First blog of the year: Awareness Vs. Action?

First off, I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years, there were great moments of both for me =)

So I want to talk a little bit about something.
To Write Love On Her Arm's Heavy and Light event was last night, after some technical difficulty I finally got to watch the live broadcast (One of these years, I will make it down there for the actual event) and there was some awesome music by Zach Williams, Bryce Avary, Aaron Marsh, amongst others and there was an amazing poet, Anis Mojgani if you haven't heard of him, look him up. Soon. Then of course there were people who spoke, Jamie spoke as always. He brought up a friend of his, Nicole who talked about losing her boyfriend to suicide (Her boyfriend was one of Jamie's good friends). Amongst the people who spoke at Heavy and Light was Aaron Moore and his wife (I can't remember her name, sorry) came up and spoke and honestly, what he said really hit me and made me realize some things.

TWLOHA has always been about community and people and this idea that we're not alone.
Perhaps we all are guilty for going about things the wrong way. . .I've wanted to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. Perhaps it's not the virus we need to raise awareness for.
People know it's out there. They know it is killing our mothers, our fathers, our brothers, our sisters, our kids. However, there is a lot of ignorance that surrounds this virus. A lot of people don't know what it is, they don't know how they can get infected, they don't know how to prevent it. So, where it's good to wear your red ribbons and have HIV/AIDS awareness stickers and pins and shirts, it's important - no, I retract that, it's necessary that we teach people what this virus really is and how they can protect themselves from being infected.

It amazes me, well not exactly because a TWLOHA event always makes for a good night.
Rather, the people involved with them makes for an amazing night.

I love that idea of community. I love the idea of people helping people, of course it doesn't happen often these days. Too many people don't love each other and help each other.
But it's a beautiful thing when it happens.

I hope you all got to at least watch the broadcast last night (If not, you can watch it on synclive.com). The ending was amazing, they performed "Stand By Me" and "Still haven't found what I'm looking for" both were beautiful performances.

I guess this whole post was just to say that of course, we need to continue to talk to people and tell them about these issues that effect us but maybe we need to start telling them more about how to help/fix/prevent those issues instead of just focusing on raising awareness for it.

I hope the new year is treating you all well so far!

Love & [World] Peace,
Brandi <3