This is your PSA to keep creating. 

Create and create and create and create. 

And put it out there. Share it with the world. Every last chance you get. 

Fuck that fear of being seen. Fuck that worry that people will think you’re too much. Fuck the way your heart tremors and your limbs quake. To hell with the worries about sharing too often or sounding too full of yourself. Tell your demons or your asshole of a third-grade teacher or your snarky friend to shut the fuck up. 

You’re an artist. A creator. A writer. A dancer. A singer. A photographer. 

You are a maker of things. 

Beautiful things. Things that matter. Things that brighten days and make people think outside the box they’ve built around themselves. Things that shine a light into the darkness and pull the darkness into the light. Things that change lives––maybe even save them––even when you don’t have any hard proof that this is true, not for sure.

Maybe you just have an inkling or a whisper. Or a sense of purpose that you can deny. Maybe there’s a heartbeat just beneath the surface that keeps pushing you forward, that keeps you up at night, that keeps telling you that you’re here to make.

And so you make. My god, the things you make. 

Images and words and art. Bodies in form and voice lifting high. Even if what you make isn’t called art by the rest of the world, when you get honest you know it comes from the same place, somewhere between your heart and your gut––the place the flame was lit and somehow refuses to die. 

And maybe it feels like nobody is watching or reading or hearing. You’re making your art in the center of a void that threatens to suck you in. You get weary of sharing, you don’t want to bother people. You don’t want to be too much. And sometimes, that might even stop you from making––because fuck that space is hard on the heart. 

It’s not easy holding out your heart over and over and over again and asking people to be gentle with it. It’s not easy at all. And sometimes, it’s too tender to go there. Because right then you can’t handle the rejection one more time. 

But sooner or later the muse whispers. The words start swirling. The canvas calls or a note is sounded or your body starts to move to a beat nobody else can hear. 

You can’t stop creating forever, because if you did, you would cease to exist. That sounds awfully dramatic, but you know and I know that it is true. 

This is me, reminding you to continue. 

To make. 

To share. 

To not just shout into the void, but to reach into that relentless darkness with your art and to pull yourself (and everyone else willing to take your hand) out into the light. 

Because you never know who will stumble onto what you’ve made.

You never know who will find you when they most need it. 

You don’t know who will pass on that thing you made to someone on the darkest night or the brightest day. 

You have no idea the domino effect of influence that could begin. 

You don’t ever know when you are *this* close to the day that everything changes. 

You don’t. And I don’t either. 

And sometimes it’s really hard to keep pushing and to keep working. To keep battling demons and to come out of hiding, again and again, and again. To remember that there is always the possibility of becoming in every moment, in every act of art, in every outreach into the wide open world.

Do you hear me?

Every last thing you create and offer to the world––no matter how big or small––has the potential to be the one thing that changes everything. 

And the last two days have reminded me of that. The beginnings of some really good things are there, almost close enough to touch.

I want to hedge my bets and knock on wood and in the face of really exciting news say “yeah, but it may not really happen” and convince myself that humility built on fear will somehow protect me, even when the good thing is knocking on my door and asking to come inside––or, like right now, asking me to step out. 

It’s a struggle for me, most times, to believe in good things. 

The hint of those good things, they activate every last demon inside of me that wants me to hide. That cautions me against the wanting. That reminds me that I should prepare for disappointment so that I don’t get crushed when the inevitable let down occurs. 

It takes active work for me to celebrate. It’s a conscious decision to shush all those voices that urge caution, that don’t respond to wide open possibility with ‘yes, but’ and a list of all the reasons the good is unlikely to materialize. And it takes some serious effort to sink all the way into news that could be, might be, should be really fucking good. 

This is human. This is real. 

Day after day for years I’ve been making things and holding out my hands and asking if you want them. And still, when the world wants to offer me something back, it’s terrifying to admit how badly I want it. My first reaction? To hang my head demurely and to tuck my hands behind my back and say “It’s okay, I’m good. I don’t need/want/deserve that really big, really good thing”. 

Well, guess what?

I want it. 

I want it badly. 

And the last two days have delivered some pretty damn good confirmation that no matter how far away it feels, it might just be closer than I think.

And so right now, as tempting as it is to quiet down and go back to work, I’m going to tell you that no matter what––if you have that drive to create somewhere inside you, and you can squeeze even five minutes out of your day to make something. Do it. Do it and share it. Ask people to look. Tell them that you want to be seen. Ask them to share. 

Tag me. Let me see you.

Let the world know just how brave you are to do this. 

And you are. And it is. And so am I.

