I met Ram Dass on two occasions - when he presented in a cathedral in Paris in the mid-seventies, and a decade later after debating with Timothy Leary at Harvard on the 20th anniversary of their ejection for doing LSD research with divinity students. In all the swirl of celebrity and social perceptions surrounding him, he held out one thing his spiritual teacher had said as a constant; if you want enlightenment, serve others.

I have been a webmaster by profession for a decade, and a few years ago the opportunity to do some volunteer work led to my involvement with BeadforLife. Amazingly, one month after we built their website, O Magazine (Oprah) included a few words about the project and what is now a spectacualr poverty eradication project was born. This month, after playing 'catch-up' for four years, we launched their new website - www.beadforlife.org.

Along with the experience of visiting the beaders to record their music, the daily involvement in helping this project succeed has been a blessing for me. In helping North Americans assist the Ugandan women in such need, I find a lot of meaning in the mundane, and a sense of connectedness that runs deeper than 'just a job'.

Ram Dass heard right. If you want to move deeper in your music, there is one way absolutely guaranteed to produce results - serve others!

As for many others, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells was for me a revelation in sound and classical-groove fusion. For the next thirty years I followed his composing and recordings. It was always apparent to me that he carried his mastery with considerable suffering and frustration - the recordings always included pieces that tried to go too high or too hard in performance for what they held in their composition.

Then with the release of 'Tubular Bells 2' something changed, and the music that has flowed from him since has held the kind of steadiness and beauty that conveys a deeper shift.

His last project has been a fully orchestrated work showing that purely classical music can still be composed as beautifully and originally as ever. An incredible journey.