I listened to him. Growing up as the child of humanitarian workers, I spent a lot of free time helping people in need. I've painted refugee homes, babysat for teen-mom support groups, and spent months helping girls in West African markets prepare their wares to sell. But the more I sojourn this earth, the more I realize that the most valuable thing I can give anyone is simply my silence...my listening ears. I met Bruno at a café. He was a smiley, elderly man, but his eyes held a shadow of sorrow that drew me in. So I talked with him. I asked if he had family around and he said he used to. His daughter died from a rare disease when she was four. My heart hurt with him and I shared that I, too, had felt the weight of earthly farewells. I told him about my dear friend's suicide and the brokenness it caused. His eyes softened, "My wife committed suicide. I haven't been able to tell anyone about it before. It seemed too heavy." I told him I was sorry. Then I waited. The silence seeped in...an appropriate silence for an appropriate heaviness. Slowly, softly, Bruno began to tell me about his wife. And I listened. I did not give him answers or tangible relief; my steady silence was all he needed to slowly unravel the very thing that burdened him the most. Several days after I talked with Bruno, I ran into him again in town. Or, rather, he ran into me. Apparently, he had been looking for me for several days. When he found me, he said, "I have something to give you. Could we meet at the café again tomorrow?" I was entirely unprepared for the weight of what Bruno would give me at the café. There we were, sitting amid the ambient chatter of coffee-house conversations, when he handed me a gift bag. Inside was a sweater. He smiled, "It was my wife's." My heart gasped. "Bruno, I can't. It's too precious." He smiled. "You must. I loved when she wore this sweater. But every time she wore it...she wore it with great sadness. I've grieved long enough. Now it is time to let new things be born from what has passed away. I want you to have this sweater and to wear it with joy. I want to see it on someone who has life in their soul." Bruno and I met again several times over that year. We sat for hours in parks, drinking tea in the rain while chattering about our dreams and fears and the beautiful heaviness of this world. We spent time listening to other hurting hearts, inviting lonely humans into the connection we had found over shared sorrows. He says I brought sunshine to his life and I say he brought deeper intentionality into mine. And all I did was listen. I've seen this happen over and over again. The most meaningful things I've been able to do for people have involved time and silence: sitting on the side of the road with lovely Thea, my homeless friend, or sitting in the rain with my Grace, my suicidal friend. I don't have much to give this world and I'm far too human to be a hero. But I have time. I have a heart that cares and I have ears that are willing to listen. This fall, I will be studying crisis and trauma counseling with the hope of learning to be an even better listener. I want to live my life helping others process theirs.

"A hundred ghosts of souls are ringing in my ears." That was the answer I gave my mother when she asked what appealed to me about pursuing humanitarian work. I hear it everywhere, this ringing. It's the sound of babies with swollen bellies, crying and not knowing why they remain hungry. It's the sound of little girls screaming for help just before they're snatched into slavery by men they don't know. It's the sound of mothers praying to an unseen god while they cover their babies' ears to block out the noise of bombs and bloodshed. I carry it with me, this sound of a hundred ghosts of souls ringing in my ears. Sometimes I have tried to escape it. Living an ordinary life in an ordinary home with my own ordinary family and ordinary habits seems rather lovely. But every time I try to block out the noise, it echoes even louder, reverberating off the walls of my soul. Though I have never met the humans from whom these cries come...I love them. I hear them. I cry with them. In many ways, I was born into this "ringing." I spent the first twelve years of my life in the inner-city, watching my parents take care of at-risk youth, house orphaned children, help teen moms, and pour love upon the broken hearts of gang members and drug addicts. I learned from a young age that the "difficult" humans are not so unloveable. In fact, I saw that they were not so unlike myself. Like me, they needed a home and hope and peace. When I was thirteen, my parents shifted the focus of their humanitarian care and moved our family to an underdeveloped country in West Africa. It was there that I began to hear the ringing myself...to notice the hidden rhythm of human heartbreak which pulses beneath the surface of the earth. I saw it in the eyes of the dusty children in the marketplace. I heard it in the cries of neighbor-women who could not feed their babies. I felt it in the heavy, oppressive air that suffocated life and water from the land. I was in Africa when I committed my life to humanitarian service. I told my parents that I wanted to study crisis and trauma counseling to provide mental health tools to humans in underdeveloped countries. My mother's response was a question: "What draws you to that?" "A hundred ghosts of souls are ringing in my ears." The answer slipped out of my mouth before it was even fully formed in my mind. But it was true. I could not, and cannot, help hearing this song of human heartache. I cannot help loving those who sing it and longing to sing them a new song...a lullaby. When I have completed my studies and earned my license in psychology, I intend to join a nonprofit organization focused on underdeveloped countries. My passion is to provide counseling services and mental health relief to individuals in areas of political and social turmoil. I want to give my entire life to loving bleeding hearts at the border of wars, to welcoming orphan children with open arms, to feeding hungry mouths. I know I am no hero and have no means of mending such a shattered earth. My dream is not to fix all the brokenness of this life. Rather, my desire is to help give individuals the tools to survive that brokenness and find beauty in the process. I have a hundred ghosts of souls ringing in my ears. And I will not ignore them.

