My Secret Public Journal: June 2026

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

How to Travel: An Ancient Guide for the Modern Tourist

Sunday, June 28, 2026

Saturday, June 27, 2026

Algeria vs Austria (World Cup, Group J)

National WWI Museum and Memorial

City of Entrepreneurs Marketplace at Union Station

Friday, June 26, 2026

That is the only way I know how to say it. It was not dramatic. It was not ceremonial. It was not the kind of day that announces itself as history while it is happening. There was no fanfare, no administrator stopping by to thank me for the years, no students gathered in the doorway, no speech, no card, no ritual of departure. It was simply the last day I was the teacher of the School Flex Program, and the last day I would teach at Roi S. Wood.

Sixteen of my nineteen years in education have been spent inhabiting that role in that place. That word matters to me: inhabiting. I did not merely work there. I lived a vocational life there. My days had shape there. My students knew where to find me there. My books, pictures, coffee cups, small signs, strange objects, practical materials, and accumulated bric-a-brac formed a kind of visible biography along the walls and shelves. The room became familiar not only because it was used, but because it was cared for. It was a place where students came to finish, restart, repair, escape, return, and sometimes just sit long enough to become ready for whatever came next.

Gaston Bachelard wrote, “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” I thought about that today, though not in those exact words at first. At first, I simply felt the truth of it in my body. A classroom is never only walls, ceiling, floor, fluorescent light, furniture, and institutional paint. Not after sixteen years. Not after enough students have crossed its threshold carrying anger, boredom, fear, exhaustion, hope, and the complicated burden of almost being done. Not after enough mornings have begun there, enough conversations have unfolded there, enough crises have been softened there, enough small recoveries have taken place there. At some point, a room absorbs the life lived inside it. It becomes more than space. It becomes witness.

Andrew Wyeth’s Groundhog Day feels like the right painting for this kind of ending. On the surface, it is a quiet image: a table, an empty plate, a knife, a cup and saucer, pale wallpaper, winter light, and a window looking out toward a field. There is no human figure in the room, yet the room feels charged by human absence. Someone has been there. Someone is expected. Something ordinary has been prepared, or perhaps something ordinary has just ended. The painting does not dramatize its emotion. It lets absence gather slowly.

That is what today felt like.

For the past month, I have been stripping away my presence from the Flex room. Pictures came down. Objects were packed, donated, or thrown away. Books found new homes or went into boxes. Items that once made the space feel like mine became things to sort, things to carry, things to decide the fate of. Some of it was practical. Some of it was necessary. But beneath the practical work was a quieter emotional labor. I was slowly removing evidence of myself.

That is a strange thing to do.

A room does not become empty all at once. It becomes empty in layers. First, the walls lose their familiar marks. Then the shelves stop telling stories. Then the small objects disappear, the ones no one else could fully understand because their meaning came from accumulation, not decoration. A thing sits in a room for years and becomes part of the weather of the place. Then one day it is in your hand, and you are deciding whether it belongs in a box, a trash can, another classroom, or nowhere at all.

I did not realize how much of myself was distributed throughout that room until I began removing it.

Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I have always understood that line intellectually, but today I understood it spatially. Sixteen years is not an abstract number when it has been lived in the same place. It is a thousand arrivals before the day begins. It is the sound of students entering reluctantly, confidently, nervously, or too loudly. It is paperwork, lesson plans, online courses, credit checks, graduation conversations, hard phone calls, small jokes, long silences, and the particular patience required by alternative education. It is coffee gone cold while solving someone else’s problem. It is the daily work of believing that a student’s story is not finished just because the traditional path has become difficult.

That is what the room held.

Flex was not just a program. It was a particular way of seeing students. It was a belief that time, structure, work, trust, and persistence could still make a path when the obvious path had narrowed. It was an educational space built around second chances, but not sentimental ones. Students still had to work. Credits still had to be earned. Hours still had to be verified. Choices still mattered. But the room itself carried a different kind of promise: you may not have finished the way everyone else did, but you can still finish.

That promise shaped me as much as it shaped them.

There is grief in leaving such a place, even when the leaving is right. That is difficult to explain because nothing tragic happened. I am not leaving education. I am not leaving the district. I am not even leaving the work of structure, accountability, reflection, and student repair. I am moving into a new room at the high school, into In-School Detention, into a role that I believe can become meaningful and humane. I can see the shape of the next work. I am already imagining its rhythms, its norms, its possibilities.

Still, something ended today.

C. S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” I do not want to overstate the comparison. This was not death. It was not the loss of a person. But it was the death of a form of life. It was the end of a role that had become inseparable from my adult identity. It was the end of a place that had carried sixteen years of my professional self. Perhaps that is why I did not weep. The feeling was not only sadness. It was disorientation. It was the body realizing that the map had changed.

There should be rituals for this kind of thing.

Schools are full of ceremonies. We know how to mark graduation, awards, retirements, first days, last days, athletic victories, academic honors, and public accomplishments. But many of the most important transitions in adult life happen without ritual. They occur in empty rooms, half-packed boxes, silent hallways, and parking lots. Institutions often depend upon the long devotion of people, yet they do not always know how to honor the emotional weight of that devotion when the structure changes. The schedule moves forward. The room is reassigned. The program changes. The next need emerges. The institution continues.

And the person who inhabited the work sits alone in a truck, trying to understand that a chapter has closed.

That was the moment when the weight of it all finally fell on me. I had finished what needed to be finished at Roi. My desk was ready to be delivered to my new room at the high school. The old space was behind me, the next space ahead of me, and I sat there in the truck, not crying, not speaking, not doing anything useful. I just sat.

There are moments when stillness is the only honest response.

That truck became a threshold. Behind me was Flex and Roi S. Wood. Ahead of me was ISD and the high school. Beside me, or behind me, was the desk itself, a practical object made symbolic by circumstance. I was not leaving everything behind. Some part of the old work was being carried forward. The desk that had belonged to one version of my teaching life would now enter another. It would stand in a different room, under different lights, serving a different purpose. Maybe I will too.

That is the paradox of transition. We leave and carry at the same time.

In Wyeth’s Groundhog Day, the window matters as much as the table. Inside, there is stillness. Outside, there is land, light, labor, and winter. The room is quiet, but the world continues. That is part of the ache of the painting. Whatever has happened inside the room, the field beyond the glass remains indifferent. The day goes on. Work goes on. Weather goes on. There is no cosmic pause for private grief.

Today had that same feeling. Something immense happened in me, but the world did not stop. No bell rang differently. No hallway altered itself in recognition. No one stood at the edge of the parking lot to say that sixteen years mattered. And yet they did matter. That is the truth I have to claim for myself. The absence of ceremony does not mean the absence of meaning.

Perhaps that is one reason art matters. A painting like Groundhog Day gives dignity to what might otherwise be overlooked. It notices the empty plate, the cup, the knife, the quiet window, the light on the wall. It understands that ordinary things can become solemn when they stand at the edge of absence. It does not need a figure to make the room human. The room is human because it has been inhabited.

My room was human too.

It was human because students struggled there. It was human because I struggled there. It was human because it contained the daily evidence of effort, frustration, humor, patience, and return. It was human because, for sixteen years, it held a version of education that I still believe in: one that does not give up on students simply because they have become inconvenient to the traditional structure. It was human because it gave me a place to practice the kind of teacher I became.

Now that room will become a room again. Someone else may use it. Someone else may arrange furniture, hang posters, store supplies, or pass through without knowing what it once held for me. That is natural. Places do not belong to us forever, even when they shape us. We inhabit them for a time, and then we leave them to other lives.

But leaving does not erase the habitation.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “The end is where we start from.” I felt that today when I finally shifted the truck into drive. The ending did not become real when I took the pictures down. It did not become real when I packed the boxes. It did not even become real when I walked out of the building. It became real in motion. As soon as the truck pulled into the street, there was a before and an after.

Before Flex and after Flex.

Before Roi and after Roi.

Before the room emptied and after the room became a room again.

There was no music, no speech, no blessing, no farewell. Just the ordinary sound of leaving. But by the time I drove away, the world had changed. Not for everyone. Maybe not even visibly. But for me, a line had been crossed.

I carried the desk to the high school. I carried the work forward. I carried the grief, too. And somewhere behind me, in a quiet room at Roi S. Wood, sixteen years of presence settled into memory.

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Speed Racer

Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers

Coral Rose

Monday, June 22, 2026

Go Eagles!

I finally found a red Philadelphia Eagles hat to stand in for the Joplin Eagles. After 17 years at JHS, I finally feel like a real high school teacher.

