Julian Lennon
speaker
357 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Julian Lennon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
when that woman presented me with a white feather, you know, the goosebumps came on heavy. I get them now every time I talk about the story. I'm getting them right now. So, yeah, there she is. There's Iris, and there's Bunna, who's one of the other guys. That is so crazy. I still have that. I still have that in the original envelope that she gave it to me, and it's, you know, it's a...
In a very special place at home. I mean you can talk all about coincidences. No, listen. For me, I'm sorry, that was undeniable regardless of where my faith or spirituality or religion was. To me, that was, this is real. This is as real as it gets.
Yeah. And I was in Australia, number one at the time, with Saltwater, the most environmental humanitarian song I've ever written and performed, you know. Right. Yeah, so I said, yeah, I'll do what I can. So we did make the film. And then with the advent of, of course, the internet, I thought, okay, we'll put a website together to sell the film.
And I'd also said to my business manager, I said, if we make anything on this film, I said I want everything to go back to the moaning people. And he said the only way that that can happen is if you have a foundation. So initially the foundation was just a vehicle just to pass money along. But I started the White Feather Foundation to have, again, a vehicle to sell the film.
And then slowly but surely, I would start getting these emails from people over the years, you know, over time. Sorry. Say, well, you know, can you help us? And I'm going, well, I'm not really a foundation. I'm just I did this project and I thought that was it. Anyway, there are a few other. There was lots of emails. And I finally said, well, you know, all right, this is a platform.
Let me see if I can. OK, what am I interested in? What can I do? There's plenty of other charities out there. There's plenty of other people doing other things. But what can I do? What's most important to me? Indigenous tribes were the first, so the Moaning People.
And then, in fact, in the film itself, in Whaledreamers, Kim, my director, friend and director, had already done a segment of a film where he...
80 of the elders of the world's indigenous tribes, 80 from around the world, around a fire and just filmed them to talk about their plight and what they had in common and the fact that their cultures and land were being taken away from them, being destroyed, etc., etc.,
So that became one of the first orders of the day, protect the mining, protect indigenous tribes around the world, try to buy back their lands and protect their cultures and their people and try and support them in whatever way we can, which is what we continue to do. And I was in Kenya going to different schools and health clinics, mostly girls' schools.
I set up a scholarship in my mom's name, the Cynthia Lennon Scholarship for Girls. And so we send them to college and universities where they go to learn how to protect their people and their families and cultures. Yeah.
And so we support, you know, we build health clinics and dormitories and we do it because, I mean, the stories that I heard from these girls about having to walk to and from schools that took three to six hours and they'd be exhausted by the time they got to home or to school. And that they, in order to, you know, get ahead, they had to pass, you know, certainly exams.
But they had the threat pretty much every day of being either raped or murdered. And they would literally stay in their own schools, sleep in the classrooms and convert them to dormitories at night so that they felt protected. I mean, it was when they went home, they were doing three hours of chores every night before they could do any homework and then go to sleep and then walk to school again.
So you'd hear these incredible stories that you just you just realize how lucky you are. And so we try to help, again, the indigenous. We do help with health and education as far as young kids, young girls across Africa, Kenya and Ethiopia. And also my last trip was to Colombia, to South America, to visit the Koji tribe, who were these insane people people that chewed the cocoa leaves. Oh.
But they used to be fishermen years ago before the Spanish arrived in the 1600s and chased them off into the Sierra Nevada mountains. Is it coca leaves or cat? Yeah, it's coca leaves. Coca leaves. Yeah, and they chew it and mix it with spit. Oh, boy. Yeah, they're all off their heads really. But –
But they still have this beautiful culture and I was only there for a few days and we were up in the mountains with them. There's another group, there's an NGO, another group called the Amazon Conservation Team who the White Feather Foundation worked with and we went down there and was able to buy back some of their land and we did a couple of ceremonies with them.
Which were very, very beautiful. But probably one of the happiest moments of my life, and I've only mentioned this once or twice, was that we came back down from the mountains. And we came to the sea where we were staying in huts. And the Koji tribe came down with us. It lit a fire on the beach. The sun was just going down. And there was no phones, no computers, no nothing.
And we're just sitting on the beach. And the fire's between myself and the Koji tribe. And the sun's just going down. And the waves are right in front. And it's just very beautiful. Nobody on the beach. Old, beautiful, beaten-up tree trunks that have washed up on the shore. And just a little haze from the water and the sand being blown. And there was a piece that I can't explain.
I looked over at them and through the fire, the flames of the fire, and we just smiled. There was no words. It was just... some level of peace that had been found just living in that moment, that present moment. And then the sun going down and then because there's no street lights or anything else around, you saw every star in the sky possible.
And so with that transition, hanging out with this one of the oldest tribes in South America with the fire, with the sea, with the sky and the stars. I can't even describe it. It was one of the most loving and most peaceful moments of my entire life. The simplicity of it. It was actually the simplicity of it all. And just the human heart and the appreciation. for the world that we live in.
And it's like, well, that's partly why I do what I do, you know, even with the photography is capturing those moments, those once-in-a-lifetime moments. And the other thing was, is that how I started doing photography is when I was on the road a lot, you do these real long-haul flights, you know, to America or to Asia or wherever. And back in the day, you only had... one movie on a projector.
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