The cosmos is sending me to a city chock full of millionaires.

In fact, according to a recent report, Dallas has the fastest growing population of millionaires in America.

Nearly 70,000 millionaires at last count, with another 50,000 expected to join that elite club in the next five years.

Twenty-two people on Forbes’ Richest in the World list come from Dallas.

All I can say is – Whoo hoo universe!

Thank you for not sending me to West Africa.

I’m looking forward to these fifteen days from November 23rd!!

I’ve just posted on the Gone Tours website some information on the distances and elevations of the various stages on the Assisi tour, next April / May.

Here is the link –
Assisi Tour – distances & elevations.

The pilgrimage is 224 kms over 10 days of walking. There’s a day in Florence, a rest day in Gubbio (a wonderful historic town) – finishing in Assisi.

It’s going to be a glorious walk…

I got an email from my brother Bob yesterday. He's currently walking the Camino Frances with his 21 yr old son Rupert.

They've been walking nineteen days now, without one rest day, and last night they would have got to Leon.

That's hooting along!

I'm astonished, because they hardly did any training. My brother did though do squats in lieu of walking. He said he was doing 300 squats a day before he left Australia.

He said in the email they both have bad blisters, but they're “soldiering on.”

Ha! And before they set off they were wondering if they'd even make 100kms. They'll be in Santiago before they know it!

The Camino carries you upon its wings…

Heading back to Mudgee, we stopped overnight in Narrabri, in the centre of New South Wales.

I went out at first light and took some shots with my little compact Sony RX100 MkIII –

I’m in Brisbane Queensland at the moment, where I’ve been doing some work for the university where I’m an Adjunct Prof…

I grew up in Brisbane, and my family lives there – brother, sisters, and mother. Jennifer and I have been staying with my youngest sister, Angela.

We had dinner together last night, and my mum came over. She’s 87, and as it turns out the dinner was a celebration of the publication of her new book – The Killer with Three Hundred Names. 

The book details a twelve year investigation she undertook to solve one of Australia’s most notorious triple homicides, committed over a hundred years ago. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) did a half hour profile on my mum last year, in a programme called Australian Story that features prominent Australians.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon if you’re interested –

The Killer with Three Hundred Names

This is her fifth book. In each book she’s solved a murder that dates back more than a hundred years.

My mum is remarkable.

Anyway over dinner we were talking about the intuition film I’m doing, and she told me how as a youngster – when I was two to three years old – I seemed to have some kind of communication with the spirit world.

it would happen when we were driving. I’d sit up in the back of the car, look ahead out the front windscreen and smile, and start saying: “Hewo…” (Hello)

And then up ahead a cemetery would come into view.

Evidently this happened many times, and it freaked out my mum and dad – because they could never see the cemetery. Often it was around a corner or over the crest of a hill – but I would sit up and smile and start saying hewo…

My mother said last night that at that age, I didn’t even know what a cemetery was. Much less anticipate it before anyone else saw it. Much less seemingly communicate with spirits.

She said that she and my father at the time thought it was “very strange.”

And then as I got older it stopped.

Of course I can’t remember any of this.

But in esoteric writings they say that a child up to the age of two or three often carries the wisdom and capabilities of past lives. But they disappear as you get older, and the patina of the real world begins to encrust those sensitivities.

A couple of people around the table said they had goosebumps as my mother was telling the story. This wasn’t some Halloween gag. She was simply telling me what she and my father had witnessed when I was young.

She said she couldn’t remember if I’d exhibited any other “tendencies,” but she remembered that vividly.

I came across this today as part of my research into intuition –

A quote from Pablo Picasso, from a series of conversations with the great Hungarian photographer, Brassai:

“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen.”

I find this a fascinating way of looking at the creative process. And it’s a method I’m using in making my film on intuition. I’m following my intuition.

Here is a piece I recorded in Dharamsala –

The Process – 

For those of you who have been concerned, Julian Lord just emailed me to say that he’s now back at home, safe and well.

His lack of communication was a result of his phone being stolen.

But he’s ok.

Which is a relief…

It takes me such a long time to write a post for this blog.

A minimum of an hour, and usually more.

It may not look like it, because my posts usually read fast, right?

I hope so.

That’s what takes me the time – making the writing simple. Easy.

I don’t dash it off. I can’t. I’m not that clever.

I have to use craft.

And part of that craft is checking for typos. Typos bug me. They indicate a lack of attention to detail.

A sloppiness.

I let a screamer go through on that last post: Reading.

Third line.

All kids of books. Instead of All KINDS of books.

I went over that text, in review, several times. And I never saw it. Until I read it after I published it.

Maybe I shouldn’t write blogs at 4am…

I read widely. Always have.

I love books.

All kinds of books.

I read everything from Stephen King (a great writer) to Cormac McCarthy (a very great writer), from George RR Martin (read all the Game of Thrones books one after the other – have yet to see the tv series) to Dickens, who wrote the best book I’ve ever read – David Copperfield.

Perhaps my favourite contemporary book is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, voted the Booker of Bookers – being the best Man Booker prize winner ever written.

The book is magnificent.

But when I decided to get serious about my spiritual development, and as part of my research into intuition, I made a decision to forego my usual reading habits and concentrate on more esoteric fare.

I don’t have time to read Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Not both of them. It’s either one or the other. They’re both weighty tomes. And I simply don’t have the time. Whilst I do try and make each moment in my day count towards something productive, I’m not superhuman.

So here is what I’m currently reading, and what I have on my Kindle to read in the near future –

• Supernormal, by Dean Radin
• Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein
• Varieties of Religious Experience, a study in Human Nature, by William James
• The Rig Veda, translation by Ralph Griffith
• Light on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, commentary by BKS Iyengar
• The Divine Plan, by Sri Aurobindo
• The Bhagavad Gita
• The Holy Science, by Sri Yuteswar Giri
• Unveiled Mysteries – I Am Discourses; the Saint Germain series, by Guy Ballard
• Walking the Noble Path, by Thich Naht Hahn

There’s some heavy duty reading in amongst this lot.

And a bucketload of wisdom.

The Queensland University of Technology has asked me to continue on as an Adjunct Professor in their Creative Industries faculty for a further three years.

So this week I’ll be in Brisbane, holding a master class for film students, and judging the student “pitches” for their productions next year.

I’m driving up, and last night I stayed in Goodiwindi, a small country town on the border of New South Wales and Queensland.

I love Goondi, as the locals call it. It is a quintessential Queensland bush town.

This morning before sunrise I went for a walk with a new compact camera – the Sony RX100 M3. It’s a terrific little pocket sized camera, and if I were to walk the Camino tomorrow, it would be the only camera I’d take. Small light, and terrific images.

Here are some shots I took on my walk this morning: