There is an ancient Latin phrase that has traveled through centuries, cultures, and countless conversations over a shared glass of wine.
In vino veritas.
In wine, there is truth.
The Romans said it first — or at least, they said it loudest. But the idea stretches further back to Alcaeus in ancient Greece, who wrote that wine reveals the nature of a person. Pliny the Elder embraced it. Medieval scholars debated it. It wound its way through the Renaissance, through Enlightenment salons, through candlelit taverns and modern dinner tables. Across eras, across languages, across borders — the idea endured.
Because we recognized something true in it.
When we drink wine, our guard comes down. The performance softens. The careful architecture of how we present ourselves to the world begins to loosen. And in that loosening - truth often surfaces. Real thoughts. Real feelings. Real stories. The ones we don't always say out loud in the ordinary hours of ordinary days.
Yet, wine is simply the vessel. The veritas — the truth — was always already there.
Veritas is one of those words that carries more weight than its three syllables suggest.
In Roman mythology, Veritas was a goddess — the daughter of Saturn (titan of Time), the mother of Virtue — so elusive that she was said to hide at the bottom of a well. Truth, in other words, is not always easy to find. It requires a certain depth. A willingness to look down, and to keep looking.
Veritas lives in philosophy — in Aristotle's pursuit of aletheia, the unconcealed. In law — where truth is the foundation of justice. In science — where it is the unreachable but essential horizon. In art — where it is the only thing that makes a work last.
And Veritas lives in people. In the moments when someone dares to say what they really mean. To tell the story they've been carrying within themselves. To let themselves be fully, vulnerably, unapologetically seen.
Which brings us here.
Not because women are more honest than anyone else. Not because truth belongs exclusively to women.
But because I believe — deeply, and with increasing conviction — that there is a particular kind of truth that lives inside women. A wisdom that is felt before it is spoken. An intuition that has been refined across lifetimes of listening, adapting, holding, nurturing, enduring, and rising.
And I believe that truth has not always been given the space it deserves.
When women gather in a space that is genuinely safe — not performatively safe, but truly open, non-judgmental, and free — something remarkable happens. The guard comes down. Because when truth reveals itself in another — openly, without apology — it acts like wine on the soul. Because of the rare and powerful experience of being in a room where you do not need to edit yourself. Where your story matters. Where your voice does not need to compete or justify itself.
That is the space Stories We Carry is reaching toward. A space where truth flows — not because it is coaxed out, but because the conditions finally allow it.
There is something important in the spelling, too.
WomEn. Not womAn.
Because while the truth lives within each individual woman — her singular story, her particular wisdom, her irreplaceable experience — the power amplifies when we come together. When our truths are placed alongside one another, they don't cancel each other out. They compound. They resonate. They illuminate corners that no single light could reach alone.
I hope history has shown us what happens when women's voices are suppressed, diminished, or simply never given a room to fill.
And I am definitely very excited about what happens when they are.
It is not a protest. It is positively not a performance. Neither is it a space for any particular ideology or agenda.
It is an opening. An invitation to come as you are — with whatever you are carrying — and discover what happens when truth is finally given room to breathe.
I believe that when women feel safe enough to speak their full truth — and wise enough to truly hear each other — the world becomes richer. Wiser. Safer. More whole.
And that is a world worth gathering for.
If you have a story, a truth, an experience, or simply a quiet curiosity — you are warmly welcome.
In Women Veritas.
With much Aloha, Olga
P.S. Our first digital In Women Veritas, within Stories We Carry, is taking place on May 28th at 10AM HST. Our first in-person In Women Veritas, within Stories We Carry, is on June 9th in Honolulu, HI.