“Not so much, but it’s really something I should not discuss because it should never have been in the first place. I’m sure karma and her friends are raining down upon my head. I deserve to battle alone…”

No.

That is a lie. A lie that your heart tells you because you are punishing yourself for the crime of being human.

You and me? We are so very human.

I don’t know the specifics of your story. I don’t know the exact reason you feel that karma has decreed that you suffer in solitude. But since I am human, just like you, I can fill in the blanks, and I can imagine.

So from that space, I will tell you now. It is not true. You don’t ever deserve to battle alone. None of us do.  So, do me a favor, dearest, and shut that down right now. Even just for the time you read this letter.

Now, it’s true that I don’t know a damn thing for sure about your story. But shared experience holds a pretty clear mirror, and I see beyond your words. I feel your heart, and I know.

I know, love. I know.

You have loved, haven’t you?  You have loved someone you believe you shouldn’t, and it is over, and you hurt, and maybe someone else has gotten hurt as well, someone you never wanted to hurt along the way.

You are punishing yourself for that. Holding yourself responsible, neon-lit scarlet letter upon your chest. Your heart is broken, but you don’t think you have the right to feel that grief, so even the sadness becomes another marker of all the ways you have done wrong.

But here’s the thing, I don’t know too many people who have gotten through very much life without at some point and in some way, loving someone we’re told we shouldn’t. If karma decreed that we be alone for the human act of loving when the world says we should not, then most of us would be destined to exist in perpetual solitary confinement. Some sort of horrible self-constructed purgatory, forever and ever.

Our hearts are beautiful and mysterious and sometimes selfish and not often very forward thinking.

And they do what they are here to do.

Love.

To seek love and find love and open to love, again and again, and again.

To fill in what is empty in us.

To allow ourselves even momentary kindness, or touch or desire.

To be seen and known, even for a brief time or a time outside of time, no matter what lies on the other side.

Bravely and recklessly. In kindness and fullness and in greed and desperation.

So, without knowing anything about what is happening for you right now, know this:

If the act of loving, even outside of contract or social acceptance or what the world decrees is ‘right’ makes you deserving of anything, it is entering the room with all of us who have stood where you are now standing.

All of who have loved and lost and broken, who have brought hurt to others. All of us who have confused and tangled our own hearts, or made questionable choices to quench our own desires, or stepped outside of our own integrity to taste what called to our souls or our bodies or our longings for things we cannot even name.

This is a part the humanness that connects us.

Threads woven between broken and stumbling souls.

Fumbling and scared.

Wanting and open.

Holy and whole.

We don’t get here clean. We can’t. It’s not how we were made, us miraculous, stumbling, terribly messy, deeply wanting humans.

And my god, if I don’t believe we all deserve infinite tenderness inside of this truth.

I didn’t always know this. I didn’t know it when I made the choices that cost me my own grasp on integrity and all the stories I had told myself about who I was and the things I would and would not do.

Not when my choices left me dazed, months later, when it felt as if the entirety of the life I had known had burned down in the wake of my own decisions, collateral damage beyond my comprehension.

I didn’t know it when a few short years after that someone dear to me broke my trust to have a hidden relationship with someone I will love until the day that I die. I didn’t know it when I yelled and wailed and walked through the night with tears streaming down my face, sowing the seeds of anger and resentment and letting them take hold and root down deep.

I didn’t learn this lesson until I fell into a love that was a remembering.

A love where past and present and future and countless parallel lives tangled and exploded into life, as real and anything I could touch or taste in front of me. A love that was my first experience of what it was to be seen and loved for who and what I am, never once asked to be anything or anyone else. A love so holy it could never have felt wrong. This love, the groundwater and memory and inevitability of it, it pulled me forward in spite of everything I thought I knew about what was good or right.

In the process of this loving, I chose a path that was not the one the world would have had me make. One that brought great hurt to another and once again risked the foundation of the life I had rebuilt from the ashes. And in the process of this loving, I made a choice not between goodness and wholeness, as I first thought, but instead a choice that was an integration, finally, of the two.

In the aftermath of this love, there was a difference inside of me. A self that refused apology, that recognized that a such a love, it demands that we listen. It asks if we are willing to taste, to allow, to open. In the aftermath of this love, I found redemption and forgiveness was finally made possible.