How to Cope: An Ancient Guide to Enduring Hardship

To Whom It May Concern

Human beings have always spoken into absence.

We speak to the dead. We speak to the night. We speak to the sea, to the sky, to the moon, to the storm, to the mountain, to the fire, to the empty room, to the body in the hospital bed, to the name carved in stone. We speak to God, gods, saints, angels, ancestors, spirits, fate, memory, conscience, silence, and the future. We speak when no answer comes. We speak before we know whether anyone is listening.

That may be where prayer begins.

Not in doctrine.

Not in certainty.

Not even in belief, at least not belief fully formed.

Prayer begins in address.

Something in us turns outward. A fear, a grief, a gratitude, a longing, a confession, a need, a hope. Something too large to remain sealed inside the self presses toward speech. We may not know where the words are going, but we know they cannot stay where they are. They must be given direction. They must be spoken, whispered, chanted, written, sung, or carried in silence.

Prayer is the grammar of that address.

That is why prayer is so difficult for me now. I no longer believe in a personal God who hears me from beyond the world. I do not believe there is a divine listener weighing my requests, arranging outcomes, correcting my path, or opening doors according to hidden wisdom. The conversational model of prayer no longer works for me. I cannot honestly say that I talk to God and God talks back.

But the need to address remains.

That is the strange thing.

Belief can fall away before the gesture does. The theology can collapse while the body still remembers what to do. Someone dies, and I want to speak. Someone suffers, and I want to hold their name somewhere. I feel gratitude, and silence feels incomplete. I fail, and I need language for contrition. I sit with fear, and the fear asks to be named. I stand before beauty, and something in me wants to bow.

If prayer were only belief expressed in words, then disbelief should end it.

It has not.

Instead, disbelief has made prayer more complicated and in some ways more honest. I can no longer hide behind inherited certainties. I can no longer pretend that every prayer has a clear recipient or that every silence is secretly an answer. I can no longer call my conveniences blessings while ignoring the suffering of others. I can no longer use prayer as a way to avoid action. If prayer remains, it must remain without those protections.

It must become truer.

The title of this essay, “To Whom It May Concern,” names that uncertainty. It sounds like the beginning of a formal letter, something sent into an institution without knowing who will open it. It is polite, distant, almost bureaucratic. But it also sounds like prayer after belief. The concern is real. The addressee is uncertain.

To whom it may concern.

That phrase lets me begin without pretending more confidence than I have. It allows prayer to remain addressed without requiring me to define the recipient too quickly. The words may be addressed to God, if God is there. They may be addressed to the dead, who live now only in memory and influence. They may be addressed to humanity, past, present, and future. They may be addressed to conscience, to silence, to the self beneath performance, to the community that must act, or to whatever remains worthy of reverence.

The uncertainty does not make the concern false.

In fact, the uncertainty may protect the concern from becoming too easy.

Much of the prayer I inherited was certain about its direction. We prayed to God the Father through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. We prayed in Jesus’ name. We believed God heard, cared, answered, delayed, corrected, blessed, protected, and provided. Prayer had a destination. It had a theology. It had a path upward and, if we were attentive enough, a response downward.

There is comfort in that.

There is also danger.

Certainty about prayer can make people careless with mystery. It can make them overconfident about God’s will, God’s answers, God’s silence, and God’s relationship to suffering. It can make them explain too quickly. It can make them call good fortune providence and tragedy lesson. It can make them believe that prayer is meaningful only if a supernatural being receives it and acts.

I do not want that kind of certainty anymore.

But I also do not want a world without prayer.

A world without prayer would be a world in which grief has fewer forms, gratitude has fewer rituals, failure has fewer confessions, and concern has fewer ways to become care. It would be a world in which the living speak less often to the dead, the lonely carry more silence alone, and the ordinary thresholds of life pass without attention. It would be a world in which everything must be either explained or dismissed, useful or useless, proven or abandoned.

Human life is too deep for that.

We need forms for what cannot be solved.

That is what prayer has always offered. It gives human beings a way to stand before the unsolved and remain present. Death is not solved by prayer. Grief is not solved by prayer. Injustice is not solved by prayer. Fear, guilt, longing, gratitude, and beauty are not solved by prayer. But prayer gives them shape. It keeps them from dissolving into noise or hardening into silence.