And right now I’m going to post this and I’m going to sit here for a minute and breathe in some really good news. And then I’m going to get up a dance, and I”m going to laugh a hell of an incredulous – ‘is this even fucking real?’ laugh, and I’m going to celebrate. 

Because no matter what––I made art, and someone saw. And maybe, just maybe, something magic will come from that.

No matter what you do. Never stop making. Never stop holding out your hands. Never stop trusting in the power of your art.

The post Never Stop Making Stuff (a PSA for the discouraged artist) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Hey you.
You who writes.

You who keeps on writing.

You who pours out your hurt and your joy and your bliss and your ways of being and existing and understanding onto page and screen.

You who hits the submit button again and again. Even though you’ve papered an entire wall in rejection letters, because you know that somewhere there is a home for your words and if you keep trying you will find it.

You who writes in private, in secret, in the darkest back corner of your closet after everyone else has gone to sleep just so you can write the whole of you.

You who writes to follow the trail, to chart the course, to make your own map through the mystery.

You who writes the path to your own redemption, because you know that clawing your way back to forgiveness of self is the only way through.

You who writes in silence, in a whisper, in invisible ink.

You who writes with the risk of being dismissed, dishonored, ignored because the risks of not writing are even greater.

You who writes because nobody else is willing to tell the truth and the truth must be told.

You who writes to bring the perpetrator to justice.

You who writes to fuel the revolution, to feed the fire, to create the necessary unrest.

You who writes to bring the people into the streets.

You who writes so that your children and their children and their children will know.

You who writes until you are bleeding and then uses the words to staunch the flow.

You who writes to lift others even when you are writing through the thick haze of your own tears.

You who writes to shine a harsh and uncompromising light on what is unjust, on the wrong doing, on the abuse occuring in the shadows.

You who writes to unbreak your own heart.

To you who writes to weave the magical stories that lull the babies to sleep at night.

You who writes to make visible the ones who do the hard and lonely and dangerous work and who risk it all just to stay alive.

You who writes in gratitude and thanks that you are able to bring worlds to life on paper.

You who writes to give voice to the things nobody else is willing to say.

You who writes so that the invisible can be seen, the marginalized brought to center, the spotlight moved away from the stars and onto the ones in the background who make the show go on.

You who writes to make a thing real, to recreate the past, to return to yourself, to mark in ink the path of a new beginnings. 

You who writes the body. The heat and salt and sex of it.  The truth of blood and vein and the secrets the bones hold. The soft and wet and want. The body that winds and dances in the shadows. The body that heals trauma by naming and claiming her own pleasure.

You who writes to claim space, to name yourself, to create a new world you can stand to live in.

You who writes to own your history or accept your present or shift your future.

You who keeps writing love letters to the one long gone or the one not yet arrived or to fall in love with the miracle of your own being.

You who writes to make peace with the ghosts, to release the steam, as a substitute for the therapy you cannot afford.

You who writes because the world inside you is so magical and so real and even if nobody else believes you it must exist somehow, represented in concrete form.

You who writes because to not write would be like a form of death, and you’ve died too many times already.

You who writes to bring us all back to life.

You who writes to set the record straight, to hold the story, to alter the dominant narrative.

You who writes to bring hope to the hopeless and give voice the the voiceless, to share the stories of the ones nobody bothers to hear.

You who writes in the face of all that would silence you.

You who writes to craft beauty in the midst of devastation.

You who writes because the force of creation is what gets you out of bed each day.

You who writes to brighten hearts and lift spirits and to make the sun rise in the sky.

You who writes like the ocean, like waves crashing and crashing and crashing again against the shore of what is real.

You who writes the dance, the movement of clouds across the sky, the way the flowers blow in the breeze.

You who writes outside of the lines. Who ignores the rules. Who has no idea about grammar or punctuation or the correct way to spell things, but who writes anyway.

You who writes in an illegible scrawl on purpose to keep the stories safe from eyes unable to see the the beauty of your truth.

You who writes words that rise like smoke and fall like ashes, still alive from the fire.

You who writes to take the swirl of chaos and confusion and, waving pen like magic wand, makes the spinning stop and the truth rise to the surface, clear and true, like a fortune teller conjuring the future from her crystal ball.

You who writes only the necessary, who casts multitudes from scarcity, who takes the story of the entire universe and reduces it to the exact few words that say everything that has ever needed to be said.

You who writes even though they told you that you could not. That should should not. Who writes over the red pen marks and bad grades from teachers who thought writing had to follow the textbook.

You who writes the things that push people up against their own limitations, their prejudice, their hard edged bias, who forces us to see the things we would rather ignore. You who are willing to endure the discomfort of pushback in order to help us all grow.

