You are what your deep driving desire is; As your deep driving desire is, so is your will; As your will is so is your deed; As your deed is so is your destiny.


The dance changes you. It's hard to say how, but it does. Even now I can't really describe how changed I feel, but I really feel different.

It's a reawakening that you can't really describe and it has everything to do with purpose. You find yourself feeling, in contact with that soft yet deep driving desire that flows even within you. Even now I feel the energy moving through me. It seeks freedom and expression through me. It challenges me to ask myself, Who Am I, in this moment, and who am I going to be in the next. It asks me to see the effects of my intention and my clarity. It teaches to me that in any moment, I can be a difference in this world.

Everyday I seek the dance. Some days more strongly than others. I know there is an energy there, a field which seeks and waits for me to meet it, to catch it, and to work with it. Some days I am prepared. Other days I am not. Self doubt, fatigue, fear of failure, in general very low emotional tone is the barrier. Peace in existence must be cultivated for the energy to descend, to run through. Otherwise the ignorant chaotic movements of the subconscious kick about and disperse the higher movements before they can even begin to manifest.

That's certainly been the case of late. 12 hour days. The fatigue that lies at the end of it. Day after day after day. The lack of emotional balance or space to reflect and find the peace of the heart. But really what it is - being stuck in the machinery of the world and the disconnection from one's true, deep, driving inner desire - what some have called the Daemon... Disconnected from one's true inner purpose and desire, life becomes a very rough and rocky road... a truly confusing battle for survival and Destiny lost.

It gets hard. But even so, I can still feel the Dance. It keeps me alive.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.
                                    -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's funny sometimes how in the midst of all our insanity, the miracles of life can totally pass us by.

Yesterday I finished a short stint in the neonatal intensive care. My role in this job is sometimes to be the privileged person to welcome high risk babies into the world. Birthing can be a difficult thing, especially when you get stuck :) sometimes the little guys do get stuck and it can be a pretty tight fit! So when they come out often they can be pale, floppy, listless, not breathing, heart not beating, goo and muck throughout their lungs ... you get the idea. For a baby, Life sometimes can truly be a dangerous place!

The game is to rub them, pat them, squeeze the little guys, cuddle them, love them and at rarer times to jam breathing tubes in their throat if they really dont want to behave :) but usually, a friendly "Hi there mate! welcome to the world!" suffices. They usually just turn pink, blink, or cry, or sometimes pee on you if you dont get out of the way and then most of the time give a good, healthy scream, a salute and greeting to a new world.

I love those little babies. I love them so much. They are amazing. One of my most peaceful moments is to just stand at the door of the nursery, look out into room of the many little cots, a feel the beautiful energy of care which exists for each of the little lumps of brand new life. It's one of my favourite jobs ever, to look after brand new babies. They are little lumps of beautifulness just waiting to be loved. They are just a wonder to me, when they come out, all brand new. Sometimes you just stand there and look at them. After you put them down on the little resuscitation trolley they often dont do much - they have a bit of a sniff, have a little look around, blink, as though they are just coming to terms with the fact that they have eyes, wiggle and wobble their arms and legs, getting used to the fact that they have them too. Most times they are grumpy and they cry, burp, vomit, pee or poop when they are brand new. But they still amaze me.

What touches my soul is when you get to look into a brand new baby's eyes for the first time. Im often amazed and awestricken by the idea that I am probably one of the first people they see and definitely the first person they have a real interaction with. I am the first person to touch them, to wake them up, to poke and prod them, I am the first to welcome them. And then you look into their eyes. They are magnificent, those beautiful luminous blue-black-brown-green globes, they are endless and so wonderfully full of an indescribable newness. They are just glowing and when I look there, just for that moment, I touch briefly a wonder and a beauty that I cannot describe and cannot forget.

Being a witness to new life often makes you stop and ponder. Yesterday when I was standing there I really started to take a step back from the 'doingness' and started to wonder what it really meant, to be such a brand new helpless vulnerable little person. I started to get a sense of the awesomeness of what lay ahead for these little beings. To think that each of these, from such a small, undeveloped and vulnerable place, will grow up similar to me and have many hours, days, months, years, decades full of the experiences of life. To think of the events, relationships, lessons, joys, pains, passions that these little people have yet to move through just blows me away.  To meet the people they will spend their lives with, to fall in love, to lose, to win, to triumph, to share, to celebrate. That each of these is a Being in themselves capable of living such fullness! I dont know exactly what will happen to each of these but mostly when I stand there, I feel a sense of fullness and Beingness- it is a sense of an unknown potential, but filled with  a Promise.

It makes me glad and fills me with deep appreciation for the experience of Life. It makes me question, acknowledge and honour a miracle - my own existence. Where have I really come from? Where am I going to? What was the promise that I came into this world with? Is my collection of experiences a really fulfillment of that? Just who or what am I?

I just smile. Somewhere inside me I know. But on the outside I dont have all the answers. Yet.

