August 18, 2026 · Episode 80
52 Min, 40 Sec 

Summary

What does it mean when your creative life goes quiet, when nothing’s moving, nothing’s landing, and the work that used to flow just… doesn’t?

Brea brought this concept to the table and it turned out to be quite fitting for the moment. Sitting in the studio late on a cold, winter’s night with a couple of gin and tonics, I warmed up to this idea of ‘creative winter‘.

In this episode, Brea talks about the season of dormancy. The stillness that feels like a creative slump. Like stagnation or the brutal pruning of projects or habits that can feel like loss, and the subterranean root growth you can’t see, but makes the next season possible.

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Transcript

Lyndon: Welcome to Pain In The Arts, where the pursuit of meaningful art meets the unpredictable demands of real life.

Breallyn: And one of us finds out the topic at the same time you do. I’m Breallyn.

Lyndon: I’m Lyndon.

Breallyn: Thanks for joining us. Who gets to find out the lucky topic today?

Lyndon: Me. But that doesn’t mean I’m the lucky person.

Last week we had Dom and Shannon creating a little bit of havoc here —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: in the studio.

Breallyn: We had a nice full studio space.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Which was great. As well as having lunch and coffee and everything with the guys. That was a lot of fun.

Lyndon: Yeah. I wouldn’t say we made an event of it, but we certainly made an afternoon of it. A day, a morning.

Breallyn: It was a day. We did, we recorded an episode of Pain In The Arts, which you can listen to in our back catalog.

Lyndon: And we are having gin and tonics, so you might hear a little bit of ice rattling in the glass because we’ve had a… This is our, this is the day we normally would record an episode.

But we just didn’t get around to it until 9:30 at night —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: for a whole bunch of different reasons.

Breallyn: That’s right. It’s not like 10:00 AM — which we won’t — and we’re —

Lyndon: We won’t bore you with…

Breallyn: we’re drinking the G&Ts.

Lyndon: Oh, yeah. No, no. That’s right. You can’t start until at least 11.

Breallyn: No, it’s been a day and we get to hang out in the studio at night, which is, even though it’s hard gearing up for work time at night, it’s actually quite nice to pop in here and have a drink and have some time just in this nice zone in our home.

It’s — it always feels like a different space. I mean — it is a different space… you spend a lot of time in here. But it’s almost like walking into a different world when you come into the studio from just the regular domestic home.

Lyndon: But it is, because it sounds completely different in here.

It’s a nice dead space. Dead-ish. It’s dead. We’re all brain dead. So dead, got no good ideas. No, but it’s just what you’d expect when you walk into a studio, is that it’s a controlled acoustical environment.

Soup Pod Chaos Recap

Lyndon: Once you’re finished listening to us ramble on, you can head over to An Appropriate Amount of Soup podcast, the Soup Pod.

And listen to us pretty much ruin their podcast. I’m gonna put my hand up. Fair warning, I did tell them before we recorded that I probably wasn’t gonna be very good at the task at hand. They have a podcast — it’s nothing to do with soup, which was very disappointing for me.

Breallyn: It’s a bit misleading.

Lyndon: I don’t mind a good soup. A few healthy croutons. And there wasn’t even a thermos of soup.

Breallyn: There was actually no appropriate amount of any sort of soup at all.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: They’re a literary type podcast. They’re — yeah — about all about books, which — for me, love it. I’m —

Lyndon: Yeah, I mean — absolutely. You three got on like a house on fire, and I just sat here. I don’t know. Like a… I sat here like a pork chop.

Breallyn: With their podcast, they take the first chapter of a book and read a bit of a synopsis of the chapter, and then they make up the rest of the book as to what it could be. So we all took turns with doing that.

And they were confused because when it was your turn, you pretty much just summarized what the person before had said.

Lyndon: Don’t give all the secrets away, Bre. You gotta let people go there and just enjoy the — I don’t know if enjoy is the right word. They’re not gonna enjoy any of my contribution. But —

Breallyn: I’m just saying it was a unique contribution, that’s for sure.

It wasn’t quite what anyone was expecting.

Lyndon: I hate to draw on my disability as an excuse, and I am gonna just say this upfront, is that even though I did have a raging migraine, and it really got worse once they left —

Breallyn: Mm-hmm…

Lyndon: Which is probably compliments to them. If it had’ve got better once they left.

Breallyn: Yeah. They held it at bay.

Lyndon: They’re off the Christmas card list. But pain came at some point and… But look — had I not had the migraine, because I’m a professional migraine enthusiast. I’ve had enough decades of… What does everyone like to say these days? Masking, let’s say.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: I just say dealing with it, but yeah, I’ve had decades of just soldiering on. Even had I not had the migraine, my contribution wouldn’t have been much different, unfortunately. I was way out of my depth with all you literary folk. And you were funny, so all is forgiven once you make a few jokes.

Editing Nightmares and Mic Fails

Lyndon: Yeah, I don’t know about that, but I do know I spent pretty much all week trying to get all the tracks right in editing. As Dom rightly pointed out, he’s a nightmare to edit in post because he has the worst mic technique of pretty much anyone.

He reminds me a lot of — I had a guitar student very briefly, maybe for one lesson, and this was years ago, and I would’ve been probably, I don’t know, 19 or 20 or something.

