A Change in the Air

On dropping off the radar a while, and what the future holds

Navilleton School, an historic one-room schoolhouse near Floyd’s Knobs, Indiana. Photograph by the author.

Readers, I must apologize. I last posted over a month ago, though I have, to my mind, a good reason.

The reason is school.

When I began One Continuous Branch, I’d just finished teaching a semester of college writing at the University of Louisville and, through a series of circumstances, had lost the opportunity to sign another contract for the spring. I was living off some savings, and I’d eventually gotten a bit of contract work doing content writing for a small firm in Texas. That kept me afloat and also gave me plenty of time to work on my Substack.

When summer came around, I traveled to Sweden on a grant, and I’d by then already lined up a few weeks of extra posts to cover my absence. When I returned, I’d lined myself up to sign another part-time contract for a semester at the university, though I was understandably anxious. I’d been paying for my own health insurance for months, and the contract work had begun to dry up—not uncommon, I was told, in the summer months. I needed something far more regular.

A week before the start of classes, I was hired by North Oldham High School to teach English. That, I figured, would give me the grounding I needed to continue my creative work. I thought—and I laugh at this now—that teaching would be my “side gig.”

Anyone who has ever taught in a public school full-time knows how foolish a thought this would be.

Still, I managed to keep up with my Substack, more or less. At the outset, I was posting weekly, but I shifted to biweekly to give myself time, as well as to conserve content. When 2025 began, I figured it would be a good year. I was settled into a routine, although I’d made sacrifices: my photography was the main one, though I consoled myself with the fact that, in winter, I wouldn’t get much shooting done anyway. There was always summer, I told myself.

Since spring break at the beginning of April, life has been a whirlwind. I came back to school with close to one hundred essays on Fahrenheit 451 to score, and I’d completely underestimated the continuing workload—especially the fact that I would still have to plan daily for the next unit, including all the additional work that came along with that.

The stress finally got to me. It cost me sleep, of course—things came to a head when I came into school one day on only three hours of sleep. Now, one of my colleagues pointed out that this is precisely where I would need to take a sick day (in education, too, these are sometimes known as “mental health days,” and that day certainly would have qualified). But given my inflated sense of responsibility, I figured I had to be there.

While I was doing this, there was other work, too, on the home front. My personal work: grant applications, finishing an article on Minor White for Black & White Photography, nearly a hundred slide film exposures that needed to be scanned, and so on. On top of that, all the rains had set the grass to growing, so I had to begin mowing the lawn and pulling weeds.

One Continuous Branch was the last thing on my mind. I was just over-occupied and, generally by the time I got home, made dinner, washed dishes, and took a walk, completely exhausted.

This set me to thinking: is the topic I’m writing about the right one? Shouldn’t I be writing about what’s on my mind? Shouldn’t I be more…motivated?

For example: one evening, I was out walking, my mind full of negative thoughts, as if just thinking was a form of doom scrolling. It was Memorial Day, the beginning of the last week I’d have with students, and all that this fact entailed—reviewing final projects, entering grades, saying goodbyes.

I was walking my usual circuit, down to the community gardens, which I’d circle before turning back home. It was a lovely spring evening, cloudy, a warm wind shaking the treetops. That alone puts me in a mood—I always love a warm wind.

What I saw stopped me utterly: two great egrets aloft on the wind, sailing into the distance, northward toward the Ohio River, where I knew they nested. What happened was this: a feeling came over me, which I can describe only as awe. It permeated my whole body.

I thought, This is what we mean by holy.

I thought, This is the feeling I want all the time. I continued home, refreshed.

The following Sunday, the school year was completed. All that remained of my responsibilities was to attend graduation that morning downtown. By then, I’d struggled for a few weeks with what to say, with what to write here. All my ideas for The Tombs of Slate Run, the book I’ve wanted to complete for years, feel as if they’ve faded off into the distance, like an old friend who’s finally taken his leave after a brief visit.

And I looked to the next school year, only two months away. I’d have a month-and-a-half to try to fit everything that needed to get done, including photography work, before I travel to Spain on a grant that will take me to the Experimental Photography Festival in Barcelona. I’ll return from that, rest a few days, and then be right back into the school for meetings, a conference, workshops, professional development and so on.

Is there time enough for everything?

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And so at the end of the academic year, I find myself questioning what I’m to do with my writing and my photography. Can I unify them? How can I speak most authentically?

The first week of June I’d originally reserved to travel back to the ancestral landscapes of Pennsylvania and New York, but let’s face it, I’m tired. And such a trip, with gas and food and lodging, is expensive. I’d applied for grants to cover it but none had panned out. I’m not even sure I need to go; I likely have plenty to work with already, the research done. If anything, I wanted to take photos, perhaps visit a grave or two more.

As I sit here, listening to a pair of cardinals just outside the window, watching the clock so I can eat, shower, and drive my daughter to an appointment, I think, I can go back to the monthly, weekly, and daily planners I used for a long time before I let them slide. I can make a plan and try to stick with it. Be disciplined. I can plot my ideas and look for what is inspiring and rewarding in my life and make it my work—if not “work,” then perhaps my vocation.

I went back and reread the opening of The Tombs of Slate Run. I felt it deeply, the original conviction, the original enthusiasm. It’s a constant game of cat-and-mouse trying to reconnect to that devotion.

And now I’ve begun looking at another family line, trying to find a line stretching backward from rural Indiana into Kentucky and, finally, to Virginia. I think to myself that if I go visit a few courthouses—they’re close, both within an hour’s drive—I can look at marriage records for myself, see the original documents. Inspire myself to keep going.

As I write this, we’re all seeing the news: what’s happening in Los Angeles, what’s happening in Gaza, what’s happening in Ukraine. For anyone with a sensitive disposition, just reading the news is like trying to keep your head above water.

So, readers, over the course of the summer my task is to rethink my directions. I saw that one Substack, Motley Stories, is changing direction because, as K. J. Wilsdon wrote, “I believe I have reached the end of that journey. It is hard to find something further to say…”

I would like that freedom, too: the liberty to write about what’s actually happening in my life, to offer that narrative as its own story. I’m doing far more than just researching family history. I’m reading Minor White’s Rites & Passages and Eugene Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. I’m photographing nineteenth century Catholic churches in rural Kentucky. I’m cleaning my house. I’m parenting. I’m watching the news cycle daily.

There is something to be said for Herrigel, despite the criticism and controversy surrounding both his book and himself. In the introduction, D. T. Suzuki elaborates on the concept that it is not “I” who write—nor who photographs—but what he sometimes refers to as “It,” or, more concisely, the Unconscious.

The practice of any art, claims Herrigel, is to allow the Unconscious to rise and act. Anything we try to do, as limited egos, can never be truly free. I should be writing, naturally, what comes to me. Not what I think I should be writing. The difficulty in doing that is that, often through our writing, we fashion our approach into a cage. And then we complain as we chafe at the bars.

I would invite you to continue on this journey with me. Sure, I’ll write from time to time on my probing of family history—I’m not quite done there. But I also want to write about the process, to keep these larger ideas moving so that I cease feeling so stagnated. Life is always moving, and we are always changing with it.

The truest art, then, is how we order our lives.