dear burning burning man

Photo: Galen Oakes

Dear Burning Man

As I watched you burning fiercely amongst the 70,000 'Burners' I reflected deeply on these last few years since I left Sydney and the stories I'd been battling with since I was a child. I watched you light up the sky bathed in beautiful fireworks and realised just how there I was. How released I felt and ultimately, how bloody grateful.

As I meditated on you I felt the fire within me burn too; absolutely free, alive and whole. Thanking myself for burning the shame, burning the sadness, burning the fears and burning the fury and the rage. Burning Man, you burn and boy do you burn good.

The BE //Photo: jessicabrookes.photography

What I wondered - as I sat under the stars of the Nevada desert - was what exciting dreams would come to life next? Where would life take me? How would I grow? As the ashes shook away, I finally, sighed with huge relief. I can't explain it but I can bow my head and say thanks. You took away my fears Burning Man and those things can hot bake pretty damn deep.

If all the grit brought me here, in this very hot moment, I thought. Then I have a lot to be thankful for. Except the wrinkles, they've taken a bit of time to adjust to - ironically. But I rather a few lines that crinkle when I smile, than the high security armored heart I'd slogged around for far too long. Yes I feel more than before, the tears come all too easily but yet the joy for living showers me in such inspiration, Burning Man. Like waterfalls of endless potential you rain down the message loud and clear; anything is possible.

To all the Burners, you beautiful celestial beings that make the pilgrimage to this wonderful place, I wholeheartedly salute you. What an incredibly magical place we crafted together, what powerful dust storms we fought (I will not forget cycling straight in to that sculpture!), the boundary pushing workshops we dove in to and dance floors feet kissed while bathed in the breath-taking golden sunsets. I rode my edge Burning Man but I  didn't snap. Even as the storm pulled out the tent pegs and coated everything in a layer of dust. Even then when you pushed me that far. Nope. It was OK.

Burning Man, you are full of such dreamlike wonder. Full of the bizarre, eccentric and fun. You are full to the brim with creative spirit and you are so full of love and everything that's inspired. You are a great place to burn off the pains and exist more fully in the NOW with a smile on the face and a big open heart. And you are extraordinary because you are a collection of creations, selfless and empowered. A giant united heart facing the sunrise and looking forward, day after day. When I rode through the desert and found a watch only to learn that the time said N:O:W - I got the message. A great present from the desert that I offered to the beautiful Temple which was home to so much grief. Somber it was, thank god that got burnt down too! In silence. With plenty tears. And so many people moved by it.

The Temple //Photo: jessicabrookes.photography

Thank you for burning. You have liberated, enlightened and been a space for healing and self expression to a lot of brave people. You have also brought a whole manner of sorts in to one field; from the naked banana pancake camp to the giant penis sculpture.

Here's to more magic, more love and more joy. Let that fire ROAR burners, there's a fire in your heart and your life is the canvas to blaze it on. You don't always need a desert, baby, you've got soul.

So spark it up Burning Man and burn burn burn.

In love with desert light, made peace with the dust.

Jecta x

"Your life is a sacred journey. It is about change, growth, discovery, movement, transformation, continuously expanding your vision of what is possible, stretching your soul, learning to see clearly and deeply, listening to your intuition, taking courageous challenges at every step along the way. You are on the path... exactly where you are meant to be right now... And from here, you can only go forward, shaping your life story into a magnificent tale of triumph, of healing, of courage, of beauty, of wisdom, of power, of dignity, and of love." ~ by Caroline Adams

moments with murray

Born on March 23^rd, 1925, at 88 years old, Murray is my oldest friend. New York born and bred with a sharp wit and an endearingly gentle manner – I had the honour of sharing my last month or so in New York in the Upper Westside apartment of this dear soul.  Murray is the Father in Law for Jeff, the Founder of The Dream Flag Project, which is how we met and we quickly found a kindship in our shared love for nature, photography and poetry.

Murray has his quirks, his incredibly warm apartment with the radiators tuned to the hottest reminded me of the Bikram studio and his likeness for classical music was a wonderful soundtrack to our time shared. Murray lost his wife last year that he’d been married to for 53 years. While I’m sure he knew how to deal with his loss, as a now retired psychotherapist, I sensed the weight of his loss while I was there. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her” he said to me once as I admired all the stunning pictures of the life they shared together on display in his apartment. Heartbreak and grief had weighed down his spirit and I hope at the least my bouncing optimism and poetry recitals may have lightened the days we shared. I know the night I transformed his living room in to a movie theatre is marked high in the box of beautiful memories on the road while we enjoyed The Princess Bride together and it concluded with "You know what's funny, for a moment then, I thought I was at the movies" in his beautiful New York accent.