When there is a chance for a love like that, I learned. We take it. And we don’t always take it the way we believe we should. And we don’t always take it without betraying others, or ourselves. Sometimes, integrity, the real and rooted kind, is something we only find through the path of that betrayal.

And if that was true for me, then it was also true for the others who had broken my trust and brought hurt to my doorstep. There was no forgiveness of self without the forgiveness of others.

It is true, when we stumble off the path that marks our relationship with our own integrity, that profoundly personal and incomparable relationship, there is work to be done. Hard, painful, deeply humbling work.  None of my words are here are to offer excuse or absolution. That is between you and whatever and whoever you answer to in the deepest part of your soul. It may require penance or the hard work of rebuilding or the letting go of what refuses to repair.

And every last one of those will hurt and come with costs I cannot know or name.

So no, I’m not handing out free passes or making light of what has been done. God knows I am still carrying the marks of my own choices. And god knows, it may be something you live with now and forever, as it has been for me. This knowing of what it is for your actions to impact another, maybe even someone you dearly and deeply love, is not a thing that can be undone. I’m not going to sugar coat or gloss over that reality. But I’m not going to let you sink into the pit of self-loathing either.

And I am going to tell you that there is redemption, even now, right there waiting for you.

It’s true, redemption and forgiveness are sticky things, almost always. But never more so than when we are asked to shine that light on our own hopelessly human hearts.

And maybe its presumptuous of me to type this, when I don’t really know a damn thing of what your heart is living right now, and there are days when I know my own work of self-forgiveness is a patched up, beaten around work in perpetual progress.

And possibly this is simply my own attempt to remind or even convince myself that I am worthy, in spite of the times in my life when I’ve left the path of my own integrity, and brought havoc by the act of my own loving.

Or maybe it is only this, that we need to meet each other here. That we must.

We must remind one another of the fact that we are here, and alive and human, so terribly and beautifully and sometimes painfully alive. And that very thing is what makes it so blindly brilliant, so achingly true.

We are not defined only by our actions in the moments we step off the path. I cannot believe that because that would damn me and you and all of us. I believe that ultimately, what defines us is the way we keep stepping back on. The way we trip and struggle through the wilderness of our selves, the way we wander through the dark desert night believing ourselves worthy of being cast out. And still, somehow, when the light rises in the sky, our path appears again, and we step back on, put one foot in front of the other, and onward we go.

And you, my dear friend, are finding your way back to the path. Even if you can’t feel it or see it right now, you are.

And you deserve to be there. And so do I. And so do all the rest of us.

We are here, you and I and everyone we loved in the light and all of those we have loved in the shadowy spaces.

Our hearts doing the thing they are made to do, pulsing and yearning and casting aside all doubt in the hope that we will be met and seen and known in holiness and in wholeness, with our guilt and our scars and every last ounce of hope remaining in our bones.

Here we are, you and I. Hearts beating. Still loving. No matter what.

______

Photo from header image by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The post Terribly and beautifully and painfully alive. 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 recording | listen to the soundtrack on spotify

when she finally leaves, you will not want to let her go.
when she finally leaves, you will not be ready.

no matter that you thought you were fine
no matter that you thought you were moving on
and even healing and shit.

sometimes the heart plays tricks like that

when she leaves you’ll know better.

and no matter how much control you like to wield
over the proper folding of the towels
and the direction the toilet paper goes on the roll.

you won’t get to have a say in this one.

you’ll want to think that you’ll handle it with grace
but you won’t.
you’ll ugly cry.
you’ll drink too many whiskeys and not eat near enough food.
you’ll beg. and plead and send ill-advised texts and show up at her doorstep
unannounced and uninvited
your hopeful heart an earthquake, ready to take the house down to the foundations

you will not drive away happy.
you will drive right over your heart, splayed on the hot august pavement.
you will drive away not knowing if you will see her again.

when you get back to your apartment
make yourself some tea. add honey
you need to learn to give sweetness to yourself now
play all the songs that speak her name
sink into the sad like it’s the only home you’ve ever known
you’ll be living here a while
you might as well make friends with it.