A woman came in and she wanted to learn guitar, so she was a mature age student, and she had never held a guitar before. So she had it laying down on her lap like you would play a lap steel, and I — which is fair enough, and I’m like, “Not for that sort of guitar. You actually wanna hold it, sit it on its edge.” And instead of doing that, she managed to flip it over, and so now the strings were, like, flat down on her lap and it was just the wood of the back of the instrument facing her.

And I thought, “What’s going on?” And then she ended up at one point with the body of the guitar on the ground and the neck sticking up. And I thought, “How on earth is that even…” It was like a game of going cold, warmer, but it just kept getting colder.

And at one point, I kid you not, she’d done the — she’d flipped it around, so now apparently she’s left-handed. I’m like, “Holy moly.” Like, you would think that…

I didn’t know there were so many different possibilities of how you could play — or not play — the guitar. And I think the one that kinda just made me go, “All right, there’s no hope for this person,” without a shadow of a doubt, was when she put the guitar up — holding it as you would expect — but now the strings were against her body.

Yes. And facing me was just the bare wood. And she looked at me like… and she said, “How about this? Is this it?” And that’s when I thought, “Is this a joke?” Like — why is someone playing a joke on me? Is this person… And it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “This can’t be happening.”

So yeah, that’s pretty much how Dom approaches mic technique. It’s just like I’m trying to edit in post, and it’s like he’s over here, now he’s over there. Now there’s things banging around on his mic, and it sounds like he’s in another room. I’m like, “I swear he was on the couch the whole time.”

And I gave him a handheld mic ’cause I thought if he’s holding it in his hand, when his head moves around it’ll just move with him. Not to happen. And I probably can’t talk, ’cause when I was in grade five and I had to mime to a Prince song. I didn’t even know who Prince was. And I don’t know, it was some, maybe some school production or something.

You know how it is, school production, primary school, but it’s just your parents come over into the portable and have to sit on the little chairs, and I don’t even know what it was. I just remember that it was being filmed, and when I looked back the mic was at my groin level for the entire time I was singing.

I never held it up to my mouth, so maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on Dom. Hi, Dom, by the way. So yeah, anyway, that’s my long way of saying go listen to —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: An Appropriate Amount Of Soup wherever you get your —

Breallyn: podcasts. Definitely worth a listen. It’ll be funny if nothing else.

Lyndon: Look, they’re funny guys.

Breallyn: They are funny guys. Both very smart, funny guys. It was a real joy to have them here and, yeah, hopefully —

Lyndon: Sprinkled with a good dose of dad humor.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: So I was right at home…

Breallyn: Very listenable for anyone who’s ever had a dad.

Lyndon: Everyone’s had a dad, haven’t they?

Breallyn: Technically.

Lyndon: What was that? If your dad hasn’t got a beard you’ve got two moms. Absolute classic slander. Oh, before we get onto your surprise topic. We have a shout-out to Locky Smed, who has joined our Patreon, so big thanks to Locky.

Breallyn: Thanks, Locky. Great to have you join us.

Lyndon: Yeah, very excited to have another patron on board. Thank you so much, Locky, and we will hopefully be chatting to you on our Patreon very soon. Go to Patreon and search for Pain In The Arts and we will come up —

Breallyn: Mm-hmm…

Lyndon: Forthwith, as Soup Pod would say. They used a bit of old world language, didn’t they?

Breallyn: Yep.

Lyndon: Was that a good enough shout-out to Locky?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: It was? Okay, cool. I should have asked him where he was from before I announced on air. Locky Smed from…

Breallyn: New Orleans.

Lyndon: Okay, that’ll do. Why do you reckon that sounds like a New Orleans name?

Breallyn: I dunno, it just kinda seems to roll off the tongue.

Winter Tales and New Beginnings

Breallyn: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are almost at the end of winter. We’re in the last few weeks of winter.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Which actually feels quite nice to be in a warm room at night when it’s pretty cold outside. But I hadn’t actually… usually I’m not a huge fan of winter. I’m like, “Ah, it’s cold,” and, you know — muddy boots inside and all the rest of it, and it’s just a bit of a pain, and it’s hard to go places and, I don’t know, it’s just an annoying kind of season.

Lyndon: It’s not that hard. It’s not like we’ve got snow that we’ve got to get off of our cars and —

Breallyn: No —

Lyndon: True… Ice and —

Breallyn: No, I’m — it’s — I guess I’m thinking more —

Lyndon: Psychologically…

Breallyn: Psycho — no, more practically, with Birdie because — oh, okay… often she likes open spaces. There’s not a lot of things that… I’m not taking her to the movies or anything like that. We do a lot of walking outside and —

Lyndon: But she doesn’t care, does she? No, I don’t think.

It could be, like, gale force and she’d love it. It’s more like —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: Our comfort and the convenience around it.

Breallyn: Yeah, practicalities. Yeah. You can only spend so long walking outside on a Saturday. You can’t —

Lyndon: Do it —

Breallyn: All day.

Lyndon: I still remember — it’s like going to the beach. I still remember when we were out on a trip to Flinders Ranges and we were on our way back, and we camped by some part of… maybe there was, like, a Murray River National Park or something like that.

It was freezing. It was so cold. And she — it was like early morning and she was up and, snowsuit or whatever, and she was just not happy and it was hard to be happy in that cold, right?

Breallyn: It was really just frozen cold.

Lyndon: But I had those hand warmers, and so I put them in her gloves, and so we’re walking out, just out into the bush just to have a walk to warm up and just to get the blood moving, and she’s like, “Ah.” And then I thought I’ll give her these hand warmers, put ’em in her gloves and, put ’em in, and she’s just, “Ah,” just throws them out into the bush — throws her gloves. I was like, “Oh.”

