My major concern for Australia at the moment is how we support and nurture our youth, this will be occupying my thoughts and actions as we head into the next decade.
Partly because of course I will have three teenagers next year, but also because I am thinking of all the nations and worlds young people and the need to build with them and for them a better brighter future. Let’s find a way forward.
If you are doing or can potentially do anything for youth please post this under this status statement or approach me for guest blog or interview. I want to gather some positive energy – and mention anyone out there doing amazing, empowering and positive work.
For me personally a brighter future for young people is about enabling them to find a spiritual centre, to walk with practical feet, and embody in their actions in the world, and their interconnection to others. It is about listening to them, encouraging them, giving them opportunities, and tools, enabling them to have opportunity from whatever beginning point they are given at birth and have no choosing in. It is about seeing them embrace service to humanity, with love, skill and patience.
It’s about moving it away from politics and thinking of young people as spiritual beings with immense energy, potential, drive and leading them into their role as co-custodians. It’s about youth making decisions that propel them forwards and propel those around them forwards so they can see themselves as carriers of hope, not burdens to be scared into action.
As a writer/artist I think the way for me to do this is to create projects, art works, films, stories that have this as their central drive and purpose. My challenge – to find a way to be sustainable in this work, to take greater care of providing finances to my children’s university or other education and finding ways for them to do that too. For this I need collaborators, ingenuity, inventiveness and to foster sustainability. Let’s face it not all forms of writing bring in enough to provide shelter let alone education for our youth.
It’s not about platitudes but walking a spiritual path with practical feet, and not sticking with anything outmoded that holds back the development of women, youth, people in general, and people dealt a rough initial starting point the world (born into poverty, or families with a need for healing, or without any caring family).
As I soul search my return to bread and butter work, as well as continuing the often voluntary arts and community work that is good for my soul, I begin to strive to bring all the elements of who I am together, and to try and be an example to my children and youth in my own family of how to do that. How can I make it better for them?
How can I use innovation, storytelling, creativity, ingenuity to become all I hope for them as well, a person whose work is not just bread and butter, but vocation, building a society that is not just about economy but about human spirit, and community?
Gumboootspearlz 