don’t try to convince people you are trying to forget
when you are determined to not to let go.
when you’ve got a box tucked beside your bed
filled with two and a half years of love notes
and a hell of a lot of empty space
it’s okay to hold on for a little while
demons are not exorcized overnight.

but just a warning
what comes next is not going to be easy.

soon you’re going to have to forget her phone number
forget her birthday
forget the way she smiled at you first thing in the morning.
the way she said ‘sleep good’ and you bit your lip every time to keep from correcting her.
the way she poured a whole mug of coffee and barely drank any of it.

your memories will play tricks on you anyways
turning ordinary moments into magic.
and right now is no time for magic.

right now is time for hard truth
and tough love.

it will take a few times of ignoring good advice before the hurt is
deep enough for you to listen

please remember to be kind to yourself

listen
i know you don’t want to hear this
but stop texting her.
everyone will agree with this.
they will say that if you need to – you should get a journal and write your love letters there.
where she will never see them.
better yet. write them on your own skin and let them wash away in the shower
somethings were never meant to stay forever.

listen when they tell you that you are romanticizing things
listen when they tell you that it’s all for a reason
listen when they tell you that it’s for the best.

it doesn’t matter if it’s true right now
it just matters if you can believe it long enough to get through the night.

next:
change the playlist
change your favorite coffee shop
change the sheets
you deserve cloth that doesn’t hold the memory of her skin.

bolt the doors
stop waiting for the sound of her knock
it is not coming
she is not coming.

do you hear me – she is not coming.

walk alone at night and remember how safe you used to feel.
make the food she never liked to eat.
don’t go to the grocery store near her unless you know she’s at work
it’s too early to risk a run in with a ghost.
make new memories.
make new friends.
get a tattoo
get another dog
go dancing. go to the ocean. go to sleep earlier.

god knows, our bones could all use a little more rest.

and listen.
for real this time
stop trying to cram your heart into the hands of girls with clenched fists
stop trying to cram your heart into the hands of girls with open palms

there’s safe space somewhere between holding on too tightly and letting things blow away in the breeze.

someday you’ll learn this.

but or now, don’t even think of trying to give yourself to the next girl you see
she deserves better than your heart in pieces
she deserves better than your mouth still shaped into an echo of the past
and anyway, it’s time to stop being afraid of your own company

and cry as much as you need to
it’s okay to be all the way broken.
that’s the only way to let the grief do its holy work
so go ahead
cry so much that the rivers flood the oceans
and the forecasters announce that the drought is over

and then be done crying.
be done.

steady up girl
you are way better than this

_________

The post steady up girl {you are way better than this} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The time of grasping tight and trying hard and still, in the end, being forced to let go. Of fingers locked tight and pried stiff from that which you’d hoped to hold for so very long.

It’s been the falling down time. The confused and lost and broken time. The ill-fitting skin that begs to be shed time. The kneecaps bruised from prayer time. The time of keening howl that rises from the center of the earth and pleads, no more. Not now. Please.

The endings, they came to you slowly. Pulling away inch by imperceptible inch. Till suddenly you realized the hand you’d held for years had slipped from yours and you were now reaching across a chasm of relentless empty.

And they came sudden. Hard and fast, so that there you were, without warning, curled in a fetal position on the rough carpet of an unfamiliar hotel room floor, black eyeliner smeared across your face and a lifetime ocean of tears being pulled like the tides from your obliterated heart.

You knew it was coming. You collected the red flags and tucked them back in the corner  – hidden behind stacks of books scrawled with all the stories you told yourself so that you could continue to believe what you desperately needed to believe. Every now and then you took out those flags and counted them, didn’t you? As if by will you could force their numbers to decrease.  You couldn’t.  We never can.

And you. You had no idea. Blinders and rose-colored glasses have been your specialty for years. You’ve got a closet full. They kept you so safe. But on that last day there were no storm clouds, no early warning system to get you to shelter. Just a tornado that swept in from the east and flattened every last thing it touched. Until in the aftermath there was just you, standing in the midst of the rubble of a entire life.

