“These are not your normal kids playing with fireworks” Mr. Ford said that those who were firing off the explosives made it impossible for him to walk his dogs at night …adding that he and his neighbors had called 911 as well as 311 …“I think it’s a lot of people who have been pent-up and need to blow off steam … but it’s just adding whole other layer of anxiety.”

That was from a June 2020 article in The New York Times about fireworks being set off in NYC, and that person is a fellow Inwood resident. My work focuses on the opposite of what he’s talking about. Instead of seeing the kids as “not normal,” they are my siblings. Instead of calling 911, I go out and join them. Instead of adding anxiety to my already anxious life, I choose to empathize more and look at the beauty that they create, and in this instance, they created a series of lights in nights darkened by a pandemic and social injustices. I capture the joy in places many people tell me not to enter. The beauty in what others may find scary, or just plainly ignore.