Breallyn: She just didn’t know what —

Lyndon: To do. She didn’t, no. She was just —

Breallyn: Didn’t realize…

Lyndon: Beside herself.

Breallyn: Oh.

Lyndon: And I’ve got video — no… of her, like —

Breallyn: She was crying…

Lyndon: Banging and knocking on the glass of the 1994 Toyota Tarago. The ones that were called the Shuttles ’cause they looked like the space shuttles.

But she’s in her suit, so she looks like a little mini astronaut — banging on the side of the Shuttle. “Let me in,” ’cause she just wanted to go. I was like, “Oh, we’ve got three hours of pack up before we can even hit the road.”

Breallyn: Aw, she was so cute. Yeah. In her little pom-pom kind of beanie on, and her snowsuit was pink.

She looked like a puffed up marshmallow in this little suit.

Lyndon: I should put it on the Patreon so people know what we’re talking about. I’ll try and find that photo. I’ve only got 25,000 on my phone to sift through.

Breallyn: Mind you, we chose to travel during winter ’cause we literally couldn’t take her anywhere where there was other human inhabitants ever at that point.

Lyndon: It was a difficult time.

Breallyn: She was, yeah, she was really having a tough time. So yeah, winter.

Lyndon: Winter.

Breallyn: Winter’s tough. And we got our beautiful assistance dog, Lacey, right at the start of winter. The first week of winter she was placed with us. So it’s been a season of having her be new to the home, and she was a dog who came from Queensland.

She was born and raised — oh, yeah… in Queensland, and she got —

Lyndon: So —

Breallyn: Brought down here… a pink —

Lyndon: Puffer jacket.

Breallyn: I got her plenty of pink pajamas. And a black puffer jacket. Yeah. So yeah, winter, I don’t know. It’s… I have mixed feelings about it, but I was thinking about it. We’re coming to the end of winter here in Melbourne.

Winter Wisdom for Creativity

Breallyn: And it just kinda got me thinking about how life itself can kind of mirror seasons sometimes. So I thought, “I’m gonna think about winter a little bit.” And often when winter’s kinda portrayed in literature or in art or whatever, it kinda looks like a season of death because the trees have no leaves, everything kinda looks decrepit, and black, and, you know —

Lyndon: Bleak.

Breallyn: Like stagnant, bleak waters. Yeah, that kind of thing. But it’s actually a really necessary part of conservation, and restructuring, and preparation. So do you know, Lyndon —

Lyndon: No, I’m just gonna say no, ’cause that’s —

Breallyn: A safe bet. You do actually know this.

Lyndon: Oh, do I?

Breallyn: Yeah, you know a lot of these things.

But when deciduous trees lose their leaves, they’re just really entering dormancy. They’re not dying. You know that obviously. But the reason that they’re dropping their leaves is to actually prevent moisture loss and pump water out of their cells. They don’t want a whole lot of water flowing through their cell system, because the cold weather can freeze it, so they displace it into other sort of extracellular spaces.

So they’re actually protecting their core vitality so that they can regenerate.

Lyndon: You don’t need to tell me. I’m the biology expert. Manager. What’s the word? Didn’t I tutor you in biology for year 12? No. Do you remember that? I’m sure.

Breallyn: I do remember this.

Lyndon: I’ve got a memory of helping you in that area.

Breallyn: I remember you — being over while I was trying to study, and you for some reason thought you’d give me some kind of lecture on… Yeah, and it was on something biological, and I tuned out mostly. But then I heard you saying something like, “Yeah, and that’s why all of the energy goes to the proper parts.” I was like, “The proper parts?”

Lyndon: That was when you snapped out of it.

Breallyn: And thought —

Lyndon: It was when I said proper parts. I was testing you.

Breallyn: No, you weren’t. I knew you weren’t listening. You were wasting my time.

The other thing about winter is that what’s happening above ground and below ground are two completely different things. And in winter, trees aren’t pumping out new growth and new things above the ground. But what they often are doing is redirecting those carbon reserves downwards, so they’re strengthening and growing root systems. So what’s happening up the top is — you see a whole lot of growth in spring and summer.

But in winter is where the underneath growth is getting stronger. So —

Lyndon: Oh, I see where this is going.

Breallyn: Yeah. We’re getting around to art eventually.

Do you know, a lot of plant species, and this would include a lot of fruit trees like apples and cherries and so on, they literally can’t flower or produce fruit unless they’ve undergone a specific number of cold hours during winter.

So they need this like chill time — literally a very chilled requirement time. Because otherwise — if they don’t have that prolonged sort of freeze time and that cold time, their spring blossoms can’t trigger. So they have to have that for growth.

And one other thing I wanted to tell you about winter — have you heard this? That trees talk to each other?

Lyndon: The more you talk to me about winter, the colder I’m getting.

Breallyn: It is ’cause the heaters are off because they make noise.

Lyndon: What is this magic you speak of?

Breallyn: Trees talk to each other.

Which is —

Lyndon: Like the Magic Far Away Tree, did that talk? The Magic Far Away Tree?

Breallyn: The tree didn’t.

Lyndon: Didn’t it?

Breallyn: No, just all —

Lyndon: Oh, lost opportunity.

Breallyn: All the pixies and so on in it.

But no, trees actually communicate through an underground — I’m gonna mess up the pronunciation, but it’s called a mycorrhizal network. So it’s basically an underground network, and it’s actually fungal threads.

