Everything is Illuminated

Lately, it has become increasingly obvious what my life is about: it's about telling stories, giving people a voice, increasing the volume on my own voice, creating voices. It's almost as if it has been ingrained in the fabric of the time points in my life and I've just had to start connecting the dots to make me aware of the picture-though that picture is still being sketched. The dots all fit perfect:

dot 1) I was a writer of stories when I was a wee kid-leading mom to put me in creative writing camp at age 9.
dot 2) Dad taught me about storytelling by telling me stories every night growing up.
dot 3) I'm a taurus, born under the sign associated with the throat and the voice.
dot 4) Out of all the art forms I practice, I chose storytelling to be my main focus...now being a writer, and actor, and hopefully a director and producer.
dot 4) I started pursuing voice and speech coaching in college.
dot 5) I am a singer
dot 6) I have a strong desire to be an activist, thus helping others have their voices heard.
dot 7) I have been chosen and invited to speak publicly on several occasions: church, youth groups, the chairman of the Environmental committee in the Washington WOrkshops, Sitting on the HISD superintendents Ad Hoc Advisory Council, Commencement speaker.
dot 8) Though not for long, I serve as the voice for a weekly NPR program.
dot 9) well there are many more dots, and they are just as out of order as the previous list, but you get the connect-the-dot picture yeah?

I met a woman while in transition from Paris to London on the Eurostar last week. I meet people like this often-as if it had been planned out as a screenplay or a previously written story (this is actually physically true as I am reading in my new physics book of choice, anywho). I am sitting in my window seat, and accross I see this woman. Something tells me "talk to her. Talk to her." But I don't: I choose to look at my split ends. That didn't matter to the universe, because eventually she got ousted from her choice of seats by people who were assigned to them, causing her to come to my aisle seat and ask to sit next to me. I had no choice: I spoke to her. I will call her Kiwi as she is from New Zealand. Her story....After some tough times, and several jobs that weren't fulfilling her, she followed her passion to study photography in Paris. She had been resisting her own little voice too, pushing off the idea to move around the world to a new country where she didn't know the language and had to sell her home etc. But she did it. We spoke for the entire trip, about life, about "following our bliss" and she helped give me the courage again to follow what my father always taught me: "Do what you love and the money will come." In fact, she told me the exact same words, and my face lit up, hearing someone say those words who was practicing them. Her face, her eyes, were full of light, of peace, of joy and of comfort that I found inspiring, reassuring.

One of the last things we spoke of was this: Most of us walk around, existing only as pieces of ourselves at a time, rather than as all we are about, all we are. Mostly because many don't know who that is. Others, because we aren't asked of it in our work places, at home...or denied it, or judged otherwise. But I decided that moment, sitting next to my kiwi friend that I would once again assemble my entire self and move through life so that people know who I am when they meet me, my whole self...just as I did that one day in ken's acting class...the time I felt the most whole ever.

Before I left for London I watched this film "Everything's Illuminated." Elijah Wood, as some american character, returns to Ukraine to research his grandparent's past, their lives prior and during World War II. He finds the sister of his granfather's finacee, who has buried her engagement ring in the river of a town that was soon after shot down by the Nazi's. She was one of the murdered...she and her unborn child. He asks the sister, why do you think she buried the ring? He thought it was because she knew someone would come back looking for her. The sister said, no, it's for proof that she existed.

I once wrote in my writing class, that I write, I tell stories, partly, to prove my existence. I want to light up, to have an illuminated life like my friend on the train.