Pictures + Words are a first person chronicle of stories, lessons of life, creativity, and sometimes humour.
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Perspective Shift
I am patiently waiting for snow to return to Toronto. That sentence ⬆️ might be the most surprising sequence of words I’ve ever strung together….
Which comes first, the passion or the skill?
Joseph Campbell, the originator of the meme“follow your bliss,” was clear: bliss isn’t always easy. Bliss skins your knees and tests your mettle. It’s our…
Sunday Story: The Plasticine Airplane
On Friday I shared a link to an episode of The Daily podcast called The Sunday Read. The Daily is published by The New York…
Staggered Effort
Worst Marathon Ever got me thinking about marathons. Marathons are macro. Curious about the micro, I looked up the average number of steps in the…
Worst Marathon Ever
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see or hear the word marathon? Chances are it’s something to do with endurance. At…
Create the Space
For the past couple of years – OK, decades – I’ve been driven by a desire to show up in the world in a different…
Something Bigger
My writing process is a little like the chicken and the egg. Sometimes the words come first, then I try to find a picture to…
Perspective and Context
Perspective is a core principal in photography. You want to lead the observer into the frame. Leading lines are one of the best ways to…
Why Intelligent People Follow Toxic Narcissists
There’s a conversation that keeps coming to mind today. I was driving home from an out of town event. Radio reception was inconsistent, except for…
Unhooking from Systems
Unexpected themes and patterns emerged as I wrote chunks of my memoir. I’m not talking about my self-generated patterns and themes. Of course they are…
Begin (Again)
As you may know, I joined Seth Godin’s first run of The Creative’s Workshop last year because I wanted to start a daily blogging practice….
A Quiet Christmas and the Purple Toilet
I thought I would hate a quiet Christmas. My first quiet Christmas happened in 2005. In the space of twelve months of that year, I…
Selective Focus
With selective focus, I can cut out the extraneous junk and keep focused on what’s most important. Any other Thanksgiving Monday I would have recuperating…
Essential to Someone
Essential is not synonymous with valuable or your ability to make a difference. It might look different on the outside for now, and require some…
Surmountable
I didn’t know how to begin again. The mountain became insurmountable. Somewhere in the early days of summer I gave myself permission to take a…
Memoir: First Trip to Sedona – Part Four
This is the fourth installment in a chapter or section of the book about my first trip to Sedona. Links to previous installments: First Trip…
Memoir: First Trip to Sedona – Part Three
This is the third installment in a chapter or section of the book about Sedona, available to Patreon members only. Links to previous installments: First…
Memoir: First Trip to Sedona – Part Two
This is the second installment in a chapter or section of the book about Sedona. Links to previous installments: First Trip to Sedona – Part…