So it’s funguses that are connecting the roots of different trees so that they can communicate with one another.

Lyndon: Is it like their nervous systems or something, or neur —

Breallyn: It doesn’t have a direct kind of mirror to what would happen in our bodies.

But people have called it the Wood Wide Web.

Lyndon: That’s terrible… Muriel.

Breallyn: So it’s a chemical signaling and resource exchange through a fungal network, which is pretty amazing. So literally, trees are communicating with one another, and they can give resources to one another.

So if one tree has picked up a disease or something, other trees can redirect resources to that tree so that it can fight that fungal infection or fight the disease better, and that kind of thing. So during late autumn and winter as deciduous trees are shedding their leaves and so on, their underground fungal network stays very active in the soil ’cause it’s damp and undisturbed.

And the older trees — so the more like mother trees — they use their network to send carbon and nitrogen and sugars to some of the younger saplings who don’t have the same energy reserves. So it helps them survive the cold freezes. So they’re literally — the mothers are nurturing the younger saplings. So all this is happening during winter.

And I also pulled out some old wintery kind of poems, and I thought I would read you one just to have some poetry.

Lyndon: Reminds me of some nights at my Uncle Alec and Auntie Elaine’s farm, where we’d be sitting around the fire and we were always the city kids and the city folk, and they were clearly the country folk ’cause we were in the country.

And Auntie Elaine would say something about, like this, would just be talking about how wonderful winter is or something.

And then she’d read a poem about it.

Breallyn: That’s so cool.

Lyndon: Yeah. And I’d be like — when do we get to do something fun?

Breallyn: You ungrateful child.

Lyndon: No, it was actually pretty good. The smell of… You know when you go into a room that has a Coonara or even an open fire, even when it’s not on — it’s the smell of the room that’s so welcoming. And it’s cool ’cause what it has is the memory of the night before and the promise of that evening —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: In that smell that’s lingering.

Breallyn: Yeah. And they had a great country house too, so a literal larder with preserving jars and —

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Things like persimmons and that, they’d picked from their tree and then preserved, and all that kinda thing. And then —

Lyndon: Yeah…

Breallyn: Yeah, they are —

Lyndon: Although I am squinting a little bit because as a kid I liked a hot dessert. And like you knew if you went there and you had a meal and it was like, “Does anyone want dessert?” It was just gonna be like a jar opened up — persimmon jar — with some cold custard or whatever, and I’d be like, “Where’s my hot apple crumble?”

Breallyn: And you’re still disappointed all these years later ’cause I don’t cook that, so that’s…

Lyndon: But yeah, they were probably the first — they weren’t doomsday preppers, they certainly had — like they had a lot of jars of fruit you could live off of for a while.

Yeah, so yeah, that was the sorta thing that they — yeah, they were too. They were —

Breallyn: And —

Lyndon: Uncle Alec as well. They were very —

Breallyn: They were very literary because, being teachers they loved books. They, yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: I always really enjoyed your uncle and aunt. They’d always talk about, you know — yeah, some kind of literary type connection, in a lot of conversations.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And Kathryn, their daughter, has turned out really smart. But those other two, the boys — what happened to them? Couple of dunces.

Breallyn: Hi —

Breallyn: Doctors. Not quite.

Lyndon: Yeah. Hi, Earl and Adam.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: They don’t listen to this. They should. They should though, shouldn’t they?

Breallyn: Dunno, should they?

Lyndon: No. No. They’d have to work out how to download a podcast first.

Breallyn: You know what’s funny, is that out of everyone, those two are the most like you out of all your family. Yeah. ‘Cause the three of you get together and you’re hilarious, so yeah.

Lyndon: I know. I’d like to hang out with them more, but — yeah… they came to Melbourne, decided they didn’t like it, and went back to the country.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Good on ’em.

Breallyn: So this is an excerpt from Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” It’s only a little bit though, so it’s okay, Lyndon, you’ll get through it. “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow. And have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind.”

Lyndon: I heard the word juniper and I’m drinking juniper berries.

Breallyn: Well, there we go.

That’s — I’m so glad you got a takeaway from that. Yeah. So that was my reflections on winter, because I was thinking that personally and creatively, people go through seasons, and it’s not hard to draw on seasons of nature to see some parallels in the seasons that we go through. So when, personally, like in — I don’t know — relationships or personal growth or spirituality or, I don’t know, financial growth or whatever, different things in life, when it feels like a winter period, when it just feels like there’s nothing growing.

It’s been cold for so long. You’re just surviving, and for all the toil and all the things that you’ve put in, now it just feels like stagnation, and you can’t see any fruit for all that labor. It can feel like a very cold time.

So yeah, I just thought we would talk about that a little bit. Yeah.

Lyndon: What do you do in those times, though? Like, where you’ve got — yeah, where you’re in a winter season and it’s — it’s once you realize that you are, that things already start to turn around a bit, don’t they? Or like you can not panic so much.

Breallyn: I suppose so, if you — yeah, recognizing it is often a, yeah, a good step, like to just kinda go, “Oh, it’s just the season I’m in.” It’s not ’cause nothing’s working or it’s not gonna work. Maybe it’s just the season I’m in.

Yeah, obviously it’s hard ’cause you don’t know when it ends.

It could be a long cold winter. Or —

Lyndon: When spring starts.

Breallyn: Yeah. It just doesn’t always — yes.

