Darwin's Dream

It's back...

My Australian Dream ...

It's been 3 months since I bathe in a dream that had captivated me and recalled me back ten years later. I was madly in love in May 2000…My ideals ignited by the Olympic torch, floating in my new world inhabited by strange creatures: Australian Jesus, Kangaroo, Platypus and LifeSavers. A happy tribe, eaters of life, dancing to the sound of the Yidaki.

In 2010, My Australian Dreaming returns!

The circle is complete. After trekking in Asia here and there. Taking one directions, changing directions, having dreams on the way ...

Many dreams ...

Nightmares as well...

No ... Not too many nightmares ... a few anyway, eyes wide open at the crossroads of the long way taken by the Burmese people ...

That's another story ...

U-turns, leaps forward, passions, questions, detours, pitfalls, failures and joys, loves and disenchantment ... I'm back on the beach which remained intact, where  me and my girls friends exchanged giggles 10 years ago , shouting loud a spicy song we barely understood, so loud that we would lose our voice to it:

"How long how long Will I slide

Separate my side I do not

I do not believe it's bad .... "

Red Hot Chili Pepper ...

Bondi Beach ... The Beach ...

Over-real beach, vibrant and overrated, over-crowded and popular, endearing and horrifying, obligatory passage for dreamers who arrive, in bulk by the thousands each year in Australia with the intention to live at least a year that special "Australian Dreamin ' "...

As of September 2010, I invent my own ritual for that special reunion with the beach of my dreams. I offer a lock of hair to the waves coming to swallow it as a sign that it accepts me on this beach a while longer. Let those waves never stop ...

And then I dip the feet in the sand and wiggle my toes. The feeling is always the same ... Excited and snorkeling for a year in this fascinating city, I had anchored dreams, loves, passions, small follies, hopes. It is around this beach that some of my greatest friendships have taken seed: Stephanie, Muriel, Sebastian, and the whole troop of Warners Avenue ... A breath of wind made this ephemeral microcosm fly away spreading all of us at one end and the other of the planet. What remains from this microcosm,  our microcosm, We, The "Bondi Band » my own Australian world10 years ago ? very little .. Only Dov was fairly confident and crazily enough in love with this sacred soil to build the empire of his life what ever the sacrifice where. Dov grew up. And we? and me?

I push my feet deeper in the sand. It is cool ... This Present moment, me aside, is similar to itself, like the present moment 10 years ago. Constant. Consistant. Around me Backpackers wander around with working holiday visa, experimenting with all sorts of jobs - in cafes, bars, restaurants, a few weeks sometimes - a few months before moving elsewhere as free spirit. In here, who wants something can.The unemployment rate is weak and young people are a easy labor, cheap and they do not complain because they are dreaming and they have no space in their positive impulse for complaining. Same as 10 years ago, young backpackers live fully, go out, flirt, whoop it up, get wasted with pitchers of beer  that they pour into their throat every night, discover surfing, making love, get burnt by the violent sun, ride the vans, ready to eat thousands of kilometers in the Australian Outback to feel the infinite possibility of the infinite.

They dream , eyes wide open shut,  their Australian Dreamin.

BONDI, A LOVER ASLEEP

Oddly, back 10 years later, I rediscovered the pretty bubble of Bondi Beach with a detached glance, softened look. Not as aflame but still very deep. A bit like seeing an old lover with whom once had fallen in love madly, blindly in love, so blindly in love when life is just beginning and so attached that it was better to exit from a dream too sweet, too well done and to build its own road.

Ten years ago I could accept any job to stay, without giving its luck to elsewhere while elsewhere would promise mystery, challenge the improbable, the unexpected, the difficult, the unusual, routs. Sydney promised pleasure and happiness to anyone who will cling. The Sun and the vibes of sacred land Sydney was sufficient to my happiness then. It was the ecstasy without ecstasy. The atmosphere enveloped all of us, me in any cases, into a well-being that was selfsufficient. A little paradise on the road of life like a terminal where it would be sweet and euphoric settle down. Very sweet ... I was seduced.

In this present moment, in 2000, Bondi was my delicious lover. I did not need anything else. I'll stayed in Bondi and I’ll shaped my self to merge into him. A Visa coming to an end was quick to propel me out of my bubble, tearing me out of this  empirical love, pushing me to embrace the other worlds, to fly elsewhere without the passionate attachment to grow independently of a dream served on a silver platter, so tempting, so desirable.

I was lucky because once out of my Bondi 2000 bubble, I was dizzy, I woke up and I was hungry again. Hungry for life, hungry for experience, hungry for wonder.

