Anyone that knows me, knows I was born melancholy. I came into this world solemn and taciturn: as if bearing a responsibility. I had much to mine to discover my mirth … It is the moment I found I was an actor that levity entered my life …Because it was that moment when I knew that art can help me navigate pain -- the kind of pain whose origin you may not even consciously know.

100 years ago today, the ‪#‎Ottoman‬ government began its planned extermination of the ‪#‎Armenian‬ people from their ancient homeland … 100 years ago today, 250 prominent Armenians:lawyers, doctors, actors, writers, priests - our intelligentsia- were rounded up to be deported and killed. 100 years ago this year my great-grandfather Bedros was beheaded in Kharpert leaving his pregnant wife Lucine brutally widowed to have their child and walk 200 miles to Aleppo and somehow raise him in a refugee camp. She never spoke of what happened along the way.

This event has been something I have been processing for most of my conscious life -- since I first heard of the horror stories as a young child in‪#‎Aleppo‬ on our summer visits. This event has become a defining element of who I am today as a human being, and as an artist -- working to understand, to process the pain, to reclaim joy while making art as catharsis and a means to understand the vastness of what it means to be a human being …

In the last couple years, we have also lost Aleppo … At times, it just feels surreal.
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I woke up sick in ‪#‎Yerevan‬ today -- sore throat, fever. Oddly appropriate. But I woke up in my gorgeous Aunt Helen's house, able to speak my mother-tongue of Western Armenian and drink Armenian coffee and be here to witness the energy in this city, in this country as we come together to remember, honor and move forward with the knowledge that we are here.
And sadness and pain can be the path towards discovering a greater joy … but we must continue to speak, continue to tell our stories and share our humanity … this is not the end … and this is not a fight. It is an opportunity …‪#‎makeartthatheals‬

April 2015
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I am so so blessed to be ‪#‎armenian‬ ... It has really hit me in a different way recently -- seeing my community globally so united, passionately fighting for justice ... Embracing how alive we are, how committed we are to healing and moving forward, thriving ...

The generosity I continue to experience from within my community stuns me ... The support, the love, the unquestioning embrace ...

We are commemorating a deep trauma from 100 years ago this week -- but we are still here, we are present all over this earth and we are a testament to the beauty of the human spirit ... The power of resurrection ... The capacity of the human soul to alchemize the dark matter into gold ... For what is life but a series of moments and opportunities to do just that ...
Being Armenian has been an opportunity to live life epically ... When you know the depths of the abyss, your recognition of the light is that much more profound ...
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And so even with all the pain, being Armenian has been a beautiful gift ...
‪#‎bearmenian‬ ‪#‎bealive‬ ‪#‎bealight‬

April, 2015 ...
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Recently I discovered a lovely fresh pressed juice bar in ‪#‎Istanbul‬. Chatting with the guys behind the counter I learn one is from ‪#‎Aleppo‬ (the owner), relocating here due to the war. Of course we have plenty to bond over: my childhood recollections ... His few phrases of Western Armenian due to his close friendships, the fact that Syrian cuisine, specifically Syrian-Armenian, is the best in the world ...

The other young man is Turkish. They ask me what I'm doing here and I say I'm doing some research work for a feature film on the ‪#‎ArmenianGenocide‬. The Turkish guy looks at me and says, "Well, you may not like me too much after I tell you something. My great-grandfather killed your ancestors." I stare at him. Him at me. A bottomless moment. I ask, "how do you know?" He replies, "I have his sword."

He pulls out his great- grandfather's photo and he has the exact same eyes.

He tells me he's an actor. He'd like to audition for my film. He goes to grab his belongings to leave and asks "so, is the film completely against us? And I say, "The film speaks the truth. It is not for or against anyone or anything but the truth."
He brings over his cymbal case (a musician preparing to go to rehearsal) and of course they are made by Avedis Ziljian - the best/most famous cymbal maker in the world, the Armenian who first made these cymbals in Istanbul in the 17th century... One of the oldest companies in the world ...
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He straps the cymbals on and turns to me and says, "Well look. I carry you on my back. I always carry you on my back."

April 2015
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I just walked out of my workout in ‪#‎istanbul‬ ... Thinking about the power of eye contact, when we engage and look into the portal that leads to the soul of another human being... And I walked into a Starbucks, to wait for my friend to pick me up ... With my broken Turkish I start to order a cake and coffee and the young man (handsome,hipster looking) asks me where I am from ... For the first time here I just say, "I'm Armenian. "He stops. Looks into my eyes and says, "I love Armenian people and I love you. I believe so much in the‪#‎ArmenianGenocide‬ and I am so so sorry for what happened." For not a single moment do our eyes part and mine fill with tears at the same time his do. He takes my hand and just hugs me ... A young man I had met not 3 minutes before, and we are holding each other and crying ... He buys my coffee and we exchange info ...
We are here to love each other. All of us, always ...at every moment there is opportunity to engage, to look , to see ... To connect and love ...
Let the breaking open of my heart continue and continue and continue every step I take on this earth ... I am grateful for all of it ...

December 9, 2015
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The story goes that when I was 2 years old and my first sibling was born, I would stand vigil by her crib to alert my mother when she started crying. When I was 5, my first flashbulb memory is of begging my mother to allow me to hold my next new born sister in my arms on a porch swing; there is a photo of this moment. That same 5 year old me was climbing trees in small town Alabama, riding her strawberry shortcake bike with abandon to go down the street to her best friend Leah's house and jump on the trampoline for hours (past a vicious pack of dogs, but it was worth it), and getting lost in the Atlanta mall on her mother's shopping trips (having to be called over PA) because she always found it much more interesting to wander than to sit down and do what she was told ...