You who writes the edges and pushes the boundaries and then calls the words back into the center.

You who writes the trauma. Writes the pain. Writes the ugly words that we don’t want to read but can’t turn away from, not because you want to, necessarily, but because you know we all we need to stay present with what is real.

You who writes the worst of the hurricanes and tornadoes of reality and then keeps writing all the way into the eye of the storm where everything is peaceful and beautiful and true.

You who writes the imaginary, the fantasy, the fiction, and in the writing you conjure a world that is deeply real and alive. 

To writes who writes with irrepressible joy bubbling up through your cells, giddy with the knowledge that only you could write this particular story.

You who writes in service to the cause, to the greater good.

You who writes the birth, the death, the honest everyday mundanities of our humanity. The messy and the boring and the deeply human.

You who writes to honor who has come before, to uplift the wisdom of your ancestors and the truth of those who walked the lands long before we were here.

You who writes in the stolen moments, on the grocery store receipts, who scribbles poems on the inside curve of your elbow, inking skin with novels that wash away in the shower but that mark you forever.

You who writes to create a truth that is more true than reality that you are living. 

You who writes under a name not your own in order to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You who writes to understand what you already know and to learn what you need to understand and embrace the unknowing of all that exists beyond comprehension.  

You who writes to remember the details your brain will not hold.

You who writes your way into your own wide open life.

You who writes. Period.

To heal the world. To right the wrongs.  To save a life. 

Because you couldn’t stop, even if you tried.

It is a brave and beautiful thing to create stories in the face of all that would stop you.

You do that. And it is everything.

The post For the ones who write appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Listen to the audio reading:

Don’t think too much. As a matter of fact, don’t think too much at all. This is not one of those exercises that requires much forethought or preparation. You can’t back your way into this one, all neat and tidy buttoned up.

There’s no clean way to do this. Not this time.

This is one you’ve got to blast your way through – close your eyes and jump, light the match and burn on the way down, get pummeled by the waves, upside down and spitting water, freight train your way all your way through to the other side.

And by all those overused, layered metaphors what I really mean is this:

You’ve got to fucking write.

Not think.

Just write.

Get a sheet of blank paper.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one page.

Fill that page. Pour it out. Do not edit or reduce or backtrack. Do not worry about being succinct or understood. Just write. Just writeandwriteandwriteandwriteandfuckingwrite.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one paragraph.

Make this single paragraph sing with the hope of you, with the want of you, with the very blood and bones and guts of you. Select the lines that speak your heart. Your sex. Your sacred. Spill yourself into this paragraph as if lives depend on it. Because your lives – every last one? They do.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one line.

Choose carefully the words that define you. Choose them with exquisite care. Just one line that is the truth of you and nothing but the truth of you in this living and breathing and beating moment.

One line. Only one line.

Do you have it?

Good.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one word.

One pounding, pulsing, bleeding word. One word that flies or explodes or burns it all down. One words that is quiet whisper or the living manifestation of insistent howl of your bones. One word that glows white hot or grounds you into the dark blue-black of the deepest night.

One word.

Just one.

Does that scare you? Good – it should. This isn’t child’s play here.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Are you shaking yet? Is your heart pounding? Do you feel what we are doing here?

We’re not done yet.

Now – now that that is done. Close your eyes. Take the deepest breath you could possibly take. Fill your lungs with all those words and all those truth and all that emptiness and all that fullness and the love-loss-ache-bliss of all that carried story.

Now empty your lungs. All the way out. As your breath goes, watch all those words go too. Watch them float away on the air around you. Watch them turn to smoke and get caught in the breeze and dissipate, just like that.

Feel how damn good empty can feel when you choose it.

Now get a new page. A blank page. Purest white and completely pristine.

This is all yours. This page. It doesn’t contain any of the shit they told you was true. It doesn’t contain any of the shit YOU told you was true. Right now, it contains the only truth there is.

This story is always yours for the telling.

This has always been yours. You can expand to fill it all or take up the smallest corner. You can write in invisible ink. You can tell your story in red wine stains and spilled ink and bite marks. You can only write in pencil so it can always be erased. You can write in layers, and turn the page and write sideways. You can spin spiral and make your words dance.

You can ink it on the surface of your skin or x-ray vision the story onto the blank canvas of your bones. You can write a novel and then let the whole thing dissolve in the waves. You can write the truth and bury it in the ground, throw it in the fire, fold it into paper airplanes and watch it fly, roll it into a note in a bottle and toss it in the ocean and let it find its own way home.

Or, you share it with the whole fucking world.

You can care and not care and care-not-care all at once.

But you get to write. And you get to choose the story you tell.

And there’s no freedom bigger or bolder or braver than that.

Download the audio, motivational poster and printable PDF

The post get writing: write the truth of yourself appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“It’s been a year and I still don’t feel like I’m any farther ahead. I need to write more, create more, but I’m so often paralyzed by the fear and the blocks – all the voices that tell me I shouldn’t bother, I won’t make it. I know that this is my purpose, and some days I feel so clear and so brave and so on course. The problem is it never lasts. I can’t seem to feel wise or like I know anything for more than a day or so – and then the doubt returns. And the doubt, it blocks me from the creativity that feeds my soul. It keeps me still and small. How do I find the words to tell the true stories in the face of so much fear?”

I know some days it feels like you will never have your shit together. Some days it feels like life is a never ending battle between the laundry and the bills and your ability to give a damn. Some days you look at the other woman out there with her tribe and her books and her beautiful art and you can feel a heavy weight sinking down into your chest. I’m telling you – that lump? It’s your art. It is calling out to you, begging to free. Maybe you can’t pull yourself from the fog right now. Maybe you’re simply surviving and you don’t even notice the lump in your chest because you’re too focused on the water up to your neck, but soon you’re going to feel just a little bit better. And then you’ll feel a little bit more bold and maybe a little bit more brave.

No more longing. No more planning. Create now.

Art without action is art that will die inside your body, and art that dies inside the body is a living trauma.Winona Grey

Art without action is art that will die inside your body. When art dies inside the body, the body stiffens, the heart locks down, the mind becomes bitter, life turns gray. Art that dies inside the body is a living trauma that you carry with you. Your soul becomes colorless – haunted by the ghost of what you should have made. The ghost of your art is that lump – that sickening, sinking, dreadful feeling. You are grieving over your lost art even now and I’m not sure you even know it.

Please don’t wait any longer. Please begin the work.

Walk your body through the motions if you have to. Throw yourself into the art. Pick up the pen, the torch, the brush. What are you waiting for? Get out of bed. Light a candle. Pick up the nearest fucking tool you can find and start now.

Warm up first, then catch fire.

Let it burn through your body.

Burn down the dam, let the waters rush forth, let the wind pick up, and run alongside the art holding onto it like a kite.

Then, release it.

Breathe.

Watch it soar high above you. Peace will fill the body with every breath in. Joy will wrap itself around your bones.

Please, start now.

If you want to join me for a live call about Creative Resistance – where we’ll talk about all the ways we avoid our creative calling, imposter syndrome, money blocks and the audacity of creative entrepreneurship – I’ll be live on Zoom (with Winona as one of my guests) on Tuesday, April 11th, 2017 at 2pm PST.  If you’re not able to make the call – make sure you subscribe to my email list and I’ll send out a recording once the call is complete.

To join the call:
Join from:

• PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://zoom.us/j/2862682980
• iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +14086380968,2862682980# or +16465588656,2862682980#
• Telephone: Dial: +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll) or +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) Meeting ID: 286 268 2980
• International numbers available: https://zoom.us/zoomconference?m=m3d6sR3854QSkQKZj3ItQyrfc1ExPtq6

Winona Grey was a sad little girl haunted by traumatic memories until she found a camera and learned to tell the truth through self portraiture. Then, for ten years, she was a resolute and quiet young woman learning to survive with a mental illness until she found the words and began to write. Now she teaches the path to self love through self portraiture as sacred ritual and writes in the voice of the brave woman she has become.  Follow Winona on Instagram | Join the Sacred Self Portrait

Uncommon Sense is an ongoing series where I respond to comments and questions that stir my heart. They arrive by email, by text, by comment. They speak to something universal in me, and my response comes quick and sure. If you have something stirring in your heart and would like me to respond– please send me your message. I cannot respond publicly to all messages, but I do promise – with everything that I have –  that I will honor it and keep it safe.

The post Uncommon Sense: Create like there is no time to waste. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The inhibited artists.

Those who only dance in the dark and secret corners when nobody is watching.

You’ve got canvas and paint stacked in the closet and an entire novel bursting at the seams of your soul. You burn with the need to make things, but still – somehow do not.

Your doubt speaks loud and clear,  but not loud enough to drown out the insistent call of your muse.

You’ve something to say but the power of that message makes you want to shrink and hide.

What could happen if you unleashed it all? What would change? What would you lose.

What would they say? Who would you be?

So you don’t. And you hide. And you avoid. You get caught in the loop of perpetual busyness and debilitating self-doubt and priorities that put your call to create near the bottom of the pile.

You ignore the calling. You negate the gift. You aim for perfect and fall short and you speak unkind words directed only at yourself.

You try to content yourself with everything but that terrifying thing that you are meant to do.

That thing that is your purpose. Your passion. Your art.

Enough.

Enough already.

You are here to create.   And it is time to show up.

***

Show up for yourself.

Show up as yourself.

Show up on your own time. In your own way.

Show up with your wild broken open heart.

With your tear stained face.

Show up with ink on your hands and paint on your clothes.

Show up terrified and full of doubt that this will never work.

With all your hopes and every last thing you can no longer believe in.

Show up to announce your letting go.

Show up with whatever scraps you have left.

Show up full force, guns blazing.

Show up ready to burn that shit down.

Show up heart red and pulsing, ready to rebuild.

Show up to break the chains, to smash the cage. To say once and for all, I am done with restraint.

Show up to create.

Show up with your paint and your canvas. Show up with your words of honey and wrecking ball and sunflowers and broken things.

Show up with your hips slow spin.

With your wild and crazy and impossible dreams.

Show up to map the wilderness

Show up to get eternally lost and found deep inside the empty that comes when you spill it all.

Show up naked.

Open your arms. Let your voice ring clear.

Tell them here I am. All that I am. Tell them that you won’t play small for one more day. Tell them you’re here for a reason.

Tell them the resistance is over. The walls have fallen. The people are dancing in the streets.

Show up and change their minds.

Show up and change your own damn mind.

Just show up.

Everything changes when you do.

{an invitation}

Are you ready to blast through the resistance, slide around the excuses and really get writing?

Join me for a FREE 10 Day Challenge designed to help you create a sustainable practice dedicated to the ACT and the ART of writing. 

10 days.
10 practices.
FREE YOUR STORY

FREE YOUR STORY
Completely complimentary - my gift to fuel your writing revolution. 

10 days. 10 practices. Get writing. 

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The post you are here to create {an invitation} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Is there any reason you need to see her?  She is emerging and wants you to know.

She is beautiful and stirs something in me.  Tell me what you know of her.

She wears feathers in her hair and is covered in bone.  She belongs by the sea and speaks to the whales.  She has three mermaid tails but can survive on land. 

Chills.  All over me.

She’s also yours, goddammit.

Do you know why?  I cannot stop looking.

Only that she wants to be with you and the painting isn’t even done yet.

I have been feeling helpless in anger and ache and sad this weekend.  She feels strong.  A wise and quiet kind of strong.

Ah yes.  She’s a rock made of water.

I keep reading the words ‘covered in bone’.   Like they are significant.

Her armor. 

I think I seldom feel as if I have any.

Maybe you can borrow hers.

Jesus.  Thank you.  I needed her today.  I don’t even know why.

Just doing what the universe tells me to do.

I can already feel her bringing me words.  I want to know everything you sense of her.  Everything she whispers.  Rock made of  water.  Fuck.

Our lady of deep dives. Part warrior.  Part mermaid.  Shaman.  Feminine.  Wearer of bone; utterly soft beneath.  Receiver of gusts of the divine, divine.  Blowsly, deep winds shake her as she surfaces and she calls to her pod.  ‘Come, let us go deeper. There is much to learn.  Much to love.  Much to know’.

Image Credit: Our Lady Of Deep Dives by Kristen Kalp

~~~~~~~~~

And it is true.  Our Lady Of Deep Dives has brought me words.  And she has brought me wisdom.  And peace and solace and some deep steady strength that was greatly needed.  Her bone armor, my own.  But those words?  I’m not going to share them here now.  Because Our Lady, she wants to speak to you by herself.

If this is your day, as it was mine, to feel sad and mired in ache and anger.  If you feel without armor and bare to the world.  If you are feeling raw and undone.  If you need to heed your call to the wise and wild sea.  If there are things you are knowing you need without even knowing you need them.   Let her speak to you and move through you and deliver you to where you need to be.  She will, if you let her.

All that I will say is that I am humbled and grateful for the way this world reminds me of what I need to know.  For the souls who have crossed my path and who have joined me on this journey.  For the art and music and poetry and magic that winds and twists its way to me.  For the ache that cracks me wide open to it all.