"I hate Algebra." He used to say that all the time. Thomas had a lot of love in his heart for ordinary things: he loved cats, trains, writing stories, and Rick Astley. But he hated Algebra. Almost as much as he hated himself. I used to smile and tell him, "just a few more years, dear Thomas. A few more years and then you'll be graduated and off to adventures beyond Algebra." I said a lot of things like that. A lot of "just wait" and "it'll get better." I wasn't blind to his self-destructive behaviors. He shared them openly, whimpering for help like a child separated from their parents in a crowded room. But the odd thing about being close to a depressed or suicidal soul is that they don't exactly lose the "normal" parts of themselves. They don't forget the silly memories from their childhood or that they love pranking their friends. They don't always stop liking their favorite color or having good days. They're still very much themselves...only their "self" is twisted under the thorny grip of a dark and seething shadow. It's this blend of shadow and daylight that makes the suicidal and depressive parts bearable...but also ignorable. As the person slowly morphs into a distorted version of themselves, your perception also begins to morph until what first felt odd and scary and dangerous begins to seem normal and temporary and human. But the monster doesn't become softer. It's only your perception that does. I found out at midnight. His brother wrote one sentence: "Thomas is dead." It was February 19, 2022. He was 14. I was 15. He never finished Algebra. When I look back on the events that followed Thomas' death, I see an odd, ugly bend in the progression of ordinary lives. My best friend shrunk into a version of herself that is gentle, but fragile. She is quiet and serious and always in her eyes, even four years later, there is an underlying shadow. My other friend, so broken with his grief and unable to reconcile himself with peace, ran away from his home at sixteen and has endured years of heartache trying to steady himself in broken world. And me? I'm left watching that "bend" in the road of all of our lives...wondering what trajectory we would have taken if not for that bitter twist that jostled us. Slowly, with time, the grief becomes a thorn that our hearts begin to grow around. But it's still there. Still poking our flesh. Still whispering, "I'm a part of you now. You will never bury me completely." The longer I've carried this "thorn," the more I have come to notice it in the people around me. I've built connections with strangers through conversations about loss, forming new relationships out of broken histories, birthing new things out of burials. This is why I'm pursuing crisis and trauma counseling. I've seen, and felt, the weight of this earth's brokenness as well as the beauty of human connection within that brokenness. I understand that not every "Thomas" will be healed. My aim as a counselor will not be to create a perfect world but to help people learn to bear a broken one. I am especially passionate about suicide prevention for people with limited access to mental health help. When I have received my license for psychology, I intend to volunteer with nonprofit organizations, providing counseling services in underdeveloped countries. Because when I die, I want to know I spent my life helping others learn to love theirs.

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.