Mostly, I love anything that encourages sustainability, usefulness, beauty, compassion and the wild.*
(Sue Fan)

Successful cities are a glorious mess of old and new, of hours and shops and work place, and where the richer residents and poorer one mingle together. And it is that diverse mess that makes them safe, innovative – and, perhaps above all, resilient.**
(Tim Harford)

My goal had been to whisper every day of 2014 as long as I could add a doodle, just to see what would happen.

That should have been 365 whispers, but today I hit 2,000. Here’s number 1 from August 2013, when I must have been playing with the idea.

(Playfulness is really important as a way of overcoming the kind of judgement that would have stopped me doing anything.)

In between, I have found my love for the visual leading me into illustrating work I couldn’t have imagined five years ago: here’s my latest collaboration with Daphne Loads, newly published: Rich Pickings.

All of this is to encourage you to follow the thing you want to do. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be full-time, just see what happens when you pursue it every day.

I love Sue Fan’s words because they encourage us to create a space for our creativity that is both centred and exploring: a home that is also a studio.

And when Tim Harford describes successful and resilient cities, he could be describing a person’s life – where the old and the new mix, where there’s work and play and rest, where there the developed and undeveloped side-by-side, all dwelling in some “glorious mess” that makes it possible to be and to explore.

Who knows what will happen then.

(*Sue Fan, from from Sue Fan and Diane Ogilvy’s Do/Inhabit/.)
(**From Tim Harford’s Messy.)