play.

“In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time’s continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world’s ordinary miracles.”

A year or so back I ran across an old edition of Brain Pickings on the Evolutionary and Existential Purpose of Deep Play and it was just the slap up the side of the head that I needed. I wrote a whole paragraph after this but I was essentially just repeating myself so delete delete delete… the point I was trying to get to is that it can be really good to get thrown out of your own head sometimes. I was having a rough time mostly because neurodivergent burnout had left me feeling very useless and the Brainpickings post facilitated the revelation that I needed to go P L A Y. Being consumed with worry about not being able to work as hard as I needed to was eating me alive. So I jumped into a new tab and found myself a copy of Ackerman’s book Deep Play and got reading. (You should definitely do that too. It’s a very good book but I won’t go into that now) 

It was time to play. I made an effort to lay on the floor with my dogs. I made an effort to go look at things that were bigger than me. I made the effort to go look at the sky. I made the effort to go look at my new lake and watch the water and the wind do cool stuff. I joined the library. I looked at What’s On flyers and newsletters from around my new town and I started turning up for things. One of those things was Ballarat Creative City Ballarat’s Creative Coffee Catch Up and it was fucking great. Not just like really great vibes from connecting with good humans kind of great I mean brain exploding holy shit great. It was something along the lines of everyone brings a bottle of their favourite booze and we pour it all in a bucket and it actually turns out to be a really fucking great cocktail but for creativity and ideas and energy. 

That first day we heard about the cool shit Ballarat Creative City was up to and then we heard about all the cool shit it was helping cool people do and then we heard from all the cool people in the room tell us about all their cool projects and cool ideas and it was really fucking great. Two of the cool as shit creatives I met there were Olivia and Genevre we all decided pretty quickly that we needed to creative coffee catch up a bit more regularly… so we did! 

One of those coffee catch ups led to Olivia and I making plans for a kind of play date… Olivia knew a costume shop and I knew where to find some weird interesting textures so we met at City Oval late one afternoon and got busy making some bloody great photographs. 

Of course we have continued to play and philosophise about creativity and power and brains and I promise I will post about those adventures in good time. In the meantime please go start daydreaming about playing and making and doing cool stuff. 

We won’t grow if we don’t play.

Life is short. 

We may only live until we’re 120 we do not have time to fuck around. 

SUMMER 2024

horses.

I’m a little ashamed to say I did not discover the song Land by Patti Smith until I heard it performed by Jen Cloher at the Melbourne Town Hall in 2015. It was a one off Patti Smith Tribute show featuring Adalita, Cloher, Gareth Liddiard and Courtney Barnett. It was definitely in my top 3 best gigs I had ever experienced in my whole life and Cloher went off. I just now did a wee look about for a review or something to link to and discovered the whole show is available on Milk Records YT!

So right this minute I’m experiencing the show for the second time. If you’re a fan of beautiful noise then I urge you to drop everything and watch it. 

Anyway… back to the point of this post… HORSES!

Of course I used to ride and of course I had a life changing crash that meant I couldn’t ride again. I gave away my beautiful mad paint gelding Sir and got on with not being a horse person. I spent many years missing their big stinky selves and their dirty hooves and the water drops running off their chins after a drink. I missed all of it. I can’t remember when but one day I had the bright idea that I could still LOOK at horses even if I couldn’t ride anymore. As often happens looking eventually lead to photography and suddenly HORSES HORSES HORSES HORSES COMING IN IN ALL DIRECTIONS…

SUMMER 2024

boop.

How far do you go back with these introductory things? I’m really not very good at that linear grand narrative stuff. It’s pretty much all happening all at once in my head so trying to organise it would be the quickest way make it boring. So maybe it’s probably best to live in the moment hey? 

This post is the first entry of my journal. Just a wee introduction to mark the start before I get to all the good stuff. The good stuff will be about photo projects I’m working on and cool photo stuff I’ve done in the past as well as stories about the people I meet while I’m poking about with my camera. 

SUMMER 2023