I think of my life as one big, beautiful bridge. At nine, I learned compassion from afar by raising funds for a well to be built in India. Compassion shifted to community when I moved to Africa and began to engage in humanitarian efforts, taught English to refugees, mentored troubled teens, and cared for neglected children. When I think about my time in Africa, I see a three-year-old girl with a bloated belly, and laughter written on her face, running across the dusty, Sub-Saharan plain to meet me. I wait as her little feet waddle on the burning sands, arms reaching outward...towards me, towards a safe place, towards the hug she's promised in my presence. Jera is one of the hundreds of little children I met, and loved, in Africa. When I was eleven, my parents, wisely recognizing the fleeting nature of life, plucked us up from our quiet, American home and sent us spinning into a reckless adventure across the seas. It was in this faraway land that I learned about the kind of love that breaks you. The kind of love that compels you to build bridges, to better people's lives, to find joy in sacrificing of yourself for someone else. I spent five years in Africa, helping with weekly kids' clubs, reading to children who had never seen books before, presenting them with new clothes, giving out school supplies, and, my favorite, simply holding them, kissing their precious heads, smiling into their souls. Now that I'm "grown up," I'm finding my wings don't need to stretch that far. Moving out of the house means moving even more intentionally into what it means to be a Chi Changemaker. I'm merely expanding a bridge that has been reaching into the world since I was a little girl. Moving forward, for me, means studying crisis & trauma counseling to use with refugees fleeing from conflicted countries, for humanitarian efforts, and cross-culturally with families in crisis. Following in the footsteps of my parents, who knew life was too short to be spent in a quaint and quiet neighborhood, I'm setting my heart on the reward of seeing happiness fill hurting souls' eyes, feeling "help" touch someone through my hands. I am committing my life to being a Chi Changemaker. Because, in all these sojourning years, I've learned that sacrificing your life for others...often means finding your life too.

Asking an artist "why" they produce art is like asking a human why they breathe. Just as lungs fill with air, oxygen pulsing in human veins out of duty not desire, so also poems spill from a poet's soul not by request but by essence. The painter, likewise, does not paint because he enjoys the painting, the painter paints because the painting lives within his mind in such fullness that it spills upon the physical canvas. The answer to my "why" as an artist is as simple as my "why" as a human: because I am. Because I exist, I am human. Because art exists within me, I am an artist. There is no escaping the mold of a potter or the mind of a poet; there is only accepting. It runs in my veins, it is etched in my words, it makes its bed in the hollows of my heart and its home in the corridors of my mind. It is within my very blood and soul, because my fingers pulse with the magic of imagination and my thoughts are bound up in the wings of wonder. You may ask why I am an artist, but I am too busy asking why I am human...why I am anything at all. And I suppose, therein lies the answer. Because only an artist would ask that question.