Story to tell....Veronique

The first snow flakes are falling from the sky.  For some folks, it’s the first time of a long winter ahead. For others, it’s a sign of nature. A reminder that everything in life needs to slow down at some point, to regenerate itself.  We’ve all had to slow down to some degree in this past year. Slow down from this rat race that can sometimes become life. Normally we need to schedule time in our life to slow down. We plan this grand vacation, to go lay down on a beach, or to travel to a country that we’ve never been. We set our sights on this reward, and it encourages us to keep going and keep pushing in the day to day, thinking that « yes! Only a few weeks lefts before.... » to motivate ourselves that we will finally be able to get a breather. To breathe, to slow down, to enjoy the moment and admire all that surrounds us. We were scheduling that time. This year, we didn’t need to schedule. The ability to slow down was given to us, on a not so pretty platter, but it was. It ha...

Clarity. The clarity that came to me from self work, is like having a high definition TV to the world and your surrounding. —— I had been looking for this clarity for a long time. I knew it existed, I knew I had experienced it before but it was never lasting. It was like I was at the optometrist getting my view tested and going from lenses to lenses, trying to figure out what was the right prescription. I could find one that would make sense, but after a short period of time, it was like the glasses were being removed. Why had it gone away? Why couldn’t I not maintain the vision? When it happened, it was so beautiful, like the feeling one would get by being able to walk on water or be able to fly. I would feel so free of any judgements. Judgement from myself, and judgement from others. I had tasted it, and man did I want it to stay forever. It just wouldn’t. —— The thing is, when you experience something that is so magical, but you’ve yet been able to understand how i...

I do suffer from it. I was born in a small community in New Brunswick. All of my classmates were white. All of my teachers were white. All the folks in my community were white. Oh yeah, expect that one girl. We didn’t know any better. I didn’t know any better. We were all alone. We didn’t get exposed to it. When we saw a person of colour or of other ethnicity, it caught out attention. We all looked towards that person’s direction. We all made assumption. I then went on to University. The diversity on campus was present and for me, coming from a white DOMINATED community, it was a big change. Diversity was composed from all genders, all ethnicity, from all Colors, from all différents countries against the world. It took me a while, so it did I would say for my white caucasian colleague to adapt. I am now wondering, how did our colleagues from another ethnicity fell joining our ranks, coming to a portion of our country that is dominated by white people. I mean, I have to admi...

Create! Imagine! Dream! All words of actions that we are thought from the moment we are born, throughout our childhood, all the way to adulthood. Then, for some imaginary reason, it often disappears. In a North American culture where success if defined by degrees, tittles, and pay checks, we loose sight of our inner creative self. The same creative self that as a young child, would spend hours drawing, building lego houses or snow forts. The same imaginative mind that would make up fictions friend, that would sit at the dinner table on a empty chair, with it’s own plate. The same dreaming young soul that would think they could conquer the world, save the planet by collecting water bottles. We often loose it, and I am for sure guilty of it in some way or another. We talk the talk, but we forget to walk the walk. It’s been over three weeks since this situation started to become real for most of us in Canada. It’s been since in 2019 that the planet started feeling it’s impact. ...

Oh Puerto Vallarta, you’ve stolen my heart and you’ve conquered my soul. From the first looks out the windows of our taxi, your ocean view with mountains as your back ground, the clouds dancing through your peaks, playing hide and seek with the sun. Your citizen, so ever welcoming, helpful and so pretty. You can see in their eyes that they are living in paradise. When you look into them you just want to get a hold of their essence, their spirit and their joie de vivre. Visiting your beaches, where the sand looks like it’s sparkled with gold, makes me understand why Don Perdro de Alvarado  thought it was a great place to establish himself with it’s first colony Sitting with your sand in sparkles of gold, the great white wales wave at you from a distance where you can actually see them smiles. If you find that little corner restaurant, you can indulge yourself in some of the best traditional Mexican food I’ve had. Fresh, spicy, tangy, you inspire me to keep cooking with loc...

What happened to our sense of logic? What happened with our desire to understand where information comes from? It’s sad when you think about it, that greed has taken the world over and we are in a middle of a crisis and that instead of acting out of compassion, some of our political leaders have decided that for the better man of their own personal agenda, that it is much better to spin fear and participate in the creation of a miss information crisis. I do not disagree, we are in a situation that has to be taken seriously and where we need to be considerate of each other’s and make our best efforts not to affect people that could possibly be at risk of this health crisis. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, who had just came back from Paris last week, with her little nice. They weren’t sick but the little girl was being bullied in school because she has just came back from vacation. I mean, WTF! Children are children and they will take information we gave them ...

Some people will say that I was lucky. That I had all the opportunities in my life to become a strong and powerful woman. Some will say that society was already at a place where I could grow and prosper as a woman in a male dominated field and industry. Some will say that the obstacles that I have faced were not at all related to me being a female. Some will say that the door was wide open and all I had to do was to go through it. Maybe they are not totally wrong, perhaps they are a bit right. My life journey is certainly a great one, and I certainly had to work through it. I was faced with situations where I was certainly at a disadvantage because I was a woman.  My journey was however made a lot easier because of all the great woman leaders that came before me. Only to name a few, I am thinking of Harriet Tubman I recently discovered. I think of Oprah Winfrey, Marie Curie, Queen Elizabeth, Amelia Earhart, only to name a few. I owe it also to the great women that s...