i found this video clip a few days ago when visiting boho girl's blog, and it has stuck with me ever since. part of the reason is because the song is the sort that naturally sticks in your head. (i dare you to listen and try NOT to hum it all day!) it's also the sort that makes you bop around while listening. you simply cannot sit still. it makes you feel like dancing around the house. except you also feel compelled to stay in your seat and watch the full length of the music video because the story that it tells is so intriguing. it has a whimsicalness that i love.

i knew i was planning to post this video clip at some point, i just wasn't sure where it would fit in the scheme of things, given that i'm trying to unpack the story of my life's last week. but when i watched the video again this morning, i knew that now is the time.

here's why. the artist, yael naim, sings about being a new soul in a very strange world. she sings about making every possible mistake. and yet on her face you see eagerness. in her decorating of her new apartment, you see creativity and the embrace of possibility. in her voice, you hear soulfulness and rich depths. and in the story that plays out, you see how her little steps to decorate her apartment and surround herself with friends leads her into imagination and risk-taking and eventual total surprise.

what i love about this is that it reminds me of our blogging community. specifically, the girl in the video reminds me of tammy, my friend who is coming face to face with God and discovering the start of a new beginning. she is becoming a new soul in many ways right now. and that newness of discovery is scary. the steps that we take in such a radically unknown world are tenuous at best. and yet if we just take one step, and then one more step, each time trying to move toward what feels most true to the truth of what's inside of us (just like the artist in this video did by rolling long strips of wallpaper on the wall and beginning to decorate them with her favorite pictures), then surprising and supernatural things begin to happen.

i still can't decide if the pictures of friends she places on the wall are real friends from her "old world" that she brought along to make her new home feel more like home, or if they are people completely of her own imagining. either way, i'm not sure it matters in the scope of how her interactions with these friends reminds me of us in this little community. in a way, we are all just pictures to one another, accessed through a flat, static screen on a computer. but then whimsy starts to happen. someone comes tromping through the reeds playing a woodwind. someone comes romping up through tall sunflowers clanging together a cymbal. someone else comes from behind a huge hay bale banging a big drum.

and then what happens is magical. all the walls come tumbling down. we are mystified but compelled to explore further. we start jumping up and down and dancing in our own crazy way. and then we all get on board together, creating a joyful train of love and music and free-spirited delight. and the little goldfish we'd been preserving so carefully in that little glass bowl gets released into the wild, where it belongs.