How the light gets in

A young woman artist living in Portland briefly visited Appalachia, which happens to be the place of my birth. There she saw the ramshackle wooden shacks of poor southern whites. As a Buddhist I deeply believe that all people are my people and that we are all in this together, but I am, in this small sack of skin and bone I know as myself, an escapee from what it is to be a poor southern white person. And so I have a deep affinity with people who live in such shacks, people who have not yet escaped, who may yet escape, who will die or be broken in them.

This young Portland woman, Crystal Schenk, thought about class, about those who are housed and those who are unhoused, about rain and winter winds that blow through the cracks in such shacks. She came home to Portland and began building a life-size replica of one of those shacks, and she made it of stained glass, reinforced with steel. The stained glass is the color of tobacco, the color of bourbon, the color of bruises and abortions, the color of cooking smoke and desperation. She calls it “Shelter.” Today I sat inside the stained glass shack in a gallery in Portland, Oregon, looking at how the light comes through the cracks, sobbing.

I have collaborated with Crystal Schenk on some pictures of this shelter. She doesn’t know I did that. We haven’t met or talked about it. But that’s what I did, because I am so deeply moved by what she saw and what she did with what she saw. I’m grateful to her for finding a way to see my people and their dwellings as beautiful. Our results are here.

This is what Leonard Cohen has to say about it.