I’ve been feeling quite quiet here at my retreat space… meditating, sleeping, praying, drinking tea, making little fires to stare into and warm what feels like a pretty cold home some of these final winter days, and, taking great notice of my dreams, as in the ones I venture off into while my body is resting in sleep…
Africa, and connecting with one of my friends there I call “Africa” have been favorite stops on my out of body sojourns of late. I wake with snippets, remembrances, compellings… interesting number combinations; a white man I’ve yet to meet accompanying me in a market place in Kampala; a song that’s yet to be written about “Being The Love”; my hair being painted golden, well, actually one half of it, and I mean sparkly golden; and the other morning, humming a song I listened to very often when I was in Uganda.
I’ve never known what the song is about, I’ve just always Loved it and made up my own words for it. Something like “Allia, allia, allia, Africa calling…” or sometimes, I change it up! It is sung by Vieux Diop in what I always assumed is some African language, but I never figured it out past that. I remembered the title to be “Jali” and when I found myself humming it again I felt prompted to have a go and look up the word in my bookmarked Swahili/English dictionary.
Sure enough, there it is… JALI. A verb, meaning “heed, respect, honor.” Now, that, was an inspiring moment for me! Immediately, a surge of creativity flowed through me and for the next couple days I worked at bringing to life a little 8 minute video of my photos of the children, set to the beautiful music.
I’ve posted ‘JALI’ on YouTube now, ha, my first video posting ever, and within a few hours I’ve already received some “views”… exciting, and I gotta say, affirming, to know that I’ve just sent out into the great big world an offering, to share a little more about orphaned children and to possibly connect with ways to move forward well of their behalf.
Now that I know how, I’ve added a few more of the short movies I took when I was with the children… playing with a balloon, singing ‘Welcome’. It seems to take some time to upload to YouTube, my 8 minute video took several hours, but it all feels very good and fits quite well with the speed I’m traveling at these days!
Miraculously, I’ve also managed to upload from YouTube to here on the video page of the website, so the 4 videos are available in both places now! Here is a link to my ‘homepage’ on YouTube… Enjoy, I hope! http://www.youtube.com/namulumbi
With Love,
Catherine