Lyndon: That would be the worst if you’re in winter and it’s summer, ’cause you’d feel at odds with —

Breallyn: The earth. With the natural rhythm. Ah. Yeah, the natural season.

Yeah. But I think it’s helpful, like just recognizing it — like you’re just saying — to just even go, it’s not a defect or it’s not like because I’ve got it wrong. If something, if a project is stalled, if something hasn’t worked out, if you’re not getting the calls from agents or collaborators or whatever, if nothing, like if everything’s come to a bit of a standstill, it doesn’t mean that it is a failure or that your creative practice or your personal life isn’t working.

It can still be that you’ve had all the right elements go in, but it is just the season that you’re in, and just not — yeah, just treat it like it’s a natural cyclical type pause rather than a death and the end of everything.

Winter Isn’t Dead

Lyndon: Sounds very morose all of a sudden.

Breallyn: Is it? Yeah, just understanding like there’s a difference between a project or a creative practice being dormant versus dead — two different things — and knowing that, like what we were talking about before with winter growth with trees, like the roots are stronger, going deeper —

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Protecting, and sustaining and keeping that life force protected.

Lyndon: This is where it’s really valuable to understand the length and the breadth of what constitutes not just art, but what is involved in being an artist, because that way you can say, “Okay, I’m in this winter period. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t like it. I’ve got no inclination to pick up a pen or to continue with whatever it is that I would normally be doing.”

So then if you’re able to say, okay, I have to have times of not doing the work. I have to have times where I’m soaking in other people’s work, or where I’m being part of a community or going out and seeking people or just going out into nature.

So just going, “Okay, it’s an opportunity” — rather than fighting it and spiraling downwards or just getting really uptight about it.

Amateur vs Pro Mindset

Lyndon: I heard a really good explanation yesterday about the difference between an amateur artist and a contemporary artist or a professional artist, if you like.

Breallyn: Mm-hmm.

Lyndon: An amateur artist, or someone that’s still young in their journey of being an artist — I’m just trying to summarize it.

But they might just be a bit too precious about things. They want things to look right, sound right. If they’ve created something that is good or good enough.

Breallyn: Oh, yeah.

Lyndon: Whereas the life of a contemporary artist — instead of putting all that pressure on themselves, it’s the opposite. They just go, “What does this do? What happens if I try this? Or what does this sound like? If I put this with that, what happens?” And it’s more exploratory.

And it’s more investigative, and there’s more curiosity, and they sorta know that they’re gonna do a lot of bad work.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: Do you know what I mean?

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And so —

Breallyn: They allow themselves that freedom to just —

Lyndon: Yeah, yeah. And that’s really what separates an artist from an amateur — is that way of working. There’s a certain discipline to be able to approach things and sustain that sort of activity. A finished work that represents you and your ideas will come.

And there might be a whole lot of things that don’t look or sound like you in the meantime, and that…

And who knows? It’s when you were saying, like, when is that period gonna end?

When is winter gonna end? It’s almost — if you approach it in this manner, like a contemporary professional artist would, then there is no winter. Yeah.

Breallyn: Well — do —

Yeah. And maybe some of that work is like, even if it’s exploratory, it’s fun, it’s driven by curiosity and that exploration which we’ve touched on before in episodes as well — having the fun play of art be the lead rather than trying to produce something.

So if that’s all happening, it can still feel like a winter if none of that feels like it’s bearing fruit. Like if the ideas don’t really land, if, you know —

Lyndon: If you’re approaching your art and your creative practices with this idea that the reason you’re experimenting and you’re not holding too tightly and you’re not too concerned about how things look or sound in this particular stage —

If the reason you’re doing that is because you’re actually trying to find your voice, say —

Then when you discover what your voice is, you’ll recognize it. So there’s a lot of learning. But that’s just one aspect. The other aspect is, yeah, if you’re doing it and you’ve really taken a lot of pressure off yourself, it’s much easier then to go, “I’m not feeling it today, and I wasn’t feeling it yesterday. I need to go out and go to a gallery,” or, “I need to go out into nature,” and that’s all part of the job.

Yeah. That’s not a separate thing.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: “I need to catch up with friends.” It’s like that can be part of the job. For someone like myself being a musician, just going and seeing a band —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: Can be an amazing experience beyond the music itself.

It’s —

Breallyn: Yeah. It’s one of the points I was wanting to make too, actually, was that spring growth is — oh — dependent on the strength of the root system built during the cold times and the winter times.

Lyndon: Oh, so you’ve got this — you’ve got the metaphor you’ve gotta get through.

Breallyn: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Lyndon: I’ll shut up then.

Breallyn: No. But it’s exactly what you’re saying.

Input Season and Admin Reset

Breallyn: Winter’s sort of a time for input rather than output.

So even if you’re experimenting, creating, doing stuff — it might be a time of getting a bunch of ideas, like thinking about what will the next phase be, and reading things, yeah, going to see movies, just absorbing, learning new techniques. Maybe experimenting with new ways of doing things or new kinds of tools that you’ve got at your disposal. You can fix some admin stuff. You’ll restore —

Lyndon: Ugh, what did you just say?

Breallyn: No, res —

Lyndon: Get out.

Breallyn: Like setting up your systems, restoring things, like — making room and preparing the ground for the growth that can come.

Lyndon: I haven’t got 4,500 unread emails in my inbox from suddenly jumping onto admin during a season of winter. No siree.

