I want to do what I can to make this world less lonely and the way I know how to do that is through being honest with my art.

Rights are rights, regardless of whether a government recognizes them as such.

In the process of art-making, all subject matter is filtered through the artist herself.

Embedded in being truly seen is the "as I am" part.

I was still alive, but huge swaths of who I am lay dormant inside, waiting to be awoken as soon as I was ready to grieve.

By remaining open to the many possibilities of living, maybe we avoid a little less and live a little more.

This is a very special edition of Chicken Doodle Soup. I'm including an excerpt from my book, Into the Light: Traveling between peace and pain.

What I value about being an artist is what I value about being a person in this world.

To me, art is too far-reaching in my life to label it as a career. It's not smaller than a career, but rather, it's bigger.

I wrote a poem called “Fairy Dust” and incorporated the words into my artwork of the same time.

In simply allowing ourselves to be who we are, we help others feel more comfortable being themselves too.

I hope that my art plays a role in connecting others to their village.

Is there anything more practical over the course of my lifetime than being myself?

Even positive shifts can make you feel like the ground beneath you is unstable.

Sometimes, peace of mind is super hard to find! Yet I know that banging my head against the wall doesn’t bring me any closer to finding it.

I believe that this place way up high, somewhere over the rainbow, exists all around and within us. We just have to know how to visit it.