As I caress the sand, I'm happy to have gone finally, for perhaps a better return one day. Later. Today? Never? Tomorrow? The present will give the answer.

The waves come and go before me. Tirelessly. Here and elsewhere. Constant and reliable.

Time has smoothed out the passions. The return on Bondi Beach is one of tenderness and love, strengthened for a land that still bears its imaginations, ideals, ancient dreamings, its wealth of differences. Time and travel have only reinforced these deep links.

I am back now, appeased because I kissed the world, desperately enough that it allows me today to love Sydney without the doubts that previously touched me that elsewhere the grass may be greener. Today, I look towards my feet: the gras sis green, the sand yellow and I am in love. The present. I like the new Bondi 2010 in its similarity to the old Bondi, in its constancy.

I love elsewhere beyond the waves with its constant mystery. I love this amazing continuous universe. Here and there. Here with there.

HOME SWEET HOME

It s not like i have a status in Sydney: Neither backpacker nor expatriate nor  real tourist. Actually, I don’t have any status .. Anywhere. Fortunately, unlike theone person I've come to visit here in Australia in 2010, I have a European passport, Almighty sesame ! And a visa, so I have the right not to be confined in a detention center or to be in hide. Taken as granted, the luxury of having it , does not prevent me from losing it and that’s when you realize the value of it. As i lost it, i was about to be sent back to France because i could not renew my visa without passport and my visa was to be expired. Luckily i found it in the police station after lots of moments of despair.

When will the ID chip embedded in the neck? ...

Before coming back here, I took some side roads, winding & uncertain ways detaching me from all these prefabricated rails that one is too early encouraged to take, precipitating one in a destabilizing compliance. Blinding compliance. To the glory of profit at the expense of Life and its simple essences. Studies that are "globally" venal, dehumanizing. Studies that denature man who get lost in a spiral of surreal numbers, letters and profit. Studies that oppose man to man rather than encourage  solidarity and links to Mother Earth.

These studies that seems to forget that we are not the only ones living on mother Earth and that there is an empire of earthlings which are much larger than the only 7 billion of people ... That life that surrounds us is not a product to be processed, modified, cloned, sold, and consumed ... The creature, the earthlings and the balance around us deeply imply our humanity.

I'd love to have a Shaman of Borneo as schoolmaster, a healer in the Amazon as doctor, an Indian guru as philosopher professor, a Tuareg of Niger as teacher. With them, I would learned the world, the reality. I would live away from artifice from abstract and from utopia. With their teachings i ll learn to follow the Movement. I ‘ll learn the essential and not the trivial.

I am a child of profit, born on a soil enslaved by human beings.

Sometimes, without first knowing why we do it, in one’s metropolitan bubble, we resist a little, a lot, passionately, or not at all. We all just trying to make our own nest on this small planet in motion. We stumble, we move on, we jostle, we kiss, we stop, we leave, we get hurt, we makes mistakes, we desire, we like we love, some stay, others split up to meet again soon or later, or never meet again.

We're all kids without confidence despite our mask full of certainties. A full on movement made one appreciate the moments of solitude as much as the social moments. but most important movement allowed one to to stop to the gist, to the core and pursur the journey the rest of the time.

Once in and out Out of my bubble of Bondi, now returning in again, everything ihas become more intelligible. Here in Sydney, I feel Home because Sydney has a unique and rare treasure: Sydney invited the world to live in: Indian, Chinese, Aborigines, Turkish, Greek, Indonesian, ... It is a celebration of cultures thoughts and philosophies.

In my country, politic scares me sometimes because it has stigmatized identity and difference. By doing so it is stabbing our integrity, our humanity and our core values of fraternity. As humans born on the same soil. Planet earth.

Here in Australia, apparently in all cases, the difference is encouraged, loved, welcome. The difference is wealth and there is no discomfort at being a foreigner. As a matter of fact, it is a pride to brng one "foreignness" as an input into the Australian identity. Overall ..

THE CONSISTENCY OF A BEACH

In 2000, on Bondi Beach, as i finally conceded that i had to leave Sydney, I started my next dream. I dreamed Latin America, i dreamed chaos, i dreamed a hurricane of feelings, of music, i dreamed to take the challenge head on, dive into a mess, dance, learn Spanish, kiss life. Passion love suddenly made me dream San Francisco. Then Australia again. then Latin America again. I got dizzy. I finally took the gamble of Paris to make the big Latin leap. I did not have Latin America, I did not have San Francisco, I was propelled on a long unlikely trip in Asia. Malaysia.

Fromm my Bondi 2000 dream, it is not the Love which was rescued in Malaysia but  rather Stephanie, my great Bondi friend, who made the leap with me to Malaysia. For a long adventures of few years…  Malaysia, a country that then seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Malaysia ... Magic Country on arrival, trickster on departure. Another long story.