Breallyn: One of the other things too, during winter — and obviously another gardening analogy — is — I’m gonna have to —

Lyndon: Call you Kevin Heinz…

Breallyn: I do love a bit of gardening, honestly.

Lyndon: Do you know who Kevin Heinz is, or was?

Breallyn: I remember Kevin Heinz because –

Lyndon: He had the really — dark around his eyes — wasn’t he?

Breallyn: I just remember my grandmother gave me a Kevin Heinz gardening book when I was a kid.

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah. Which was probably a really helpful guide to, like, all the things that I wish I knew now, and I don’t really wanna ask AI to tell me. I should just — look — have my Kevin Heinz guide.

Lyndon: Yeah. Good on… Yeah, Kevin Heinz was… I met Kevin Heinz. I think a lot of — did you? Yeah, I think a lot of school students did.

Breallyn: We haven’t actually said who he is. He was a like a gardening personality on Australian TV very early on, like in the —

Lyndon: Yeah.

Breallyn: ’70s and ’80s or something.

Lyndon: Yeah, it was like a… He would’ve been one of the first on television in Australia, wouldn’t he?

Breallyn: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Here’s another gardening tip. So when you’re looking after your garden in winter, with a lot of these sort of deciduous trees — obviously the evergreens have got a completely different kind of life cycle.

Pruning Dead Wood

Breallyn: But winter’s the time with, say, your fruit trees or roses or things like that — you prune those trees really heavily.

You literally cut them back to a lot of bare wood.

Lyndon: Like our neighbor did with the lemon tree.

Breallyn: Yeah, but have you seen? It’s already starting to grow up towards the fence.

Lyndon: Let’s just wait until some fruit arrives.

Breallyn: It’s not spring yet, although it is actually lemon season. Mm-hmm.

But you can cut away the weak branches and even healthy shoots that are shooting at this time because what you don’t want is to waste energy during the wintertime on growth that isn’t actually gonna be useful during the spring. So if you are in a sort of winter stage of creativity or personal life or whatever, it can be a good time to kinda look around and go, what hasn’t been bearing fruit?

What is the dead wood around here? Maybe I need to refresh my practices. Maybe I’m —

Lyndon: Kids are gone. That’s the first step.

Breallyn: Even, we tended to do a lot of different income stream type things. And we’ve had this sort of thing before of going, we’re putting energy into sort of four or five different things. These couple haven’t — we haven’t got bookings from them or whatever, so let’s not put our energy into that anymore. You kinda cut it back. And then, you know —

Lyndon: My gigolo days were short-lived.

Breallyn: One of your more favored projects, was it? Yeah. Just looking at what can go right now, what isn’t producing anything, and how can I collect my resources together and put that energy into roots that are gonna grow stronger.

Lyndon: I think I might be in a winter season.

Breallyn: You might be.

Lyndon: Gee, lucky you brought this to the table today.

Breallyn: Yeah, it’s very timely, isn’t it?

Lyndon: I was thinking that what I notice in my own life — it comes and goes — is that I’ll go, “Oh, I —” I know why I’m a bit grumpy, or I’m a bit out of sorts, or I feel a bit sick, or I am physically a bit — like getting a bit under the weather and whatnot, and you know when you just feel like things are out of balance?

And when I step back and I look and I go, “Oh, I haven’t been hands-on enough with my creative work.”

I’ve been — I’ve got stuck doing admin stuff, or marketing stuff, or resizing photos, JPEGs or whatever. I just haven’t played guitar as much, I haven’t pressed record as much — all those things that I like to do and that sustain me. It’s like I just recognize that I’ve got it out of balance, and I need to tip the scales back in the right direction.

And it works immediately pretty much when I realize what’s going on. So that normally happens a couple of times a year, I reckon. It’s quite obvious. But maybe I do need to also take it a step further and maybe some things need to be pruned or whatever.

But you see the gardeners on TV, like whether it was Kevin Heinz or — I can’t think of a modern-day gardener. Jamie Durie.

Breallyn: He’s so modern.

Lyndon: He was a Chippendale. Yeah.

Breallyn: He was big in the ’90s.

Lyndon: Yeah. And more of a — not really a gardener, more of a landscape designer.

And a cracking one.

Easy on the eye, ladies.

Breallyn: I’m just gonna leave that there.

Lyndon: But when you see them pruning, they aren’t holding back. They seem like —

Breallyn: Yeah, it’s not pruning just the tips or —

Lyndon: It goes, “All right, mate”… but they seem almost careless when they’re doing it.

But it’s because they know —

Breallyn: What you’re talking about.

Yeah. Yep, they know that the harder the prune, the more room that they’re leaving for spring growth. They’re not hurting the plant by cutting it back. They’re actually creating room and storing resource for the plant to use. Yeah.

Lyndon: It’s when you go to clean the garage, and you go, “All this stuff has been in here like for…” You go, “Gee, when was that — that’s been sitting there for seven years,” “Oh, my gosh.” And then you go, “Today’s the day,” and then you end up just moving everything from one corner to the opposite corner.

Breallyn: I was wondering where you were going with this. I thought, “You’re not gonna try to tell everyone that you prune back the garage and you make room for new things.” It just doesn’t

Lyndon: Happen. No, but it’s… That’s what I’m saying. It’s like sometimes we’re just too careful with things and we hold onto stuff that we don’t need.

Sure. Have you seen the guy online? His yard is like — he’s got all these house bricks, like these red bricks, but he’s not getting rid of those, and then he’s got all those bits of timber in a shed out the back.

