Dean Mayes's Blog

So…I’ve taken the unprecedented step (for me at least) of stepping back permanently from Facebook. I started the account deletion process last week and, even though it’s going to take 30 days, I’m confident I won’t be going back.

I’ve been building up to this decision for a while but, as is often the case with these things, I procrastinated on whether to follow through with my intention or to just give in to the pull Mark Zuckerberg’s platform has/had on me. A couple of things happened that h...

In recent days, Hollywood and fans of pop culture entertainment have been processing the news out of Disney that Kathleen Kennedy – the president of Lucasfilm – has stepped down after 14 years at the helm of arguably, the most identifiable pop culture phenomenon in modern cinematic history.

The news has been met with equal parts praise and derision – as news from the galaxy far, far away tends to evoke these days. For me, a lifelong Star Wars fan, I have drifted away from the franchise in re...

It has been a year. A year since an unfortunate encounter with a stingray resulted in an injury to my right leg and ankle – a broken bone and a torn Achilles tendon.

Two surgeries to repair the tendon. Months of forced immobility, time away from work, surviving on a single income, painstaking rehabilitation and a mental battle that, at times, I feared I was losing.

I have been through a lot of surgery and recovery in the past seven to eight years. This one was probably the most difficult...

A few nights ago, I was nursing a patient who, earlier that day, had been given the news that the brain tumour he had been diagnosed with was a high grade GBM – that is to say, a high grade Glioblastoma Multiforme. It is the most aggressive of the malignant tumours of the brain and has the poorest prognosis. My patient was told he likely has only months to live.

Suffice it to say, he was in a world of hurt – both physical and emotional. Not only was he struggling to process this crushing news...

I went for a long walk yesterday. I took a path along Adelaide’s west parklands to the West Terrace Cemetery and back again. All told it was about 5 kilometres and I felt really good – given that I am still recovering from my ruptured Achilles tendon and broken ankle.

I find the cemetery a calming place – not at all disturbing or ghostly or any of the cliches one associates with a grave yard. Rather, I find it a place of stories; of lives lived. I find myself constructing narratives around th...

I don’t know why it captured my eye. It was just another spine on a shelf of dozens of other spines. I’m talking about book spines by the way. A secondhand bookshop I have come to frequent here in Adelaide has amassed the most amazing collection of Penguin paperback titles – from the classic orange covers of great and small fiction, the green of of crime fiction, the blue of biography and memoirs, the red of the great dramas.

The cerise of the cover which caught my eye denoted travel and adv...

There’s a place here in South Australia that I have wanted to visit ever since I moved here in the mid 90’s but somehow, never got around to it.

In the Clare Valley – roughly a 90 minute drive from Adelaide and tucked away in rolling green meadows reminiscent of the English countryside, stands a magnificent time capsule in the form of Martindale Hall.

It is a mansion built in the Georgian style that was constructed between 1879 and 1880 by the Bowman family who lived in the mansion and wo...

My journal prompt for today asks the following;

Can I keep my cool when receiving disturbing news?

Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman, The Daily Stoic Journal.

I know I need to keep my cool. We all do. It is the stoic ideal state of mind as we travel through our daily lives. A virtue that supposedly shields us from the worst impulses of our behaviour. The truth is, I don’t always keep my cool. In fact, I suck at it – most of the time.

I haven’t been very good at keeping my cool. In part,...

Today, I’m sharing a thought provoking piece from a really compelling writer and thinker in this space, Kevin G. Drendel.

While I have opened myself to Christian thinking, I have yet to have definitive experience of God that I can certain about.

I realise I have a long way to go.

DFA.

If your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body is full of darkness

God Meets Us Where We Are: But Will You Know Him When You Meet Him?

The most frightening book I have ever read is the 1982 graphic novel “When The Wind Blows” by Raymond Briggs. Released at the height of the Cold War 1980’s, it was a visual parable against nuclear war, told with painfully little dialogue. Because, of course, it didn’t need any. Through a series of strip cartoons, we watch a loving couple grapple with a nuclear calamity. Throughout, they keep a very British “Keep Calm & Carry On” attitude, even as apocalyptic conseuquences become clear.