I don’t have to try and write or attempt to be creative, it just flows. No writers block, it just means it’s time to experience something somewhere that will drive my motivation again, like fuel to the flame of inspiration driving me to scrawl across a page void of any friction. A trip away or chasing a quality thought can do this.
But like all sources of fuel you can run low if you aren’t careful to replenish – no bushfire can burn forever (that I know of anyhow)! I’ve learnt the hard way these past six months when it comes to keeping mental stimulation constant and independently creative, and have learnt that as my life shifts and changes so to must my focuses on the pages I carry around with me everywhere. I cannot go searching for motivation from the past continually without refreshing the experiences in the present.
I must explore more of my motivation – the great outdoors.
Last year, weeks turned into months at the blink of the eye as I ran around the country fighting for marine environmental protection. My focus on activism was unrelenting and utterly intense, dedicating huge swathes of my time and life to it. I was creative, but on the clock and for an organisation. The personalised words of my own dried up, and come December I was hanging for a wet spell to beat off the creative drought I was in.
I can now appreciate how people loose their craft, and opt to pack it in rather than beat there head against the machine they’re tied to. It’s a difficult scenario to find yourself in, void of those creative priorities and flat out otherwise, your instruments gathering dust, desks and benches strewn with unimportant mess, sent to the back of rooms, cupboards and garages.
And still, this could be me one day.
It’s the New Year. I’ve travelled for three weeks through coastal scrub, forest and gutted agricultural land along the Newell Highway, refuelling constantly along the way. On the road I’d wake up without an alarm, and say to myself “let’s do this – todays hanging to be explored”.
Now I’m refuelled and hanging to continue to write on a future worth living in – one filled with experiences, void of boredom, charged by motivation, and of course, one with our fair share of time in the great outdoors!
When you’re faced on a daily basis with the end of the world – with the continued destruction of dwindling reefs, forests, grasslands, and ecosystems – it’s imperative you remember and recall the good things in life. Those things that are unspoilt and still standing, the intact beautiful things. Because without them and without the good memories, we are nothing.
And when we’re nothing, we’re….
…
It’s great to be back, let’s see where 2017 takes us!
Making Tracks 