And some of the timber — which I get — but some of it’s chipboard and MDF, and I’m like, “I’d just be getting rid of that.”

Breallyn: Oh, dear.

Lyndon: But he’s like, “Could — might use it one day.” He’s got all just parts of his yard, all these bits and pieces, and –

Breallyn: Oh, dear…

Lyndon: And I absolutely — I haven’t seen it, but that’s — understand that — giving me a bit of stress just listening to you.

Breallyn: Yeah. Yeah.

Lyndon: But we need to be more like these gardeners — they’re not just doing it willy-nilly and harming the plant. They know that it’s not just necessary, but it’s healthy and it’s gonna produce better fruit or better flowers or a healthier plant.

Breallyn: Some of the other preparation work during winter — because, if you think of the landscape of a garden, so say it’s a planned out garden — all of the foliage sort of dies down over winter and it allows you to kinda see the bare architecture. So if you think about that in a creative practice or in a life, or relationships or life itself, whatever — when things slow down, you can see that underlying structure a little bit more clearly.

Kinda see the pillars that are holding everything together, the main kind of things, without all of the fussiness of, you know — the daily kind of going on. So it’s quite a good opportunity to look at that framework and see what’s gonna support the growth and, have I got the pillars in place?

Have I got the structures in place that will support the growth and growing my garden the way I want it? Or does that need to change a little bit? So yeah, that’s similar but yeah, just another opportunity to look at the structures, see what can kinda go and what needs to stay.

Lyndon: I’m always amazed by people that seem to be clued into that at a young age.

I go, “How do they — how have they been able to kinda go, ‘I really, I like that. I don’t like this. I’m gonna do that. I’m not gonna do this.’?”

Breallyn: Yeah, I know.

Lyndon: Really decisive about —

Breallyn: Yeah.

Like that whole area of life. That’s not for me. I’m not that —

Lyndon: Yeah, whatever it is… interested.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: ‘Cause I find I’m doing that a bit more now. When I do it, I’m really surprised. I’m surprised that I do it and the world hasn’t fallen down.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I’m surprised that I haven’t done it earlier.

I’m surprised that — yeah, I’m just like, “Wow.” So when people do it at a young age, I’m like, that’s pretty incredible because I would’ve been more inclined to go, “How did you do it? And how do you do it? And how do you do it?” and then try and work out which one I feel would suit me the best that I could do.

But there’s just some people — they’re just like, “Yeah, that’s not for me,” or, “That’s not how I would do it.”

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And it’s like, who are you to say it? But —

Breallyn: So decisive, yeah. Yeah. But like — we’ve been more like, “We could try everything. We could — who knows what we might do next?” Yeah.

Lyndon: And it’s like at some point you can’t… Can you just keep doing that? I don’t know.

Breallyn: No. Gave it a good shot for a while.

Trigger for Growth

Breallyn: So one thing that is important to remember, especially when it feels like winters are cold and doesn’t look that glamorous or whatever, is to trust the cycle. Just remembering that the freeze and the cold spell — it’s not an enemy, it’s a trigger for growth. Like the fruit trees —

Lyndon: You can’t say trigger, ’cause that word triggers me.

Breallyn: It’s a spring for growth? I don’t know.

So yeah, some of the seeds and so on that we were talking about earlier, like the fruit trees — they kinda need that cold spell to break the dormancy. And yeah, so some of our kind of breakthroughs, they’ll come, but we might need to go through the winter in order for that to prompt the growth and the breakthrough.

Lyndon: You know what I reckon happens when you start to do this sort of thing — you are able to, and you touched on this before, you’re able to identify things that just suddenly don’t matter or aren’t important.

And I think gardeners are able to do that.

Generally it’s part of that slowing down that you’re talking about, because they’re aware of the seasons, they’re aware of what the different plants are doing and why they behave a certain way, and they’re aware of the symbiotic nature of the different plants and animals that are out there.

And you can’t help it — everything slows down. Your nervous system settles down, and your perspective widens and deepens. Yeah. I think about this when I go and do winery gigs, and I get out into that space, and I’m playing and I’m just looking out at the scenery.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I’m like — wonderful… I know that this is — I could stare at this all day. I don’t know why, but it’s something to do with how it’s affecting me, and I’m not even thinking about it. I’m just looking. I’m just surveying.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I’m just trying to imprint it in my mind.

Like so that when I come back to suburbia I can take a little bit of it with me. But I think when you’re a gardener, or maybe for farmers as well, there’s something about it that because your body gets stiller internally —

Breallyn: Mm-hmm…

Lyndon: And externally maybe, that everything else, all that chatter, settles down as well, and you’re able to go, “These are the things that are important.”

Mm-hmm. “And these are the things that aren’t worth —”

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: Chasing.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: That’s how I feel about it.

Breallyn: I actually think — and I’m just trying to remember off the top of my head — there’s something about looking out at a landscape, like at a horizon line, that does calm the nervous system or something.

So you’re literally resetting your nervous system while you’re doing that, and yeah, and allowing the — yeah, that unimportant chatter to just drift away.

Lyndon: I wonder whether — ’cause they talk about, if you’re out on a beach, and if you just step into the ocean, like the ocean’s meant to be — it’s like, I guess it’s some sort of tactile sensory thing. But you’re also, normally, if you’re looking out across the water, you can see the horizon line.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And I do think that is different to when I’m out where the view — there is no horizon line.

