beautiful moment #4: wear your heart like a sweater.

you've got a heart on fire, it's bursting with desires.

you've for a heart filled with passion,

will you let it burn for hate or love with compassion.

My volunteer work for the last three months had been at a drop-in art studio for resilient youth. We offer a free-space to be creative through whatever means you feel allows you to best express yourself. Through free workshops in art, music, theatre, film and literacy, as well as assistance looking for housing, employment or obtaining social assistance. From simply giving the teens a warm healthy meal to fill their tummies, someone to talk to to clear their head or giving a helping hand with a project in the works. I have been greatly impacted by all the youth at the centre. No volunteer leaves unchanged by the contagious joy of the youth or the passion and dedication of the volunteers.

One particular volunteer was working in the studio for a placement in her program at school. This woman put so much time and effort into everything she did, doing it with so much love and generousity. After hearing her life story, I admired her even more. Having spent her entire life taking care of others - her siblings, her mother, her husband, her children -and encountering more trials along thet way that tested and strengthened her spirit. She finally decided in her 40s to go back to school to pursue a career in... caring. Getting to know her for seven weeks, I knew this lady didn't need a diploma to know how to care, she could write the textbooks. When the youth would tell her their life stories, read, perform or show her their work, her eyes would fill with tears. Just as I felt so much of what I was surrounded by was foreign -- homelessness, poverty, AIDS, addiction, abuse, prostitution -- she also felt this way but the empathy that she showed was so genuine that it could deceive you into thinking that she too had experience their pain. What I most admired about her was her ability to wear her heart on her sleeve, to not hold back. If something brought on tears, she would cry. If something was funny, she would laugh until it hurt.

During these last three months, I have had the opportunity to do some self-examination and I have realizedjust how reserved I am with my emotions, whether they are that of frustration, joy, sadness or appreciation. I realized how much I admire that quality in others: the ability to be emotionally free and I feel that it is time to seek that quality within myself so I can love deeper, cry harder and laugh louder. By not being too proud to show my feelings, humility will release me from being emotionally bland, instead flavouring my life with the spices of hope, pain, compassion, love, joy, sadness, gratefulness and peace.

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"To have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emmerson