Latest Work: Dance In The Rain

It’s not about avoiding the storm.

Sometimes you feel the sun on your skin.

 Sometimes you feel the rain.

We fear what the winds may take,

but altered colours emerge,

as the clouds begin to wane 

To go out.

To face the weather.

I shot this piece back at the end of Summer 2025 in response to one of life's heartbreaks. It has taken me a little while to get this piece out. I have put it off, telling myself I'm too busy, yet sharing other work in the meantime. I suspect it's something deeper, that ephemeral block that stops us from being vulnerable. The thing that our body holds onto and our mind makes reasons as to why.

I was out taking solace on one of my walks in the park. That personal habit many of us have taken up in a busy world, just a little time for me to be, process, meditate, and reflect. I was carrying the melancholy that always follows loss. Thrashes of rain. Clouds above me - grey and squalling. My feet - heavy in a quagmire.

A younger me would have shied away from going out there, deny the rain from falling, not feeling it against my skin. As I walked, I let the rain wash over me. Time and acceptance the pacifiers of pain.

Late in the day, the sun began to break through, painting the world around me with that staggeringly brilliant orange light that only appears when the atmosphere is saturated after rain. Above me, the clouds folded over themselves and peal across the sky, so low they seemed to clip the radio tower of Alexandra Palace, the focal point of the park. They towered infinitely upwards—life as if at the heart of a Turner painting. There is nothing quite as dynamic in its beauty as the moment between a storm and its passing.

The clouds parted above me. Although we fear what the storm might take from us, it is in standing against them that we return altered, more than we were before.

This idea has stayed with me. In The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger describes experiments where one plant is repeatedly disturbed while another is left untouched. The stressed plant slows its upward growth, instead strengthening its stem, becoming more resilient. The untouched plant, by contrast, remains fragile and breaks under pressure.

It echoes Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: children shielded from risk often grow more fragile, having missed the small adversities that build resilience—what he describes as antifragility.

I am prone to anthropomorphising — it is, after all, the foundation of my creative work. But is it not a truth of life, of all life, that we must dance in the rain rather than shy away from the storm?

This piece is a part of a larger series: a personal photo journal exploring the restorative power of our relationship with nature.

Touch The Grass