Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place. — Ursula K. Le Guin
This time last year, I was making final preparations for my trip to Japan — a trip I began planning two months prior on a whim after watching a YouTube video about how cheap it is to visit. I’m pretty sure my passport had only just arrived, and I was unsure whether to bring my large format film kit or my digital kit. Crazy to think I even considered lugging around the former, risking the destruction of my film to over-powered X-rays, coming home with nothing to show for my two weeks in a foreign place. Unfortunate I didn’t do it anyway, if only for the added challenge, the unique experience further enhanced. It’s not like I have shown much of my work from the trip, anyway. Life — as it always does — got in the way and time was lost to the hourglass.
I’m Cody Schultz, and this is the Explorations newsletter. You signed up on my website, likely a long long time ago (perhaps in a galaxy far away). If you’d like to unsubscribe, just click that link or the one at the bottom. One click, all done, good bye. Otherwise, welcome.
Any plans to write about my trip and the various thoughts had while there went the way of the dodo the moment I landed in Pennsylvania. My anxiety — a minor character in Japan — was quick to return, the realities of daily life slapping me in the face with a 2x4. A month later I would quit my job and find myself at the whimsy of the freelance world yet again, my only income from a nature photography magazine. Freelance work is tough enough, especially with artificial intelligence taking all of the wrong jobs; it’s even more difficult when you allow(?) your depression to brutally murder all cohesive thought and motivation to do even that which you most enjoy.
By August, I had done little more than rot at home. As Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in a 1933 letter to Russel Vernon Hunter, “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.” There was no camping, barely any photography, only a hike or two. At least I secured a job as a paraprofessional at a local middle school, to begin upon my return from Montana. But I’m not yet ready to discuss, let alone think about, the last quarter of 2025. I’m still waiting for myself to be myself again.
We are 28 days into this new year — enough time for an aggression-inducing virus to cause the breakdown of society1; not enough time to get a feel for how the year will progress. I am awaiting the start of (yet another) job — different title, different school, same district — and am pushing myself to hit the gym, to pick up a book and not my phone, to claw back my attention. This is an abysmally slow process, but I am trying to give myself the space and the grace to let everything find its rightful place. While others have set — and already forgot about — goals for the year, I simply want to see what happens, sans pressure.
Yes, I want to do more: writing, reading, exploring; and do less: doomscrolling, ruminating, rotting; but none of that needs a timeline attached to it.
Without firm plans in place, I don’t know where I will end up come June, when the school year ends and I am (at least temporarily) unemployed once more. My heart hasn’t been in Pennsylvania for a very long while now — the west calls my name. Is this the year I finally answer?
So, what’s next?
For one, you will hear from me again come mid-February. This is a promise I intend to keep, despite my failure to do so throughout last year. What the next missive will look like, I cannot say, although I have hopes it will include more (thoughts / ideas / blathering) than this one. The shortness here is intentional, if only to ensure I hit publish prior to January’s end.
Work is already being done toward an essay on artificial versus actual intelligence, which will include my thoughts on the education system as it currently stands. Given my proximity to the system — my masters being in English education and my job in middle school classrooms — this is a topic I think often about. This begins my transition away from writing solely about photography and toward more broadened themes, with the primary connection point being (creativity / nature / mental health). If I look to the great writers of the past — Susan Sontag, George Orwell, Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey — they did not limit their writing to a singular topic, even if their connection point was not always obvious2. No longer shall I.
Until February, I will leave you with this conversation between Jared Henderson and Joe Folley.
— C
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Some may say, given recent events, this breakdown has already begun. I’m hard-pressed to disagree. ↩
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There are already a dozen too many photographers writing about photography, repeating each other in slightly different ways, beating the dead horse of: the intimate versus the grand landscape; how to be more mindful; why slowing down is better than spraying-and-praying; etc. I feel no need to regurgitate this, lest I have something novel to contribute. Then again, all we have ever done is eschew novelty, defaulting to the same structures, themes, and archetypes since our dawn. ↩