📷 Photo challenge day 21: silhouette.

Black swans in #Sydney.
#mbjune

Black swans float gracefully on a serene, reflective body of water surrounded by reeds.

How Walter Breuggemann shaped me

At its best, a family can be ‘a communal network of memory and hope in which individual members may locate themselves and discern their identities’

📷 Photo challenge day 20: gather.

Six seagulls gather on a sandstone rock at La Perouse, #Sydney.

#mbjune

Six seagulls stand gathered on a rocky ledge beside a sandy beach.

What to do when you've made some notes: Start writing

The next step after taking notes is to create a finished piece of writing, acknowledging that the first draft may be disorganized but serves as a foundation for improvement.

📷 Photo challenge day 19: equal.

💬 “I exist in a fractally connected, self-organized universe where everything relates dynamically to everything else” - Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning.

Yes, we all do.

#mbjune #zettelkasten

A page contains the text WHERE AM I, followed by: I exist in a fractally connected, self-organized universe where everything relates dynamically to everything else. From the book, The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent.

Bob Doto is the author of ‘A System for Writing’.

From reading to note-making to finished draft, his approach connects it all.

I watched his discussion with historian Dan Allosso and took notes so you don’t have to.

A book titled A System for Writing by Bob Doto is on display against a blurred background of other books.

#WritingCommunity #NoteTaking #PKM #Zettelkasten #BookWriting #SlowWriting

📷 Photo challenge day 18: texture.

Furry or spiky? Spotted on a boardwalk in the Royal National Park near #Sydney - as featured in day 2.

#mbjune

A caterpillar with colorful markings and spiky hairs crawls across a textured, square-patterned boardwalk surface.

What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book

Historian Dan Allosso led a discussion on Bob Doto’s insights on flexible note-taking and writing processes. It emphasised the importance of iterative development and audience engagement. Here are my notes.

📷 Photo challenge day 17: warmth.

We saw a curious warning at this year’s Vivid, the big winter festival of light in #Sydney. #mbjune

A brightly coloured blue sign warns, FIRE IS HOT! DO NOT TOUCH, against a backdrop of foliage at the Vivid Sydney festival.

📷 Photo challenge day 16: blur. A smoking ceremony at Prince Alfred Park, #Sydney. #mbjune

A large crowd is partially obscured by thick smoke outdoors.

Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress

This whole article dumbed down by AI summary: Cultural trends often leave behind valuable ideas that merit revisiting rather than being dismissed as unfashionable. And I thought I was being clever.

Finished reading: Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling by Henry Lien 📚

A ‘how-to’ book on kishotenketsu, a Japanese storytelling concept that’s an alternative to ‘the hero’s quest’. Like many such books, it’s worth reading just for the summaries of example stories.

💬"When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." - James Baldwin. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78. no. 91, 1984.

📷 Photo challenge day 15: tie. This is how the tugboat from day 9 was secured to the wharf at Pyrmont, #Sydney. #mbjune

A weathered, multicolored rope is tied around a metal structure with bolts.

Photo challenge, day 14: twilight at the mouth of Deerubbin, the Hawkesbury River #mbjune #Sydney

📷 Photo challenge day 13: pathway. Calna Creek, just north of #Sydney. #mbjune

A wooden boardwalk cuts through a saltmarsh vegetated with tall saltgrass, leading toward a forested area under a clear sky.

📷 Photo challenge day 12: hidden.

It’s easy to watch the annual ‘humpback highway’ whale migration at Malabar Headland in #Sydney - so you might easily miss this guy, who is looking the other way.

#mbjune

A graffiti mural on a brick wall at Boora Point, Sydney, depicts a stylized skull surrounded by blue swirling wave patterns.

Worth repeating and re-repeating:

“the evidence shows that regularising migration is a positive-sum game, in economic, social and security terms.”

The Migration Question | 2025

A definitive study of a hotly debated phenomenon: migration into Europe and America, its socioeconomic impacts, and the eternal policy efforts to stop the inevitable.

#migration

📷 Photo challenge day 11: brick.

#Sydney has more than one Japanese garden, but only one is owned by geese.

#mbjune

Geese are walking through a circular stone archway toward a sunlit path with a red wooden fence and greenery in the background, at Auburn Botanical Gardens in Sydney.

📷 Photo challenge, day 10: rail.

Of the many wonderful exhibits at the NSW Rail Museum, this little railbus is one of my favourites. Though small, it still gets a Wikipedia entry.

#mbjune #Sydney #railwayheritage

A vintage green and cream streamlined railbus is parked inside the NSW Rail Museum train shed.