Given his background, I wanted to ask Murray some questions on life. I knew someone who'd had countless people lying in the proverbial horizontal position recounting their life stories probably enlightened him muchly to the human condition. 

So I asked my very grounded and rational friend “Murray, do you believe in God?”

His response was a flat-out “No”.

So then I asked… “So what do you believe in?”

To which he responded so eloquently in silence using only his fingertip as he drew on the dinner table a big giant question mark.

His faith in the mystery of life is something so simple and yet in this day so distant to what many ideas people conform to. We have created so many stories that we cling on to and many people follow them blindly without experiencing the mystery (or for me the magic)… These ideas that have been cause for war and social disharmony while also leveraged by politicians in powerful places to manipulate its people.

I have no issue with faith. It’s powerful and at times all that's been left. But perhaps faith in something that is silent, that just is, that doesn’t have a word nor rules that can be modified to manipulate its subjects, perhaps faith in the question mark may be a safer exploration in wisdom than anything written and translated by man. Yoga, among many other philosophical teachings has been a wonderful teacher to me but it'll never close my mind to the thoughts, ideas and inspirations of others; especially this wise and wonderful gentleman.

This is a song for him by an artist he really respects; Peter Seeger.

the musician comes first

Recently I met with an old colleague and friend from my advertising days. He was quite the inspiration then and continues to be a kind mentor for me now. He's also been mistaken for David Grohl much to both our amusement!

As we sat in a hookah bar in New York City late on Christmas Eve, after an amazingly fun packed day (the brief was: 'Vibrant') of festive wonders from MoMA's latest exhibit: Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926 - 1936,  fancy champagne and nibbles at the Ritz-Carlton (a special treat for this nomad), a cool stroll through Central Park, Indian cuisine at the most gastronomically delicious Tamarind restaurant, a few games of pool at the Fat Cat and my open admission that I trusted his judgement - he finally gave it to me real.

"Just do it Jess" was what he said pointing out the obvious while I somewhat reluctantly accepted his call (given my tendency to take the 'scenic route' to decision making). He was telling me to get real.

Making the transition back in to this reality has taken some effort after spending a long time reflecting on life, traveling to remote corners of the world, seeing the heart breaking severities of poverty and natural disasters while integrating some powerful experiences and awakenings over the last couple of years. It's not always easy but I certainly feel alive. It's been a joy to explore and finesse my creative spirit through writing and photography, while also training and practicing as a holistic therapist in the beautiful ancient teachings of energy healing and yoga. Nevertheless applying these lessons and coming back in to the modern world takes focus.

His persuasive words sang true and he pointed me to this beautiful Keynote given by the real David Grohl at SXSW earlier this year. It is an incredible speech and well worth listening to as we get closer to the start of a new year. I hope for all the artists out there (which I'd like to say is everyone) David Grohl inspires within you faith and strength to keep on going, to remain true to yourself and realise that creative energy within which can too often be stifled by the world around.

"Come forth from your cloud of unknowing and kiss the cheek of the moon" - Leonard Cohen

anything is possible

A great great man passed away yesterday and yet his spirit, his legacy, will continue to live on. A wonderful tribute to a man who changed the game, who persevered, who endured, who lived a life of grace and let go of bitterness. What a beautifully remarkable soul. May his life continue to inspire and enlighten us to a more inclusive, loving and respectful global community; empowered to challenge the status quo and move us forward out of conflict in to care, acceptance and a more nurtured world.

Its wonderful to be reminded that one can make a difference. That we don't always need to rely on a government to make the change for us, that people can move mountains when they have faith in humanity and such a powerful love in their heart. What a man.

Rest in peace Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. 

facing the challenges of being a dreamer

"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them" - Walt Disney

I am in the 'make your dreams come true' business. Going from 'reality' to 'reality' and traveling to different places around the world has been a brilliant opportunity to help me open my mind to endless possibilities. In a very practical sense however, while it is all very good and well being a witness to different experiences and feeling inspired by the faces, the paradigms, the worlds, the lessons etc. things also need to get done.

There can be so many ideas that fill the mind with "and then I can do this... and then I can do that" which is a wonderful place to be in (as someone who also remembers what it feels like to be stuck and uninspired) but I have found the challenge comes in when making these inspirations manifest. In making ideas real. In the doing. In walking the talk. In fundamentally putting in the work, screwing self-doubt and procrastination while focusing on some goals and taking responsibility for your life i.e. taking the helm and contributing to the world.

I am always learning and so I can only say from the little time I've had on this planet of how wonderful it is to realise ones potential. I'd love others to do so too.  

