This last year has been a difficult one for us all, in so many ways. With the larger issues of the virus and social justice in all its forms, I’ve felt as though I somehow didn’t have the right to whine or complain about my relatively small problems. And yet this year has been one of health issues for me. I feel as though I’ve been on a merry-go-round of digestive issues, and migraines, and chronic back and neck pain. I’ve had pain from head-to-toe at one time or another during this last year. And it’s taken its toll. My emotions are closer to the surface these days because I haven’t felt like myself in a long while.

Last night I awoke to a pounding headache on my right side. I took the prescribed medicine and waited. And then waited some more. Finally, this morning the pain lifted and with it came a kind of euphoria. I am full of energy this morning. It’s easy to be optimistic when there is no pain. I take full advantage of this window of ease. I clean the bathrooms and water the plants and putter around the house. Grateful beyond measure for this small window of light.

I can feel that I am in a season of transition. And it’s hard. I don’t want to to make the pictures I’ve always made, and yet the new ones are not easily forthcoming. I sign up for courses and then change my mind. I erase whole folders of pictures. I lift the camera up to my eye and simply look, moving the camera side to side and then up and down as though searching for a moving target. I am not looking for some thing, but rather some sentiment. I am unsettled and this feeling keeps me up at night. I keep telling myself that these are growing pains.

I am hard on myself, and then forgiving. The pictures are expressions of self and I try to be kind to them.

“And this is why we need art more than ever now, because artists make us think deeply about form. Qualities like light and color, mass and volume, composition and line, shape our perception of how the parts relate to the whole. They influence our understanding of content. And they invite thinking about the relationship of representation and reality.” —Grace Elizabeth Hale, Photography as History in the U.S. South

I wondered how there could possibly be another photograph to make in this place I’ve lived my whole life. I come back to this place that grounds me. I am rooted in the geography and community of rural Virginia. Even as my home is slowly surrounded by development and traffic and sprawling growth, I return to the country, giving my attention, my presence and my affection to this place. I make time to pull the car over and yield to the beauty I see. Cars rush by, hurrying somewhere. But I circle back again and again.