The Hour I Left Blank in Sedona

By River Stormcaller

There is a spreadsheet open on my laptop right now with SEDONA typed across the top of it and forty-one rows underneath. Sunrise shoot at Bell Rock. Reading light before it turns gold. A session on photographing a stranger without taking anything from them. Lunch. Willow has her own column, which she did not ask for. I built the whole plan in three evenings and it is good. It is the best thing I have made since the escape room. One row has been empty for nine days. Four to five, second afternoon. I have typed things into it and deleted them. Journaling circle. Sound bath. A short puppet bit, which is a real thing I considered and would like you to forget. Nine days, and the hour is still blank, and I know exactly why. I just have not wanted to write the reason down anywhere the guests can read it. ## The Hour I Keep Trying to Fill I am the jester. That is my archetype and it is also my

job description at this point. My whole toolkit is built for the second a room goes quiet. A joke. A bit with my hands. A question that turns all the attention sideways onto somebody who is happy to have it. I can keep twelve people laughing until midnight and still be out the door before anyone asks me anything true. Put me in a room with no script and no audience reaction and I start sweating. Not metaphorically. I have watched myself do it. At the first flash mob I ever ran I filled every single pause with a bit about my dog, and afterward a woman told me she had been about to say something real and then the joke came and she let it go. I thought about that for a week. I am still thinking about it. \*Being funny is the nicest lock I own. It works from the inside.\* This is the part of the jester nobody puts on the card. The shadow is not cruelty. It is avoidance. I make the room

lighter so it never has to get heavy. That works beautifully, right up until the retreat is mine, the heavy hour lands at four in the afternoon, and there is nobody left to fill it but me. ## What the Desert Does With Plans I track storms for a living, more or less. The name is not decoration. Twenty years of watching weather taught me one boring and very useful thing: you can plan the container, you cannot plan the weather inside it. Last month I got caught in a downpour on the way back from a shoot. No umbrella, no cover for two hundred yards. I stood under a gas station awning and watched the road go silver, and the frame I have been chasing all year walked up and handed itself to me for free. I did not schedule it. I could not have. If I had been holding my plan tight enough to keep everything dry, I would have missed the one picture that mattered. Same with people. The puppet show I

stumbled into on Canyon Road, where a man with a paper fox made an entire street stop walking. The mime in my coffee shop who never said a word and still got the whole room to lean in. Neither one was on anybody's plan. Both of them are still in me. So the blank hour is not a scheduling failure. It is the only part of the plan I actually believe in. I just cannot stand it. ## What the Blank Hour Is For The retreat is not a class about f-stops. If it were, I would fill every hour and everyone would go home with sharper photographs and the same eyes they arrived with. What I want to hand over is the thing I chase for a living: the half second before the ordinary turns into something else. The second before a face forgets it is being looked at. You cannot put that on a schedule. You can only leave a hole and hope it walks in. That is the entire design. Twelve people, red rock on every side

of us at four in the afternoon, no tripods, no prompts, no phones face up on the table. Max, a street performer I have been working with, told me the secret of a good busking set is the pause. Not the trick. The two seconds where nothing happens and the crowd leans in to find out if it is over. He said you have to stand in those two seconds like they are the act, or the whole thing falls apart. I have been doing this for a living for over a decade and I had to sit down when he said it. So at four in the afternoon on the second day there will be two chairs on a slab of rock and nothing else. If the silence gets awkward, it gets to be awkward. That is the exercise. If someone cries, nobody hands them a joke. If someone gets up and walks, the rock stays where it is. ## The Part I Am Most Afraid Of Here is the honest part. I am afraid twelve people paid good money for a retreat and will

spend that hour wondering why the host has stopped performing. My shadow says keep it moving, keep it light, keep the applause coming. That is what a jester does. It is a fine way to run a party and a terrible way to run a retreat. My job in that hour is not to be interesting. It is to sit in a chair on a rock and be a person in the same weather as everybody else. The monsoon may or may not show up. Sedona in September is a coin flip. Next to the blank row I have written a note in the margin: \*weather decides.\* It is the most honest line on the whole spreadsheet. ## Closing Reflection Forty-one rows. One of them empty. I am leaving it. If you are one of the twelve coming out with me, bring a jacket, a willing pair of eyes, and no expectation of being entertained. I will keep the light part of the plan tight, because that is my craft, and I will keep the four o'clock hour loose, because

that is the work. The rain will do what rain does. I will keep the shutter half pressed and the hour open. Some things you do not schedule. You leave the door unlocked and hope the ordinary walks in wearing something better.