I'm starting to feel that in so many ways we go through elliptical journeys. That 2 year old, that 5 year old : she was not self aware ... and somehow she possessed the contradictory qualities of grounded nurturing/tenderness and also flying wildly towards inspiring things. And then life happens. We fall down, we experience loss, we survive pain and learn how to closet it. The world tells us to buck up, to maintain the peace for the larger tribe, to swallow the things that don't make sense to us instead of spitting them out to see what's inside and be better for the understanding and awareness. Our darkness gets shelved and in time we lose the keys to the source of our own growth.

Until, we decide to be disruptive: to this "peace" in our lives ... to what others think of who we are ... to the very lives we have constructed without the vital bits ...

In the last few years that dusty, buried key resurfaced for me -- and I had no choice but to open a rusty, unwilling door. Nothing stayed the same: the earth shook, the walls collapsed, I fell down further than I thought was possible to descend. But then, something magical happened ... not linearly, because we don't live in the linear, but through massive chaos: moments of clarity and light began to surface. I was deconstructing on the outside and somehow, slowly reconstructing on the inside ...

Every person I have met, every experience I have had on this alchemical journey has somehow sheparded me to my interior. To realizing I don't have to protect my false constructs; they only make me less open to the world around me, make me less compassionate to what surrounds me. If I maintain a fallacy on the outside, how can I be connected to my truth on the inside?

Little by little I continue to reach for that sacred place we all have within us. The place where we come from, where we truly exist, where we go back to ... where we really are. This is a continuous process ... It is daily practice ... hell, mostly it's hourly!

I am not extraordinary ... I'm just a very lucky woman who has had to learn over and over the most powerful thing I hold is my heart: when I open it, when I surrender to it - I am able to nurture. I am able to also receive ... I am able to be inspired and hopefully also somehow inspire ...

So, as I sit here in a cafe in Mysore, India, with my heart having a massive workout from the outpouring of love I received yesterday from all corners of this beautiful planet we all inhabit, I am grateful to be relating more to that 2 year old, that 5 year old me than I have in quite some time ...
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It has taken me walking all over this world to realize, that all along, my destination has been here: the unprotected, raw chambers of what shines inside ...

Since I have relocated to ‪#‎Berlin‬, I have repeatededly been asked, "Why Berlin?"

Yes - it is arguably THE art city in the world right now -- full of artists every which way, pushing boundaries, drinking in the expansiveness this place offers supported by an affordable life. 

Yes - it is architecturally delicious-- a living testament to the tragedies it has undergone, survived and rebuilt from.
Yes- it actively engages its dark pasts-- memorializing them at every turn ... the furthest thing from denial and active revisionism.
But for me, the layers go beyond these obvious treasures. To be in a city full of so many Turkish people, where nearly every cab driver I've had, or local bodega owner is an opportunity to engage in the wound between us. Where, on Monday, I walked into a Turkish bookstore near Kottsbusser Damm and learned the owner's grandmother was Armenian, and the only other customer's grandmother also ... from Urfa, where my grandfather was from. And here, once we learned this, we just stared at each other in this corner of Europe and wept, hugged and then drank chai and ate knefeh and when it was time to leave he insisted on driving me to where I had to be. This elderly man whom I met moments before and could've been my own grandfather, led me down the brilliant autumn streets of Kreuzberg and sighed gently about "hayat" ... life.

​Berlin allows me to process, because Berlin is in a perpetual state of processing ... of digesting ... of transformation. Berlin is a place of alchemy. Berlin takes dark matter, welcomes it over and over, allows it to come to light and dazzle as gold ...

Berlin is a monument to resilience. And that is something for which I have the deepest respect.

When I was a kid those summers of the late 1980's early 90's in ‪#‎Aleppo‬‪#‎Syria‬, one of my favorite memories was watching my maternal grandmother make rose jam on the balcony of the family home in Sulemaniyeh ... It was a long process, several days of mixing the petals with sugar in a large metal pan covered with gauze, allowing the sun to perform her alchemy .... I thought it fantastic that we were eating flowers and was impatient to receive the fresh batches that would be had with home made pita bread and ropes of Armenian string cheese and watermelon on late summer nights ...

My Marie nene would spend the entire three months of our stay making more and more of this divine jam for us to take back in freezer bags to the States. We would return with suitcases full of preserves of all kinds: walnut, fig, sour cherry and rose to enjoy back in the States, all while maintaining our little Aleppo within the four walls of our American home ...

My grandmother died 3 years ago in the Aleppo she refused to leave ... This morning I walked into the kitchen where my mother was making a Middle-Eastern breakfast for me ... toasting sesame seeds to add to the za'aatar that we had brought from Aleppo years ago, and she uncovers the very last batch of rose jam that my Marie nene made and the smell brought both of us to a flood of tears ...
The world now knows Syria through images of destruction, chaos and horror ... For me, I will keep the tender taste of roses and love and family and community as the definition of a land, a people and a time that I will never be able to return ... in deep gratitude for the ways in which it shaped me ... for the layers and layers of the magic ...
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and no matter what, this I will always have and keep ...