JEFFREY LOVE

EUPHORIA
In May 2024, I had the privilege of spending a week in one of the Province Lands Dune Shacks maintained and managed by Peaked Hill Trust in Provincetown, MA. The shack happened to be Euphoria, owned for many years by one of Provincetown’s legendary figures, Hazel Hawthorne Werner, who bought Euphoria in 1943. She lived there every summer until she passed it on to The Peaked Hill Trust in 1986. PHT has lovingly tended and cared for the place ever since, and they offer a variety of stays to trust members, artists, writers, etc.

Euphoria has stood in its current location since 1952, the year I was born. During my week there, I was vividly aware of the bookend effect this created, residing in a space largely unchanged since my birth, while venturing out into the present and the landscape of the dunes to photograph several times daily. A partition of time and space that others before me had surely experienced, and I felt a tangible kinship to all those humans who had occupied Euphoria throughout the span of my life.

And Euphoria itself came to symbolize for me the finite nature of my existence, resting as it does in a landscape far older, perched on the edge of an infinite universe. Sitting on that porch at night, gazing out across the sea and up into the vastness of those billions of stars, is something that defies efforts to describe it.

But the sense of connection to the boundless is clear and direct out there in the dunes, a lesson for me as to where I can find the meaning in my fragile, temporary existence. In the end, I suppose it’s simply enough to know that we are all an integral part of the infinite, composed as we are of atoms cooked for billions of years in the hearts of now-gone stars. This awareness is a source of the nourishment I know my best self needs. And for that understanding, I’m indebted to Euphoria and to Peaked Hill Trust.