I will never have set foot in Latin America. Not yet. I'll go. At present, I will. It s going to be another exciting story.

Sydney looks like itself. The waves keep rolling. All the joggers parade on the Esplanade. Fine muscular characters, humans in perfection. I feel like i am in the land of Care Bears sometimes. The sand is there. The waves are there. Everyone looks happy. Bondi's world seems to have maintained its lifestyle and neighborhood issue is virtually nonexistent. In appearance.

In 10 years, Bondi Beach does not seem to have aged an eyelash.

Our group of young backpackers at the time - wanderers, in emulation and self-seeking adventurers, driving by the will for good fun for most of us, for sexadventures for a few of us, or for love of a lifetime for others, building ideas towards a flawless career, a lifestyle, sun or beaches - … This group is still there ... but it is not us anymore. We’ve gone one step further. 

Our group was replaced by a new generation of young people leaving school, eyes wide open at the crossroads of possibilities, ready to devour life and follies, ready for the most wacky jobs, picking fruit, ready to board the Australian adventure or to getting drunk all night in order to celebrate the youth finally released from school, ready to take life head on.

The fickleness of me?

In 2000 I was a girl, naive and backpacker, broke, living a day to day life on a floor mattress in a room shared with 3 or 4 other girls in an apartment of nine to ten people. I wanted to sing in the street the word Love, quite blinded by the power of love that i was convinced that by writing a poem and plastering on the walls of Bondi, a sensitive soul - in the name of love – will sponsor my trip to join my American lover, the love of my life - at that time, as pennyless as me and forced to get back to San francisco.

Today I am a woman, happy, a little stubborn, a little more confident, more certain of my present, ignoring future, more broke and in debt than ever, holding tight to the present, holding to my dreams, still on a floormattress here and there, moving every two weeks or every two months during the good times.

Homeless always … and forever?

I finally divorced the career and the salary that pretentious studies promised me. I have no certainty about the choice. It's hard sometimes, other times exciting, always passionating. But at least I have the basics: The Present time has taken up residence in my life - sometimes sweet, sometimes tedious, observer or actor, lover of life forever. Instinctively, as a precaution, the Future has disappeared and its death - essential for fragile broke people for which the words investment, deposit, insurance or savings – are the surreal luxury of a parallel world - is largely a guarantor of happiness without a single stress, allowing a broader visibility  of the world around us, granting transparent loves and friendships.

I love humans who are still human, sensitive, alert to other earthlings, down to earth, who can still communicate with the soil and have the freedom in their skin. I live a little with my little world of solidarity, with my expending tribe scattered here and there, strangers, friends or friends of friends, where we squat at each other’s place and are enriched with 10 000 houses around the world, ideas and various projects. A Growing family. Growing Differently.

AROUND THE WORLD

Lying in the sand, My eyes riveted on the Pacific Ocean, beyond the waves, I remember the band from Bondi ... What have they become?

The band ...

All those who have shaped my ephemeral world ... hung out with me and without me, with Muriel, with stephanie, all together in small groups, crazy friends, friends forever or ephemeral acquaintainces on the beach, some having lived the euphoria of the Olympics which was the catalyser for many of our friendships at that time.  We were bounded by the olympic fire.

In 2010, our Bondi band has explod all over the world and in the meantime the world has shrunk. Some of us see each others here and there in Australia, the USA, France and Asia. Regularly or irregularly.

Stephanie, my Partner in crime at the olympics, became one of my best friends, with whom we had continued a stretch of road together for several years in Malaysia. She is now working at the embassy in Singapore and lives with Jerome that she met in Malaysia. They will be in Sydney a few days. Will Jerome penetrate the memory of Stephanie when they come ll walk on Bondi Beach?

Muriel, with whom we sang with much passion, the song the Otherside - Red Hot Chilli Peppers which lyrics had been plastered on the walls of our apartment on Warners Avenue (Bondi beach) - lives in Italy with some one who popped into her life since then : Philippe who became her husband.

Dov remained in Australia, he set up a business in selling surfboard and married the pretty Yael with whom he had amazing Julie and Adam.

Alexia, a young beautiful woman thin and sexy, ocean blue eyes wide open on the world, world traveler, with whom we share all our crazy dreams and made crazy encounters on Bondi, has committed her life to God to the surprise of everyone. She was renamed Sister Mary Cecilia today. She became a nun in the Franciscan church  in Paris and the most curious is that she is the one that i find the most difficult to go and meet although i have been staying in Paris for a while. I have not met her since she became a nun few years back. Is the psychological barrier the most difficult to overcome?

