Carving new paths
“The gunfire around us makes it hard to hear.But the human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else, even when it’s not shouting, even when it’s just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard over armies when it’s telling the truth.” This quote, from the excellent script of “The Interpreter”, is about the desire for peace in war-torn lands. This picture also represents to me the battle that may be ongoing in our minds. Sometimes the gunfire is not across the ocean in a different land but coming from...
Read MoreOver a pot of tea …
Be the change we want to see, see the change we want to be … “So, what’s so controversial about compassion anyway?” That’s what six Island women of all ages and stages asked each other as they chatted over a pot of tea last week. Compassion? Isn’t that just humans behaving well? Our tacit understanding of what makes society tick? The Golden Rule? We agreed compassion was obvious, but not easy. We also agreed that the world works better when everyone treats their neighbour the way they want to be treated themselves. “How could anyone disagree with that?” we said. Edith...
Read MoreYou could be here!
Island Woman is looking for new writers and contributors. The target audience for Island Woman has been identified as all women on Vancouver Island. Our vision is evolving and will undoubtedly change and become refined we receive comments, and gauge reaction and demand for different types of information. One of the challenges will be to understand the various subsets of our broad audience in order to develop a content base that will be of interest to a variety of age groups and address a cross section of interests and issues. We are already covering topics of business, finance, sports,...
Read MoreThe Range of Self
I recently read Sidney Poitier’s book The Measure of a Man — I’d been thinking already about a similar theme so was struck by his thoughts: “…I’m so many different things. …. The things I don’t like about myself, the things I do like about myself, the things I‘m not but I’d like to be, the things I am but don’t want others to know about – these are all percolating inside. All these contradictory aspects are the basic me. Courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, fear and joy, love and hate…” This resonated with me. At 53 I am thoughtful and level and...
Read MoreBFFs in our 50s?
The upside of having old magazines kicking around is that they have lists of recommended books that do not have 127 holds at the library. My recent discovery was Zaslow’s non-fiction “The Girls from Ames”. Only a few pages in I was immediately intrigued: Eleven girls grew up in Ames, Iowa and although all have moved away, they still get together every year to share joys and sorrows. At the time of the 2009 release, they were in their 40s. I had already been thinking of writing an article about the friendships of women so the premise of this sounded interesting. As I got...
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