It’s mountains. Yeah. Especially — and I feel when you’re looking at that —

Breallyn: Yeah…

Lyndon: It’s a slightly different feeling. Yeah. It’s a bit more like there is no end.

Breallyn: There’s one last thing I had on this. Mm-hmm.

Loneliness and Mentors

Breallyn: And that is coming back to the isolation and the loneliness that can accompany that feeling of winter. And I think this is something that we go through creatively when it feels like we’ve hit that sort of dormant winter spot where maybe your art’s not selling or you’re getting knockbacks from publishers or whatever it is, or the ideas aren’t working.

Whatever’s happening in your creative space, it can feel very lonely. It feels very isolating. And it’s easy to, at that point, look around and compare to other people, and they might be hitting their summertime.

Everything’s working out. They’re, like, launching their projects or hitting their milestones or whatever.

Breallyn: And that can make your own sort of quiet spell feel even more lonely, but also you feel visible in the lack of what you’re producing or the things that aren’t launching properly.

But I think it is good to recognize, okay, I might just be in a wintertime, but also it’s time for my roots to go deep, but also to go wide.

We were talking before about trees communicating with one another and sharing resources. So that can be a really good time to reach out to mentors or friends, other artists, other people that are safe people and just go, “This is how I’m feeling at the moment,” “Just feels like nothing’s hitting the mark. Nothing’s working.”

I just don’t… Yeah, it just feels like a wintertime in my creative practice or in my personal life, and that is a good time to draw on those resources and to make that connection ’cause, yeah, otherwise it does feel a little bit bleak. And we don’t need to feel bleak and lonely.

We can have our wintertime knowing that it’s good for growth and every cycle has to have it. It’s a necessary kind of part of the life cycle. So it’s not something to feel that you’re the only one ever going through it or that it’s on you that you are having a more dormant time.

It’s actually just that time to connect and draw some strength from other people too.

Lyndon: I’ve got a new mentor. Did I tell you?

Breallyn: No, you didn’t.

Lyndon: Do you wanna know who my mentor is?

Breallyn: Who’s your mentor?

Lyndon: Claude.

Breallyn: Oh.

Lyndon: I don’t know if you’ve heard of Claude. You can’t have —

Breallyn: Claude. And if —

Lyndon: If Claude’s not available — time limits.

Breallyn: He kicks you out of his home so often.

Lyndon: If Claude’s not available, I then go and talk to Pablo on Gemini.

Breallyn: Mm-hmm.

Lyndon: And if I don’t like what they have to say — I get mentored by ChatGPT.

Breallyn: You’re not allowed to have these guys as mentors.

Lyndon: Did you see the guy that set up his own ChatGPT? He bought a billboard ’cause he didn’t want AI to advertise on it.

So he called it Chat instead of GPT. It was TJB or something like this. But anyway, so people were going online ’cause he’d set it up as an LLM, but it was just him. So he was answering —

Breallyn: He’s the large language model.

Lyndon: And he got overrun and overwhelmed that he just couldn’t deal with it all and had to — he came clean.

Breallyn: Like fess up.

Lyndon: But I think the way it did — like someone — people started to find out about it, and someone’s like, “Hey, draw me a cat.” And it’s just like this really bad — like kindergarten drawing of a cat. And I’d love to go to the site and just —

Breallyn: Oh —

Lyndon: That’s great. If I can find it, I should put a link to it if it’s anything. But yeah, he just was like — he was one of these guys that knew how to write all the code and create it. Yeah.

Breallyn: Yeah.

Lyndon: And the intention was he would be the AI.

Breallyn: That’s what I love about people — I’m gonna look that up… is that they always are gonna do something unexpected and ridiculous and take the piss.

Lyndon: Yeah. It was Chat TJB.

Breallyn: Okay.

Lyndon: So he was a former Google employee. So what if instead of typing the next silly question you have into Claude or ChatGPT, you asked a random guy instead? Tucker Bryant is the guy, his name. Public speaker, artist, and former project manager at Google.

A San Francisco billboard describes Chat TJB as the leading chat interface powered by AI. So that’s what the billboard says. But then it has an asterisk at the bottom that most people probably missed, that said —

Breallyn: Fine print…

Lyndon: That says, “AI, average individual.”

Breallyn: Oh, nice. Yeah. So he’s the leading average individual that answers questions.

Lyndon: Yeah. Yeah, he didn’t train an LLM to respond based on how he writes. He literally sits down and answers the prompts himself.

Breallyn: Yeah, that’s so —

Lyndon: Cool.

Breallyn: So funny. Picturing him sitting there typing away.

Lyndon: So yeah, he launched in April, but it didn’t take off until the very end of July when his $6,000 billboard went up in San Francisco. At its peak, he says he was receiving about 5,000 prompts per hour.

Breallyn: Oh no.

Lyndon: So he considers it to be an art project, not just a funny bit or a social experiment. Maybe he could be my mentor. Yeah.

Breallyn: I think you’d be better off with Tucker.

Lyndon: Yeah, Bryant Tucker. Pretty cool.

Breallyn: Tucker Bryant, was it?

Lyndon: You — you never can tell. Who knows? Tucker Bryant — that doesn’t even sound real, does it? That was pretty good, Brea.

Breallyn: Thanks.

Lyndon: Very thought-provoking.

Breallyn: A little bit of gardening analogy, which you know I always love a bit of chat about the garden, so

Lyndon: There we go. All right, thanks for listening, everybody, and talk to you again in a week’s time.

Breallyn: Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Bye.

Lyndon: See you later.

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