~~~~~~~~~

{the chill inducing Our Lady Of Deep Dives painting and the words in bold belong to the inimitable Kristen Kalp.  She of balloons and glitter and viking hats and TED talks and record breaking games of twister and a camp for grownups that will be a level of epic that goes beyond all previously experienced levels of epic.  She’s a doer AND a dreamer.  Pragmatic and magical.  I am so honored and blessed to call her friend, beyond lucky to work with her, and over the moon to be asked to teach at camp this spring.  Blessed Be, indeed}

~~~~~~~~~

PSST: Did you know…There’s a sale.  All prints.  Till Dec 8th.  Check it.

The post our lady of deep dives appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The stories burn for release.  We are writers by birth and by destiny and by intention. Not by choice. If we never scratched another word on a coffee shop napkin, this would not change.  A writer is not someone who does. A writer is someone who is. Denial will result in an unceasing ache and a relentless empty.  Our words are the truest way we serve the world.

Truth:   We will always have another mistress

Her name is Muse. We serve her with devotion. Do anything to please her and keep her close. Courting. Seduction. On our knees, desperate pleading. And when she leaves us, as she always will, we must write our way back into her graces. She responds only to action and dogged intention.

Truth:  We will stop at red lights

Pull over onto the dusty side of the freeway in the middle of nowhere. Gas station parking lots. School pick up lines. We will leave your arms at 3am after hard, hot sex. We will write with whatever is available and on any surface that presents itself. When the words come burning clear and true, we must answer.   Sometimes the words will be lost anyway. Gone into the ether as if they never were. We will mourn them like a lost child, convinced they were our most brilliant.

Truth: It is terrifying sometimes, having so many words living inside 

They beat snare drum steady in our chest. They burn and scratch and push and pull. They are thirsty for freedom. They crave the danger of the edge. They want someone to promise safety. They don’t give a single fuck. Sometimes we can subdue and tame and become master of this beast, but often we are at its mercy. The words are their own living, fire-breathing dragon. We must get out of the way, and give them space to work through us and birth themselves.

Truth: There are days when writing is survival

On these days the spilling of words on page is the only thing that will save us from the demons and from ourselves. The only path to burn down and rebirth. The only way out and through. The very thing that keeps us alive.

Truth: We need to write more than anything

It is the most relentlessly driving force. But many days we’ll do just about anything to avoid having to write. We will hide and run and resist with every last bit of strength we can muster. It’s the ultimate dichotomy of the creative soul.

Truth: We live nestled snugly inside paradox

We inhabit our contradictions. We are both walking peace and writhing confusion. Our only certiantly comes from the solidity of mystery. Creativity thrives on ultimate possibility and infinite potential. We couldn’t do it if we were any more sure of anything.

Truth: We’ve been writing since we were 8, or 11 or 15  

Or forever in lives long since past. We likely began with sappy, hopeful, angsty, rhyming odes to boys and girls and sunsets and ocean waves and bus stop daydreams. Mostly about love. These days we’re not so concerned about rhyming. But most of us are still awfully preoccupied with love.

Truth: You spill blood, we hemorrhage novels

Our cuts seep with the precise cadence of our lover’s sigh as our fingers slid from ribs to waist. They feel like a grieving mother hitting the ground, tearing her hair out with the wail of centuries of torn from her chest. They taste the way the ocean feels on bare skin, like salt and wet and cold and freedom. Sometimes we need to cut ourselves, clean slice across soft expanse of skin, force it all to rise to the surface – just to access the truth pulsing through our veins.

Truth: We live in metaphor as much as in reality

There are endless ways to draw our own blood. We know them all. We also know that the best way to staunch the bleeding is the exact same way we are both emptied and filled. To sit and spill our guts and our grief and our joy and our sex and our longing and our wanderlust and the time we finally found our way home. To write until we are spent. Until the words are done with us.

Truth: Don’t wait up

Rise yourself over the city at night and look. The lights still burning at 3am are those of night workers and insomniacs and the broken hearted.  And writers. Always, the writers. The witching hours between midnight and dawn belong to us. To the candles and whiskey and the sex and cigarettes and the ink and the click of the fingers against keys and the stacks and stacks and stacks of paper scrawled with layers of truth and bullshit and true love and glory and vice and battle. In the quiet time when the ghosts dance the real work gets done.

Truth: We have learned to speak in the spaces between words

In the infinite pause at the top of the incline, in the curve of the comma. In the expanse of the inhale. In the silent slide of lips along clavicle and the closing edge of teeth on hipbone. We know that one almost imperceptible moan can contain an entire love story. And that tears can be the personification of the erotic and that the metallic bite of copper is the exact taste of grief. And that in these soundless spaces we say more than could ever be conveyed with the smooth slide of pen across page and the words of a hundred languages at our disposal.

Truth: To be an artist is to be both archaeologist and surgeon

We dig deep, unearth all of the broken and discarded and fractured pieces. Pottery and garbage and bones and beauty. We dust them off and lay them out and step back to look. We study your history and make sense of your story and then splice you back together into letters and paragraphs and chapters. And on our pages you are more than the sum of your parts and yet exactly what you’ve always been meant to be. This will be disconcerting. And beautiful.

Truth: If you love us, even for a time, you won’t walk away unscathed

Loving a writer will fill you and buoy you and shatter you and save you again and again and again. You will become the muse and the one thing standing in her way. We will love like you’ve never been loved and tell stories you never wanted told. We will push past your boundaries and call you safely home. We will love you with wholeness and fullness and notes on scraps of torn musical scores and with the way we whisper your name in the darkest night. Even our touch will feel like a story. You will never be the same.

Truth: Lists like this are utter bullshit

We are infinitely variable, us writers. The beast and the scotch over ice and the muse and the love and the blood and the 3am incantation and homecoming and the paradox  – all of it – these are my words, and my naked heart projected on this screen. Nothing more than that. And if you are a writer you have your own pulsing, beating, brutal, brilliant heart. And your own muse and ritual and truth. And only you will know exactly how it loves and lives and breathes your art into life and builds your life into art.

And you will know that there is only one thing you ever really need.

To write.

Don’t let me stop you. Don’t pay the slightest attention to my ramblings. These are nothing but midnight meanderings fueled by a hard shot of whiskey and romanticized by a blood red candle flame and filled with the unceasing longing of my own ocean heart.

But you? All you need is a blank page and a good fucking pen. Light your candles and pour yourself a drink.  Séance your ghosts and seduce your muse. Dance only for yourself. Make it hot. Feel the truth of your bones leading the way.

And don’t let me try to tell you a single thing about your own truth. Or your life or your creativity or the ways and hows and whys of your loving or your life or your words. You know how it is for you. You’ve always known.

So quit the excuses. Sit down. Breathe deep. Own that burning drive inside you.

And write the fuck out of your life. 

The post 10 Truths Of The Writer’s Soul appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”.

Bella looked at my quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world.

“Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real”

And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student.

Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be.