This may be the first claim I can make honestly: prayer gives form to concern.

Concern by itself can remain vague. I am concerned about the dead. I am concerned about the suffering. I am concerned about the world. I am concerned about my own failures. I am concerned about the future. But concern can become sentimental if it never takes form. It can remain a feeling that flatters the one who feels it.

Prayer asks concern to become more specific.

Say the name.

Light the candle.

Visit the grave.

Confess the failure.

Give thanks for the bread.

Sit in silence.

Return to the breath.

Write the letter.

Do the work.

Prayer begins in address, but it does not end in speech. At least, it should not. The address gathers the self so the self can be returned to the world with greater honesty and responsibility. If prayer does not eventually become some form of attention, presence, memory, repair, or care, then it has stopped too soon.

Still, speech matters.

I am suspicious of any account of prayer that moves too quickly to action and forgets the human need to speak. Words are not enough, but they are not nothing. A person standing at a grave may not be able to fix death, but speaking the name matters. A person praying beside a hospital bed may not be able to heal the body, but the words may tell the sufferer they are not alone. A person confessing failure may not undo harm, but speech may begin the work of repair.

Silence also matters.

There are prayers too deep for language. There are moments when words are premature, intrusive, or false. Sitting beside grief may be more prayerful than explaining it. Breathing quietly may be more honest than speaking confidently. The hand held in silence may carry more truth than the polished phrase.

Prayer includes both speech and silence because human beings need both.

We need words to keep silence from becoming abandonment.

We need silence to keep words from becoming evasion.

This is part of why prayer has taken so many forms across human history. It has been chant and stillness, petition and praise, lament and thanksgiving, confession and blessing, ritual and improvisation, solitude and community, body and word, work and rest. No single form contains it completely because no single form contains human need completely.

The dead need memory.

The grieving need lament.

The grateful need thanksgiving.

The guilty need confession.

The afraid need protection.

The scattered need silence.

The comfortable need interruption.

The concerned need responsibility.

Prayer moves among these needs.

That is why this essay has to be longer than a simple argument for or against prayer. Prayer is too woven into religious life to be handled quickly. It touches death, scripture, Jesus, Islam, monastic rhythm, folk practice, evangelical memory, liturgy, psychology, providence, unanswered longing, ethics, work, and the ongoing human need for connection. To understand what prayer means after belief, I have to follow it through all those rooms.

Each room changes the word slightly.

At the grave, prayer is memory.

In the Psalms, prayer is honest speech.

In Jesus, prayer is inherited desire.

In Islam, prayer is embodied return.

In the monastery, prayer is disciplined time.

In folk practice, prayer is protection close to the skin.

In my evangelical childhood, prayer is both tenderness and combat.

In liturgy, prayer is the relief of given words.

In psychology, prayer is the gathering of attention.

In unanswered longing, prayer is fidelity without guarantee.

In action, prayer is responsibility.

In work, prayer becomes care made material.

Together, these forms reveal prayer as the connective tissue of religious life.

That phrase matters because it avoids reducing prayer to a single function. Prayer is not only petition. It is not only praise. It is not only meditation. It is not only ritual. It is not only self-expression. It is not only moral formation. It is the practice that binds those things together. It joins inner life to outer life, memory to action, solitude to community, the dead to the living, speech to silence, and concern to care.

For me, prayer no longer begins with certainty that God is listening.

It begins with the certainty that human life must be addressed.

Grief must be addressed.

Gratitude must be addressed.

Failure must be addressed.

Fear must be addressed.

Beauty must be addressed.

Need must be addressed.

The dead must be addressed.

The living must be addressed.

The future must be addressed.

This is not the certainty of doctrine. It is the certainty of experience. I know what happens when these things remain unaddressed. Grief becomes numbness. Gratitude becomes entitlement. Failure becomes denial. Fear becomes control. Beauty becomes consumption. Need becomes shame. The dead become forgotten. The living become invisible. The future becomes someone else’s problem.

Prayer interrupts that.

It says: attend.

It says: speak.

It says: listen.

It says: remember.

It says: return.

It says: do not let this pass unnoticed.

That may be enough of a beginning.

Not a full theology. Not a return to the faith I once had. Not a solution to divine silence. Not proof that prayer reaches beyond the world. But a beginning. A way to stand honestly before the human need that prayer has always carried.

To whom it may concern:

I am still speaking.