My Blog

My posts are personal reflections on being mindful, inspired and curious.

Road to Cutxan

A Tipping Point

  “The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all

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French travel etiquette

French Travel Etiquette

Traveling in a group is NOT easy for me as a tour guide, and sometimes for my clients for various reasons which includes not being aware of French travel etiquette. Most people who sign up for my small group, slow travel tours genuinely enjoy spending time with new people, but sometimes there are those who

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The Blessing, by Colby Chester

A New Year’s Blessing

” …because everything here seems to need us…” – Rainer Maria Rilke As I write this rain is falling, and I watch the almost silent transformation of the textured world into a smooth plane where differences disappear. The rain falls in droplets that even a slight gust of wind can transform, in the same way

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Old French Mail slot

A Lost Art

“To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere, without moving anything but your heart.” Phyllis Grissim-Theroux – The other day I waited in my parked car outside the post office in a nearby village waiting for it to open. Adjacent to me was a truck loading mail. Just as the truck driver

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Abbaye Senanque Lavender

Going South

“As soon as we leave the urban condition behind us, we confront newness and the profoundly unfamiliar. “   Rem Koolhaas As I drove home from the end of my first women’s only slow travel tour this year, I thought to myself that youth is not a prerequisite for adventure. Originally, this tour was sold out,

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Keeping it Real

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” – Brené Brown It’s not the wrinkles or gray hair, it’s the death of 4 friends this past

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Donkeys in Rigpeu, Gers

The Good Life

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the

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Edenwild, France

Paradise Lost

“We will not save what we do not love.” Thomas Berry – A few weeks ago I received an email from a friend who signed off, “ Miss you and life as we knew it.”, meaning when our lives return to normal. But what is the normal everyone seems to want to go back to?

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The Gift

We are each other’s, harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond. Gwendolyn Brooks – During the Middle Ages most villages had three fields of farmland. At any given time, two of the fields grew crops while the third lay fallow. The fallow fields would be rotated every year because

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