Justin, an American, my "crazy love" of the time – As broke as me at the time - which I was separated from because our visas expired at almost the same time and we reached the bottom of our savings making it urgent to find a job. We met a few months later in Malaysia: We were two new characters, two monster of careers in the making. Our crazy genuine flame was extinguished. He is about to get married in Greece.

Ghislain and Cathy met at Bondi in 2000, returned to France, separately, felt in love and got married. The small Baptist was born this year 2010.

Oliver, the handsome and smart athlete who came for a windsurf competition and soon was recruited to be organizer of the Olympic committee, was the precursor of my friendship with Stephanie, he volunteered us to help distribute the orange juice to all new volunteers who sailed for adventure in the French Olympic Committee on 33rd floor on Market Street. Since that special olympic month, he launched his own business in sport & business with a passion and an amazing freedom. From one country to another. He continues to sail & surf or African & American waters. He travels around the world. Week after week he may be in Switzerland, Brazil or South Africa. You're never quite sure, but strangely enough we come to see each other regularly. He is an inspiration to me.

Simon became the Vietnamese Kiwi and seems never want to leave Hanoi. We regularly write to each other. Chat to be more precise. Nothing serious Just Words and delirium. Jokes and teasers. He is no more from my physical world. He became a memory of Bondi, an avatar of the net who regularly  jump on the screen to tease my long writing days. Photos of him don’t match my memories of Simon of Bondi. I now chat with sort of a man that i never met before who reveals his funny side, a sort of a stranger that was not the reserved simon i knew, I learned about him through virtual world he is this popping avatar brightening the screen once in while for few minutes.

Christelle, the good living one, happy and very comfortable with herself and others, ready to laugh, tease and joke, great queen of the relationship, lives in Cannes and see Cathy and Ghislain regularly. She always put spices and fun in the group.

And the list goes on… Nicolas will marry a new Stephanie, Charles, who is husband and dad lives in beautiful place in France, Jacques is to marry an Australian .. and so many more!

But then of course there's my favorite Bondi bump: Seb, the wild, crazy vélomaster, very independent, highly resourceful, endearing, present, listening & a premium confidant, authentic, who does not waffle, loner wolf, who toured Australia with his cycle, who kayak through Alaska, and who always has been by his loneliness. Finally love has caught him and he now lives on a farm somewhere in the wilds of Australia and just had a baby.

Everyone grows ...

In 2010, on the beaches of Bondi, there are still echoes of Muriel, Stephanie, Alexia, Simon, Christelle, Cathy, Ghislain, and all the others …  Echoes of my friends in the form of new boys and girls, friends of my friends, who were there in 2000 somewhere aournd Bondi, Satellites around my core group of friends. Men and women who did not exist in my 2000 world and who have populated my Bondi 2010. Today they are the core of Bondi and have printed their mark on the beach during these ten years. Through their mouth, I hear the echoes of names muriel, stephanie.

Bondi 2010

In this morning of September, before me, before the waves, there's another name that has entered my world Bondi 2010, the waves of Liberty and this name is printed in the wind, on the fragile waves breaking relentless…

This name printed is Habib.

Habib has a dream: freedom.

A Dream: Live free.

One day be a free man.

He does not dream of having nothing. He only dream of Being. Being a Human Being.

Dream to get out of its four walls that surround the past 11 months.

Live free, free to work, have the right to have ideas, proposals, to take care of his family, his people. Being the spokesman for people without a voice. And then just study, work, build its own life

Habib has not trodden Bondi, not even the soil of Australia, except the ground floor of the detention centers since he arrived by sea and he was arrested at sea. Since then, he has taught English at the centre to his comrades in detention. Sadek speaks over six languages ... He could be a diplomat, teacher, lawyer. He has its place among the great ... Today, at present, he is in custody and it has last for 33 years for him. He is in custody and he really has nothing to do there. A life is to be lost unless justice is made and bureaucracy take of the barriers.

I'm not back in Australia by nostalgia but because life is pulping for more… because present recalled me on Bondi. Habib I hope someday will be part of those men who walk freely on Australian coast watching the waves and enjoying the word Liberty. Looking at the waves who have carried his freedom, his will, his courage, his life…

His dream has inspired mine.

It is time to dive into what brought me here: My Australian Dreaming:

Darwin's dream in which Habib is imprisoned.

Let’s hope that he’ll soon wake up out of this Dream that has slips into a too long nightmare. Let him wake up soon as a free man.

For when he wakes up free, this man's dream will voice and awaken the world to a forgotten issue: that of a stateless nation: Burmese Rohingya.