a camera, having one single beautiful thing to focus on. One thing that asked nothing of them except their attention.

There were tears (which was totally unexpected).

I sat there in that gallery trying very hard not to be the one who cried first. I am, after all, the woman who holds the space. The one behind the lens. The steady one in the room. Eighteen years of being the person who doesn't fall apart because someone has to stay present enough to catch the moment.

Old habits.

But something was happening in that room that I didn't have words for yet. Ten strangers who had never met and would likely never see each other again, bound together by nothing except a sunrise and a camera and the particular courage it takes to show up for yourself when life has been asking so much of you.

Not friends exactly. Something else. Something that doesn't have a name but that anyone who has ever sat in a room like that at six in the morning will recognize immediately.

A collective. A quiet understanding. A shared exhale.

We had all driven toward the light in the dark for our own private reasons. And we had all arrived at the same beach at the same moment and watched the same sun come up over the same ocean.

And something about that felt like enough. Like more than enough. Like everything, actually.

On my nightstand right now sits a book called Be Water, My Friend. It contains the teachings of Bruce Lee, written by his daughter Shannon Lee. I have been reading it slowly, the way you read something that keeps stopping you mid-sentence because a single line just rearranged something inside you.

Bruce Lee's most famous teaching was about water. That water has no fixed shape. That it flows around obstacles rather than fighting them. That it can move gently or with tremendous force. That it carves canyons not through violence but through persistence and time and the simple willingness to keep moving.

Reading it, I kept thinking about my career.

Because I realize now that I have always been water.

I photographed engagements and weddings when all my friends were getting married. I photographed newborns when I was having babies. I photographed families when I had a full family of my own. I photographed women reinventing their careers when I began reinventing mine.

I have never once photographed something I wasn't also living.

I didn't plan it that way. I didn't strategize or pivot or follow a market. I just flowed. Season to season, life to life, naturally and almost unconsciously moving toward whatever was true for me in that moment and finding that the women who needed exactly that were always already waiting.

That's not a career. That's a calling.

That's water finding its level.

And now, almost 43 years old, having lived near the ocean my entire life without ever truly seeing it, I am flowing somewhere new. Toward the waves and the light and the colors the sky makes at 4:57am when most of the world is still asleep.

Toward the ocean.

Toward water.

Of course.

I turn 43 this week…

I have been carrying a camera since I was in a darkroom in 2003. I have built a business from nothing. I have shown up for hundreds of women at the most vulnerable moments of their lives. I have documented births and brands and the particular way a mother looks at a baby she has only just met but has somehow always known.

I have given this work everything I have.

And on a Sunday morning at Nauset Beach, just before sunrise, surrounded by strangers who were brave enough to choose themselves too, the work finally gave something back.

It gave me back to myself.

I don't know exactly what this next chapter looks like yet.

I know it involves the ocean. I know it involves waking up before the world does and standing at the water's edge with my camera and letting the light do what it has always done without me, indifferent and magnificent and asking nothing in return.

I know it lives alongside the human work, not instead of it. Because the woman who stands in the surf at sunrise watching the colors shift from black to pink to gold, she is the same woman who knocks on a new mother's door with butterflies in her stomach after eighteen years.

She is just more whole now.

More fed. More full. More her.

If you are reading this and you have a thing, a camera, a paintbrush, a trail you've been meaning to run, a class you keep almost signing up for, something that is purely and completely yours, and you have been waiting for the right time or the right permission or the right someone to finally make room for it,

I want you to know something.

Some of the people on that beach with me were carrying grief so heavy I could feel it in the room at six in the morning. And they came anyway. They set their alarms and they drove in the dark and they stood at the water's edge and they let the light do its work on them.

The floaties will always need carrying.

The grief doesn't always lift.

Life will not pause and clear a perfect space for you to finally begin.

You have to drive toward the light in the dark and trust that the sunrise will be there when you arrive.

It will be there.

I promise you it will be there.

Be water, my friend.

With Love,

April

April K Photo has been documenting women at moments of becoming since 2008.. This is one of hers.

Joy Is the Point