Here are some fun tips that I use for any dreamers out there wishing to ground ideas in to reality:

1. Brainstorm, visualise, workshop. Get some post it notes or a note pad and start writing it all down. The ideas. The dreams. The wishes. Ask yourself "what would I do if I knew I could not fail?" Try S.W.O.Ting yourself and working on things that stir your soul and ignite your passion. I've made the notorious mistake of telling so many people about things I want to achieve and have been haunted by those who continue to gently prod me in "so how's this children's book going?" for example. Secretly I am actually grateful for this. Cole from the Ideas Bodega was a very important lady in helping me get unstuck a couple of years ago and her relentless reminders paid off.
2. Select the one's you want to make happen. Pick your favourite ideas and start to flesh them out. Start tearing up magazines and create a dream board for yourself. Embrace your inner child and be creative. Dream. Create. Go blue sky. Think "what would get me fired?" if you have a job or "what would make my work famous?" if you don't (beware of the latter however, it might happen and then you may want to escape from your own name). Curiosity without direction can be a taxing and ultimately unproductive endeavor. Choice is how we tame and channel and direct our curiosity, where we choose to allocate our time and energy, and ultimately, what we choose to pay attention to.
3. Make a game plan. This is where some dreamers get stuck. This is where one steps in to the dreaded time dimension and starts looking at what steps are needed to make these dreams come true. Putting timelines in place. Potentially deadlines to set yourself. Writing a to-do list with empty boxes waiting to be ticked. Write affirmations in the present tense and sticking them to your fridge. Get organised and set yourself up for action. 
4. Inspired action. Small steps towards that goal will take you closer and closer to you living your dream. Its magical when the Universe starts to bend towards making this happen. Its empowering and it makes one realise that anything is possible. When I find I've drifted off from this, I take a deep breath, do some yoga, clear my mind and re-focus on the intention with an affirmation to make it happen while reminding myself that I could die tomorrow. Remember: You've got nothing to lose.

Aligning and being impeccable with one's intentions, words and actions is the ultimate key to being a master dreamer whilst making awesome things happen. It's not always easy and sometimes you might struggle, but putting in work towards designing a life you love is personally one of the most important journey's I've gone on and continue to go on... Perhaps one day I'll even write a book about it...

If you're starting you're own business, feel free to refer to jectaspecta's approach to digital planning.

Keep having faith in yourself. You are awesome.

breathe in experience, breathe out poetry

Ripples wander through the mind
Along waters dark and blue
Rocking thoughts and paradigms
Opening streams of conscious new

The gates start to crumble
As floods of inspiration flow
A light reflects upon the ripples
and the surface starts to glow.

Green life springs through the soil
Along riverside it grows
With a wildness and a freedom
Of fresh seeds that have been sewn.

A moon is smiling down upon
A gently nurtured new born tide
And somewhere in this universe
The sun is only seen at night

The mind awakens to a world
Where new spirited thoughts can bathe
While light shines upon the ocean
Of ripples that became waves.

philosophical about the interwebs

I realised today that I have been blogging in some shape or form for 12 years now (obviously not always under jectaspecta) and whilst time has passed me by, dial up has evolved to broadband, delayed to instant and private to public - I have grown up, to some extent and now in retrospect query my relationship with what has almost converged to become my virtual butler.

Nicholas Carr is a writer who commentates on how Information Technology is integrated in to our lives as a standardised practice. More recently he has been examining the cognitive and cultural consequences the internet has been having on our minds.

"I'm not thinking the way I used to think," Carr tells us. "I feel it most strongly when I'm reading." He relates how he gets fidgety with a long text. Like others, he suspects that the Internet has destroyed his ability to read deeply. "My brain," he writes, "wasn't just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."

The history of reading is an interesting one. Words were once written without spaces and punctuation, they required a lot of attention to understand. Books were read aloud and shared with those who could not read (to their amazement). Readers slowly evolved to become accustomed to ignoring the sounds around them (going against our nature of alertness) and thus the deep thinker was born with cognitive ability to concentrate on the written word. Following the advent of the printing press, in a virtuous feedback loop, the public became more literate as more books circulated. How our minds adapt. Note: I bet you won't read all of this.

Carr believes that encouraged by the frenetic, fragmented, hyperlinked web, our skills in deep thought are now diminishing. We are becoming easily distracted, pay less attention to books or articles for sustained length and our minds have become data processing machines.

Carr's assertions have increasingly become a fact of accepted knowledge: that our addiction to the web and computers is affecting the way we think. That is, our capability for "deep thinking", is limited without the time to process information and draw our own conclusions.

Scarily, this concept has been shown to have significant foundations amongst academic performance in schools, studies reveal that home computers have "modest but statistically significant negative impacts" on academic performance as measured by math and reading test scores. In addition: "The introduction of high-speed internet service is similarly associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades." Worse yet, "the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps." Attempts to close the "digital divide" by, for example, subsidizing PC purchases may actually end up widening the divide between rich and poor in academic performance. And we thought computers promoted development.

