We at Stories Lived want to take a moment to wish everyone the best and brightest for 2017.

As we exhaled in the past few days before embarking on the exciting year ahead, we reflected on the amazing journey that 2016 offered us as we created and launched Stories Lived.  We have been so blessed in such a short time to connect with such amazing individuals throughout the world.  We would like to thank you all for making our lives more full and rewarding.

At this time of new beginnings and goal setting, meet filmmaker Javier Loaiza, a young man from Spain who set a goal for himself as a boy to visit New York City.  He made it happen, and much, much more.  Along the way, he put together an amazing film short, Boundless, that will leave you with chills.  Let this be an inspiration to us all who have set goals for ourselves in the coming months and years.  What is it you want to do, to see, to accomplish?  As the narrator notes in the film, “If you are going to try, go all the way…”

We felt Javier’s vignette of America was poignant on another level as well.  2016 was a challenging and uncertain year on many levels throughout the world.  It is important to acknowledge the discord that has percolated to the surface, and now work together to bridge the divide.  Stories Lived, even more so than we could have imagined, has come to globally embody the honoring and celebrating of differences that unite, not divide us.  Javier’s beautiful collage captures a vast and varied land, and in so many ways we feel pays tribute to the unifying diversity we see in our growing International Stories Lived family.