Resilient Seeds of Venezuela

Dear readers,

First of all, I wish you a happy start to a year that promises great events, both collective and personal, with the hope that it brings fewer lingering grievances and more harmony, a future with nuance, worthy of attention and hope. May humanity take more sensitive, united steps, with fewer fears and more strength to savor equality.

With a joyful and stirred heart at witnessing the beginning of the fall of an authoritarian regime that for 26 years plundered an entire nation, I feel a thirst for justice being quenched, a drive to reclaim what has been unfair.

I slowly understood that my way of participating was not through constant anger, but by sharing my roots, my actions, and my fertile heritage, infused with the scent of cocoa and Caribbean salt, with the world through art, presence, living in resilience, and sustaining the energy necessary for this moment to finally arrive. Faith moves mountains, not through religion, but through optimism and positive vibration: our moment would come.

It is a long, difficult, diffuse, and controversial path.

Step by step, what will undoubtedly be a new chapter for my homeland is being built.

My feelings and reflections from 2025 continue to take shape. It was a year of immense personal, human, and sensitive growth. I allowed myself to open my heart fully: to learn to listen to myself, to use my body as a compass for understanding and a path to my spirit; to cry, to laugh, to dance, to honor silence, to let go, to let in, to define and transcend the limitations that bound me to models, patterns, and people whose time had expired.

I gave space to that attentive listening to what truly moves me, what I truly want, and how I want it. That silence, almost mute, says everything; but sometimes we pretend to be deaf to avoid facing the inner work, to avoid tightening those loose strings which, when adjusted, make everything easier, even though grasping them can be painful and tedious.

What goals and proposals do we make for entering a new year, when it seems impossible to look with soft eyes at life’s harsh landscapes? An increasingly robotic existence, a fragmented society, constant wars, more loneliness, less connection, more separation…

The solution, in my view, is simple: your center, your core, nourishing from the inside out.

Step away from the noise that surrounds us, listen to your body, refine your listening, allow your heart to guide you… even when you don’t know exactly where. Sometimes we think it calls us toward another, but the first call is always toward self-love. To love outwardly, we must cultivate unconditional love for ourselves. We beat ourselves with constant mandates of criticism, comparison, and insensitivity, but even small and subtle actions are battles we fight, and little by little, they lead us to growth, maturity, presence, and greater sovereignty.

Petal by petal, we peel away and reach the center of the heart. Each petal drifts subtly, it doesn’t disappear, it becomes fertile soil for new possibilities. Let the air carrying memories of the past bring them closer to shining, warm flashes of the present.

I firmly believe that Venezuela is an example of this reflection. In a way, we didn’t know how to choose; we lived externally and were struck under the table. We were dismantled, but here we remain firm, fighting from the inside out.

Many of us left in pain, not knowing where to go. Yet that reconstruction also happened from the outside in, because hope and love for our land never dried up. Always high, with joy, hard work, and courage for the difficult.

We did and stopped doing what we never imagined.
We created inspiration and added flavor to the cold and the different.
Every gesture, every act, no matter how small, became a seed for new possibilities.

We cultivated a deep love for choosing better paths, for building more honest relationships with ourselves, even within the conditions we were given.
And here we are: building from the inside out, with hearts held high and optimism set on better times.

I reaffirm: this is the inner attitude that will lead us to collective change. From there, we can generate transformation around us.

Viva Venezuela!