~~~~~~

{art is always real. all of it.  even the stuff you don’t understand.  even the stuff you don’t like.  even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend}

that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder?    still art.

the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critqued to death?  it’s art.

the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world?  definitely art.

the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows?  art. art. art.

the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light.

the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing.

the clay you’ve not yet molded.

everything you have made

or will one day make

{it’s all real, every last bit.   because there is no such thing as art that is not real. bella said so}

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And so I tried to do the sensible thing. The thing everyone said was the very best possible thing to do.  To go back to school. To get a ‘regular’ job. Something solid. Secure. Dependable. To do what I needed to do to care for the wee girlies who were and are my focus.

And yet I struggled and fought and pushed back against this future that felt inevitable – with all my might.  In the years since I have gone from supporting myself with my words and my photography, to driving an hour and a half commute and working in a corporate cubical, and back to etching out a living with art once again.

But through it all, one voice has spoken with clarity and force and no small amount of entitlement. She is the artist. She is me. There is no separating the two.

It was the night I wrote of here, stuck in a freezing classroom, attempting to force my brain to understand computer programing – that I found my way to my truth. That truth has never left me, and it never will.

The day after I wrote this post – one of the first ever published here on this blog – I quit school to live my purpose. I didn’t have a plan. it was utterly irresponsible – without a doubt.  The years since have been fucking beautiful and fucking hard and fucking everything in between, but not once did I regret listening to this voice- the voice of the artist. Not once did I question her wisdom. Not after this night.

You could say – really – that everything begins here.

Why am I here?

I feel panic bubbling up inside. I can’t breathe. I don’t belong here; don’t want to learn about programming algorithms and logical coding structure. I’m the only female in a room of guys who have been tinkering with computers for years. They are all eager, excited to learn enough to finally unleash their inner Bill Gates on the world. I am terrified, searching everywhere for an escape route and finding none, so ridiculously out of place that I hear a refrain bubbling up from my subconscious, and I stifle a laugh.

“one of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…”

I’m accustomed to feeling intelligent, but here I feel like everyone is fluent in a language I’ve never before encountered. All the rest seem well versed in the dialect of DOWHILE and ENDIF and PSEUDOCODE. I am missing the part of my brain necessary for making sense of all this. I don’t WANT to make sense of all this. My brain feels like the human equivalent of the blue screen of death that keeps appearing on my failing laptop. I am caught in an infinite loop of confusion and self pity, about to freeze up and shut down.

i just want to make pretty things.

It becomes part mantra, part plea – a desperate cycling through my brain in hopes the universe hears.

