Purple Chapels and Pigeons
Reasons to Look Up
Rewind to 2014: I am married. My husband and I had co-created The Globe Squatters, two artists who house-sit their way around the world. We have just finished a house-sit in a little French town near Normandy. Now, we are headed to Paris.
We go through the Pierre La Chaise cemetery first. I want to see the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Colette, and Delacroix. I have been there once before, but I need the memory again. We walk through the cemetery to satisfy my curiosity. Then we head over to the Louvre.
Standing outside the pyramid and people-watching, my husband sits on the stairs. I am standing a few feet away from him, admiring the architecture. He is taking photos. I feel a drop of water on my head.
It’s raining, I tell him. He looks up. No, it’s not, he says. I glide my hand through my hair and look at my hand. It is covered in pigeon poop.
He starts laughing and tells me It’s good luck.
I am laughing, too, but also grossed out. I have no napkins. So I walk around Paris with dry pigeon poop in my hair all day. Here is the photo he took of me at that moment.
Back to this moment, 2024. I am at the Louvre once again. I am with a woman who worked for me when I was an art director—right after my husband died in 2016.
I convinced her to help me reenact this photo. I want a then-and-now version. She humors me. People around us are perplexed as to what we are doing. It is most likely a moment she won’t forget, and they won’t either.
You can see from the pictures Paris has changed. I have changed. There are obvious and not-so-obvious differences.
Ten years ago, there was no Ferris wheel. It was cloudy, making the buildings more antique-looking. In that first photo, I was a wife. In the second, I am a widow. I have deeper lines on my face from the same concerned look I have been making for years.
Other things that are not so obvious is that I have more cracks in my heart from living life. The moment I stepped on this soil, I exchanged one version of myself for another.
I know this all to be true. As true as this man knows he is meant to be playing the violin.
Then this happened.
To understand the gravity of what this photo means, you have to go back and read my other post: Just a Zipper.
It's no mistake that this happened to me right after the reenactment involving my late husband. We were channeling something greater than ourselves at that moment. The response rippled out into the universe and then reflected back to me in a way I understood.
I live for these moments because it feels like life is sending me signals I am on the right track. Even though I question myself daily about what I am doing here, in Europe, and in life itself, what is it all for?
A good friend said I must be missing something, searching for something out here.
I considered it. Was I looking for something outside myself because I felt incomplete? Why do I feel so compelled to keep traveling? To keep going, even when life throws me the shittiest of circumstances. What is it that I have inside of me that wills me further? Or just to go on.
For me, this life is like a treasure hunt; my role is to be in constant contact with what shows up as much as possible. And the magic is when I do show up- I get zipper pulls, rainbows in Germany, and belly laughs from strangers.
I see how a man's face lights up when he says his daughter’s name. To witness calving ice on the back of a boat in the middle of the night. To be the only person in a chapel with a purple door constructed in 1592. Where a man walks in with his small child and her doll and sings a prayer for her.
This world will never lose its beauty to me. There is so much to discover under rocks, between train stations, and in people’s eyes. I will trace the outline of this world until I can draw it from memory.
And then I will do it all again.