I help run a not-for-profit organisation called The Centre For Human Development. Our branch is based in Australia, so it's called the CFHD (Australia).

We run alot of charitable development programs, particularly for the Australian Indigenous community. That's a bit weird for some people because "Indigenous" in Australia has become so politicised. Everyone's got an opinion sometimes. Or people have pity for the poor aboriginal people. Some other people have alot of good arguments about why "helping" can be a pretty bad thing - bad for them, bad for us. Alot of people just dont have a reality on the situation. Alot of people know they should feel bad, because after all, the situation is pretty bad, but theyre not really exactly sure how.

I dont really care. At the end of the day, to me, people are just people. It's hard for me to see anything else, because my life has always been this kaleidoscope of people and cultures.

I grew up the son of refugees. They caught a boat to get here to Australia. They landed on a beach with their thongs and the clothes on their back.  I always had so many different friends from different backgrounds. I had many immigrant and ethnic friends, friends whose family had been around Ozland for generations, old friends and young ones, and I always could find a way to relate to any and most of them. And when you live in Melbourne there are so many different cultures and ethnicities living here, it's hard to see anything but human.

As a teenager, often we'd go to weekend Vietnamese school, the only place any of us were allowed see our friends because of the rules of our strict Immigrant parents. Then the next week it'd be hanging out with the private school people in some massive mansions..
 
On the weekend I might go play lacrosse down at the club...and on the other weekend it would be crazy when you'd all of the sudden just get pulled along in fleets of cars of other friends as they piled machetes and knives into the boot in their gangland struggles to survive. One of my best friends - I reckon he's a legend - did everything he ever wanted - he achieved all his dreams of playing rugby for Australia, becoming the president of his college, winning military scholarships just as I watched and admired my other best friend struggle day by day for 5 years just to stay in school and get to college, any college, as he struggled to live with and support his elderly mother and grandmother.

And a couple of years ago, I was awed and so proud of an old high school friend who I used to compete with for our academic prizes who, at the age of 25, became Australia's 99th Rhodes Scholar, winning the scholarship to Oxford University. And in that same year, my heart was broken as I sat and bore witness to the execution by hanging of a fellow refugee and teenage hooligan, at the age of 25, for attempting to smuggle heroin to pay off a twin brother's drug debt. This guy was always so full of life and he lived all the months up to his death in total open surrender to a higher form of Being and Purpose. Ill always be in awe of him and only ask that if I ever had to face death like that I could do it with similar courage and compassion for myself and the world around me.

It's been a... deep yet wonderful life. The point is living such an almost contradictory, contrasting life, brings to a person (apart from a sense of near cultural schizophrenia) just such a perspective on how different things and people can be yet at the end of the day, how much the same we really all are.

That's why when I look out now and see people, people are just people, and at the bottom of it all, theyre just like me. That's why right now alot of my energy is going into a new development project we're starting is a youth development and leadership program the community of Kempsey, New South Wales, Australia. It's one of the largest single populations Indigenous people living in one place outside of Sydney. It's also the official 2nd lowest socioeconomic demographics in all of australia, plagued by discrimination and frank outright racism. There are about 7000 Indigenous Australians living there. According to medical service records, 50-60% of these people are under the age of 21. That means there are at least 3000 children there who could only be described as at risk. A community elder who also is a teacher told me he can only count 12 young people who will finish year 12 and be eligible for university this year. 12 young people? Things are sometimes screwed up but this is just off the scale for me. Thse people struggle everyday to a unbalanced proportion with drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, sexual abuse, discrimination, incarceration, chronic preventable diseases, generational poverty..and at the end of the day, its the children who really suffer.

In this world as thinking, intelligent, resourceful creative beings we have achieved so much. These life situations which I have just mentioned produces real, measurable outcomes and we see these outcomes in the children. It becomes a revolving door. The stolen generation has become the Lost Generation, as my elder friend has told me.

 Well these stories, these realities make me angry, sad, upset, annoyed and at times incredulous, but then after all that, it resonates within me the truth that we all should know and remember: that as a being in this world, when we can tap that deep will of our intention, we can draw on resource beyond our idea of what's even possible. When we enter into this creative space I know that we all have the power to change any outcomes.

And it's so important here. I look out and I see that these outcomes can be changed. And when you change these outcomes, youre changing the whole course of lives.

I finally have a day off after getting back from Arizona.

Alot of people I know are pretty intense. It's probably not healthy. I've been going pretty hard 110% for the last 10-14 days. When I havent been working, I've been driving across the bloody country in between hospitals. 3000km in 2 weeks. 4-5 hours sleep a night. Spiritual practice kinda goes out the window. Now is the first time off I've had since. It's not healthy.

It's a grey chilly friday morning. My car's getting fixed today. I caught the bus to town and now I'm sitting, warm, in some cafe. I just ate a delicious chicken and cranberry bagel. A steaming hot lightly browned and frothed cafe latte is calling me. Mmmmmmmmmm



How good is life? :)