Kevin and I are preparing to do a shoot in Vieques, Puerto Rico. He is at his friend Brian’s, testing out a lens with his video camera. I am working on another, unrelated project.

We are going to shoot at the “Bio Bay.” Bahia de Mosquito is the brightest bioluminescent bay in the world. w.golden-heron.com/biobay.html. Wait, what’s a bioluminescent bay?

In February, I was idling on the phone with the man. He was at the Caldera residency. I was stuck at home, missing him, missing wanderlust and trying to cram down as much “day job” work as I could before leaving for Arizona. I was also researching bioluminescence. I am working on a proposal (and missing many deadlines) for a grant to build a bioluminescent (or reminiscent thereof) installation in the city here. Besides being beautiful, I want to create, within an urban environment, the eerie and otherworldly I so often shoot in nature. Most humans live in cities, and yet so many of us seem to long for nature, to find the only refuge in this world that torments us. How many New Yorkers in their 30s decide that the only way to keep sane is to buy a house upstate?

How to create a sense of bioluminescence in non-natural materials is a problem I have no yet solved. The fascination, and conviction, that this phenomenon reaches to a place so strangely inside of us, yet so foreign as to remain frightening and transcendent, began during a trip to shelter island for the party of someone who had a house out there. Shelter Island has no streetlights and, on a moonless night, basks under the starriest skies in southern new york. In that blackness, at least ten of us held our breath and flung ourselves off of a dock and into the bay.

All around us, the water sparkled. Previously as tranquil, murky and foreboding as any leech-ridden lake, the water now shone as lovely and jewel-like as the sky. This was bioluminescence and I had never heard of it.

Back to this year, I followed every possible search for bioluminescence that google deigned to make available to me. I even went here and immediately sent a link to Jean-Luc Sinclair. Of all the strange ideas, yet one that somehow reaches deeply inside, to a place logic and mystery convene, music, logical music, made from notes matching DNA.

And, I found this: Meanwhile, Kevin was hitting on bioluminescence as a theme as well, as he kept lighting more flames and catching more trails while way out west. Now that we are back east, and also tripping on our FIRST WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, we have decided that Vieques is the place to go. So has the W, sigh.