Few concepts have spread as rapidly as the ‘digital divide’ and with it, the hope of using modern IT to promote development. Groups from the United Nations to local governments, and private companies have seized upon the hope that the use of IT could enable even the poorest of developing nations to “leapfrog” their problems of development such as poverty, illiteracy, disease, unemployment, hunger, corruption, and social inequalities so as to move rapidly into the modern Information Age.

We know little about the factors that make for effectiveness or ineffectiveness of grassroots IT projects in developing nations. Thus, critics can point out that the cost of creating a working Internet connection in a developing nation is the same as that of providing immunization against six fatal childhood diseases to thousands of children. Others have argued that the introduction of ICT’s into communities otherwise unchanged will merely heighten existing inequalities. Do we really know?

Is knowledge and wisdom based on things like reason, experience, perception? Or is it now a commodity, or data, that can be applied for a given situation. Has it become devoid of humanity? Of deeper processing? Have we become lazy because there is a machine that can offer an answer quicker than we can ask it? Does that knowledge become less significant because of its accessibility and transparency?

Not only is it just the way that we garner information that has changed but also what we do with it. Increasingly we syndicate this data via social networks: "web-driven speaking tools that reduce our own communication to data piles, stacked with quick, surface-level proclamations".

And while we may be sociable online, the social aspect of those networks is only distinguishable by the ability to connect people to one another in the strictest internet sense - not physically scarcely audibly, but almost in abstract. In the end, as we place our focus in to the screen, we are facing only what we've directed these machines to do - that is, so to speak, we are facing ourselves.

Forgive what may come across as a geek staring at the stars but it is, essentially, the virtual manifestation of our intentions. Its a perpetual narcissistic feedback loop of enclosed interactivity. Its the social network of our online persona, controlled by our offline selves communicated via a small piece of equipment shining a rectangle of ironic interaction. Confused? I think I am too. This requires deep thought.

Simply, we are drawn to an interface by its proximity and emptiness that it begs us to fill. Its the blank canvas that allows for an aggregation of content which gives us a unique opportunity to make it our own, our individualistic way. Our fingers encounter something tactile (sometimes greasy) but in reality the image is always light years away at a unique distance that can only be described as unbridgeable by the body.

What we are communicating is a mirror of ourselves in a highly pix-elated form, existing only as far away as the fingertip to keypad and yet equally, not anywhere at all.

Perhaps we are in danger of becoming simply the same surface-level information that we have become slowly programmed to gather.

Has IT made us smarter and less wiser? Should we change the way we gather information or the way we communicate it?

Is it time to get an iPad?

How to start a movement

Here are some learnings from Derek Silvers TED Talk:

• A leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed
• If you’re the lone nut who starts a movement, who goes out there alone, nurture your first few followers as equals – its about the movement not about you
• The first follower is an underestimated form of leadership in itself - he shows the others how to follow
• A movement must be public, new followers emulate the followers not the leader
• Leadership is over glorified; the first follower transforms the lone nut in to a leader (if we’re all trying to be leaders it’d be ineffective)
• As more people join in, its less risky, so those who were spectators now have no reason not to get involved - they won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, they may be part of the in crowd if they hurry (Tipping point)

So, find your followers, embrace them as equals and have the courage to follow and show others. how to follow

Look at the monkey

This student film I stumbled upon on YouTube quite simply makes me happy. Cool track, funky animations and strangely addictive!

Props to:
Animation - Thomas Hicks
Music - Aaron Lampert

What Is Missing? By Silvie Bolcher

Sylvie Blocher is a famous French video artist. I went to her exhibition today at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art and I was totally blown away by the stunning visuals, insights and stories she presented. Her work What Is Missing? features people from Penrith unveiling their unspoken needs, hopes, dreams and desires, and was created while Sylvie Blocher was in residence in Penrith as part of the C3West Project. It talks to identity, culture, meaning in life and what people feel is missing in Australia.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity...

I've been reading a beautiful book called Eat. Love. Pray by Elizabeth Gilbert (courtesy of @nikkistammers)

Sometimes I read it and aside from the writers slight neurotic episodes, I feel like its my own thoughts I am reading. May be this is why its a best seller (no I didn't mean my thoughts are best sellers more the writers ability to engage deeply with readers). Either way, I love the fact that I am taking something back from it. More than entertaining my moments.

Unlike me however, Elizabeth Gilbert manages to put many of my random thoughts in to a coherent sentence, chapter and novel which is an incredible skill. Props to her.

Talking about inspiration, creativity and the genius, she spoke at TED. Just like her novel, she articulates such a sensitive and fascinating subject so well, that I cannot deny, has very much inspired me to approach creativity from a different stand point and I hope it does you too.