Throughout time, creativity has been served by technology to meet, shape and understand the world.

There is something blissfully infinite about being held above the earth—the body in transit while the mind drifts elsewhere. For a brief while, all function drops away and drifting into a light sleep in a full aircraft feels like a quiet grace. In that suspended state, somewhere between waking and forgetting-must Artemis II astronauts have elt the same I wonder- I found myself turning not just to remembered experiences, but to a longer arc of thought: technology across the ages, from stone to cloud.

Over the past week—between the stretched hours of air travel, family life, and the discipline of study—a single thread began to emerge: Technology (from techne, art or skill; logia, discourse); revealing itself not as distraction, but as companion. Pre-Homo tool makers: before language softened into poetry, before music found its place within the architecture of time, there was the deliberate shaping of stone. The earliest Lomekwian tools were not merely objects; they were gestures toward possibility - assertions that the world could be met, shaped, and perhaps even understood through what is made.

What, then, is our Information Age but a continuation of that same ancient impulse?

Technology is not separate from us. It is intention made concrete—the outward reach of idea into form. And when approached with care, with a kind of inner listening, it becomes something more than utility. It becomes a partner in focus.

In using AI to schedule my days, using google forms to log my practice journal, voicememos to check my progress, a metronome—placing practice beside conversation, discipline beside rest—I do not feel directed, but accompanied. Indeed, sometimes misunderstood — a flurry of notifications imported multiple times from an AI assistant created .ics file summoning me from deep sleep to a piece I had nearly learned to completion the night before. Rather, getting the schedule in its correct order, the day no longer presents itself as obligation, but as composition: phases of effort and release, tension and stillness, held within a larger unfolding rhythm.

In the garden, the passion vine had twirled itself through the rose bush with a daily insistence that escaped notice (or it was noticed but action deferred) until the rose bush resembled a cloaked mound. Without hesitation, I cut and rip away thorn runners. Not in haste, but in determination. The rose gives way to a crooked arthritic cupped hand of thorny spikes, the passion vine sags in the air, groaning and leaning away from its metal wall trellis, needing ties to support its weight. It is a small decisive act, but it carries the same logic as the first shaped stone: that the world, when met with intention, can be altered.

The earth churns beneath the rotary hoe, its tinny ratchety grind folding into the yard; the mulching tool gobbles up leaves and branches. Nearby, the mattock and axe rest where they always have, ready for the blunt work and holding within them another era of effort - even if that era was a brief period of 6 months when I picked up the mattock to break clay for the new fish pond. I do not reject them; I simply wean off them. The body, after all, is also a kind of instrument—one that learns, over time, how it wishes to be used.

Inside, the workhorse printer warns of a renewal need, struck in yellow and black with an exclamation. Bought to churn out music in black and white and at pace, the ipad has made its position in the studio redundant. The printer has found pasture at my father's home. I replace its drum aware that this too is temporary—like so many other tools, it is already leaning toward disappearance. To maintain it is not to deny that, but to participate, briefly, in its waning usefulness.

Soon, I will return to Sydney and the days will gather into term time structure once more. I will sit in the sleek capsule of my electric car, held in motion while the body is at rest—massaged gently, accompanied by a podcast voice - will it be Hedley Thomas or Ira Glass? It will feel seamless, almost frictionless.

But. Not all devices move with such quiet grace, and like the mattock or the axe becoming blunt objects in our hands. Some still require a kind of negotiation—a reminder that between intention and response there remains a space, however small, where we wait, adjust, and try again.

Here is the clicker for the work garage, which seems to sing in another temperament entirely. I am often found paused in the driveway at 6.50am, the car at an awkward angle, jutting its rear into the street, its nose almost touching the door—as though its posture alone might finally encourage the door to open—my hand lifting the small black plastic device with two pokemon-yellow buttons on it toward the door, a slight tensing of the jaw in hope, then pointing it toward the box inside the door, pressing one button, then the other, turning it around, trying again, unbuckling and standing closer to the door in a hopeful act of encouragement. It's too early for this challenge.

A nagging uncertainty-what do I do if it doesn't open?

For a moment, the illusion falters again - like last week when my AI assistant wrote exactly the ics file I wanted but for the wrong day: the seamless world of responsive technology gives way to something more erratic. I become aware again of gesture—of the hand, the angle, the distance—of the silliness of insisting, silently, that the mechanism recognise me: it's me, let me in.

I want to swear.

And then—there it is.

The door stirs and shrieks as if in pain: not again, it complains. I rush back into the car-the device-hoping the door doesn't decide to shut before allowing me entry. Today, I have mastered it.

The car, like the hoe, like the printer, has shifted—no longer merely a tool, but a system, a device, an environment that anticipates the body before it speaks. Effort dissolves and changes form.

And so I move between the physical and imagined worlds of earthly delight and sound—not choosing one over the other, but always noticing. The gesture remains the same; the hand still reaches; something in us continues to shape—and to be shaped in return.

Perhaps we need reminding that this is where technology reveals its quiet beauty—not in its complexity, nor in the vastness of its information, but in its capacity to illuminate: the tools we create do not merely serve us but also they reflect us. They make visible the structures we already inhabit, often before we have the language to name them.

As with the earliest tools, as with the first instrument, as with every act of making that has come before - technology's meaning is fluid. It is shaped, infinitely, by the quality of our desire, need, and attention. And so this is not an argument for or against technology, but an invitation toward something quieter, more enduring: the manner in which we meet or utilise it.