Please, not this. I just want to make pretty things.

~~~

It took me a long time to call myself an artist. It takes audacity to hold up a word like that and claim it for myself. It is a big, bold, brilliant, terrifying thing. I am an artist. I play with light, bend words to suit, gather inspiration and beauty and scatter it in circles that are ever widening as I learn to step into myself.

I make pretty things. It is what I am here to do. It is what makes me feel alive. It’s not about the medium or the money, it’s about letting the universe flow through me, accepting what I’m given and letting it become what it will. I am so solid and sure of myself, of my path. This is who I am. I create – words or images or communities of people – and it’s as necessary as breathing. I must do this.

This future I’m now staring down –  long days in a cubical somewhere, staring at a characters on a computer screen and trying to force them to do my bidding  – this feels like a direct betrayal of the work I have been put here to do, a slow death of spirit and purpose. I know what my work is, with a clarity that people yearn for their whole life. I know it, and I cannot embrace it. I turn quickly from desperation into a petulant, foot stomping child.

I don’t wanna do it! I don’t wanna do it! I don’t wanna do it!

So my rebellious teenage self steps in, all cocky attitude and larger than life bravado – chain smoking and punked out – way too cool to be owned by anyone’s expectations.

Fuck it. Don’t get worked up. Just don’t do it. They can’t make you. Go underground. Be an illegal alien. Don’t waste your time with this messed up system. This is stupid. Nana-nanana…They can’t catch you! Just sit there and put your hands over your ears, ignore the bullshit and make your stuff.

But I’m full of self-pity, an egocentric puddle of woe and the worst part is that I did this. Nobody set this in motion but me, and what is there to do but follow it through? The sense of resistance I have is incredible. I’m digging in my heels hard but being dragged along in spite of myself. The logistics of this situation leave me with few options. I am stuck in a trap of my own making. I’m gearing up for ginormous temper tantrum followed by limb flailing meltdown of epic proportions. I’m almost daring the universe to send me to my room for an indefinite time out.

Out of nowhere another voice fills my head, and she’s irritated. She hauls me up off the floor and drops me roughly on my chair for as stern talking to (with a healthy dose of ridicule thrown in for good measure).

So, you’ve got to go to school to learn to do something you don’t want to do? Oh, poor, poor little baby. You know what, lots of people go to work every single day to do jobs they hate and they make the best of it. That’s life. There are bills to pay and kids to feed and this is just reality so SUCK. IT. UP. SISTAH.  Oh, for gods sake quit that sniveling – it’s pathetic.

And I know she’s right, damn it, but I don’t want to hear it. I want someone to understand why this feels so fucking terrible. I want someone to hold my hand and stroke my hair and tell me that it will all be okay.

please, just tell me it will all be okay…

I’ve fallen off my imaginary time out chair and I’m curled in a ball on the floor now, an oozing, snotty, crying mess – wondering how to pull it together before people notice.

My gently pragmatic self steps in, sits down next to me on the floor and lifts my chin. She’s all Mary Poppins with her spoon full of sugar and spit-spot snap of her fingers making everything tidy again.

You’ll make the best of it dearie. You’ll do what you have to do and it won’t be forever. You never know, you might even like it. Come on, pick yourself up. You’re a strong one, remember. You can do this. You have to do this, so there is no sense in crying about it. Chin up love, chin up.

And I know all those voices are a part of me, and they all have a point. But the only one who speaks in first person is the artist, the one whose soul burns with the fire of creativity.

The one who makes pretty things.

~~~

Class is ending and I’m gathering my things together to walk out. For three hours I’ve sat here so deep in my head that I have no idea what was said. No matter that I’ve turned this around in my head a million times already, I’m still searching for a way out. I get into the car and turn on my iPod, looking for answers the music. I take a deep breath  put the car in drive and head home, because sometimes, there’s nothing to do but keep moving forward, taking the next logical step, and having faith that it will all work out in the end.

I am exactly where I need to be.  I need to be exactly where I am. I am a blessing manifest.

~~~

I’m gonna go home and make some pretty things.

{This is the story of the night my artist voice came and lodged in me. Where I heard her speak and knew her to be mine – for the very first time. And it’s true, I believe, that everything that came after hinged here – the way it does sometimes. on these moments that seem perfectly ordinary until lived in retrospect. You could say I owe my creative life to this night. You could stay that it all started right there in that room. And that even now – all of my choices are a way of honoring that.

So here’s to making pretty things. To the insensible and the impractical. To the pull to the center and edges. Here is to vast crucible of art and creation. To the swirl of paint and the spill of words and the melody of song and the glorious mess of it all.  May it fill us and break us down and lift us up and make us whole. May it be the very thing that saves us. This is the way of words. This is the way of art. This is the way of life.

Quiet now. Do you hear the the voice of the artist within?  She is waiting for you to listen. She is waiting for you to create.}

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