You’ve been left. You walked into strong open arms and found a home that you imagined would be shelter and protection into a beautiful future. You had so much hope and faith, cloaked in all that tender cynicism. And such a hard layer of hurt hiding just beneath your fearlessly optimistic heart. And still, you gave yourself over to the sheer bliss of believing. You didn’t know you still had it in you to be that happy.

And you’ve done the leaving. You’ve walked away from the deepest of loves because you had to break before you were broken again. Because your wrecked runs so deep that there wasn’t enough love in all this world to hold your ache. Because in the end, you had to save yourself. Because, in the end, that’s all any of us can ever do. And nobody knows as well as you, just how much it costs to leave.

But here you are, love. Here WE are.

Still standing. Fierce with the reality of love and loss. Wearing the truth of our hearts on our tattered sleeves. And yes, this one very nearly took us out. And yes, there were days when the darkness was heavy and the climb out of that rabbit hole required us to mine our depths for strength we didn’t even know we had.

And here we are.

Broken open by hope. Cracked wide by loss. Full of longing and grief and the burn of that phoenix fire.   Warrior painted with ashes. Embers from the blaze still clinging to our newborn skin, leaving us forever marked with scars of rebirth.

And just look at you. Heart broken but still beating. Arms empty but still open. Face raised to the sky and giving thanks for the light, even when it hurts your eyes.

My god, you are beautiful.

And this love. This loss. The one you have pulled around you like a blanket that still keeps you warm at night. Even though it is tattered and worn and full of holes and has no shelter to offer. It is a conduit. A bridge that you have unwillingly crossed. On one side who you were, and on the other who you will be. It was a long, lonely walk.

The ache is a ferocious kind of alchemy, the catalyst for transformation. The unanswered call? It creates the space and the silence you needed to learn to once again hear your own voice. The unmet hope gifts a crystalized understanding of your holy need. The longing that still curls in stubbornly hopeful tendrils from your open wounds? These will be your roots, seeking through hard earth to find you exactly what you need to thrive. The grief that took you the ground? It will help form the bedrock of your eventual rise.

So here we are, you and I. Grief is both relentless isolation and a common language that all hearts speak. Look into my sea glass eyes. Let me see your angel face. We come together in our sorrow because loss knows loss and needs no translation. And we come together in our joy, and our hope and our begin again – because always, it is together that we rise.

So yes love, I know this has been a losing time. And I know there were moments you imagined you might not survive. But here you still are, just like me. Here we still stand. Here our hearts still beat. Here we still love.

And in the end, you are here, broken and whole and still alive. Made even more tenderly beautiful in the depths of the shatter. Finding your way back to the truth of your soul and listening to the song of your stubbornly beating heart. And in the end, there is no greater testament to the power of love than this.

 I tell stories with music as well as words.  Listen with me on spotify.
A playlist for the ache || A playlist for the dream ||  A playlist for a hopeful heart

The post broken || open {a love letter for the broken-hearted} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

back to the mat, no exceptions. fall asleep in savasana. cry in pigeon. laugh out loud in happy baby.

mascara and groomed brows, always.  red lipstick when you need it most. save your highest heels for the days you feel the lowest. wear clothing as costume. match it to your mood. always wear perfume, it helps you remember yourself. 

chin up. best foot forward.

find comfort in words and wine and the women who love you. cuddle sleeping children. leave your comfort zone, at least once a week. dance alone in the living room, at least once a day.

guyatri by candlelight. inhale. exhale. inhale again. do the work. do the work. do the work.

spin your hoop, your hips, your dreams. mountain top church every wednesday – never you mind the unmet dreams, you still can kiss the sky.

feet to pavement, music blasting in ears. forget everything but the run.

remember why you are here. remember yourself. remember yourself. remember yourself.

cultivate presence. become fierce about your autonomy. take long drives with the windows down.

bless everything, even your regrets. accept your regrets and allow them to teach you. welcome admiration but decline the pedestal. make friends with your unmet hope and allow it to guide you. kiss your solitude and allow it to work through you.

be infinitely tender. show up for others. live out loud. live as the personification of wide-open-vulnerable-crazy-free. stick your landings.

live in kindness. keep a prayer candle burning for someone at all times. give thanks, every day. practice intentional, loving touch. om namo guru dev namo.

tidy your space before bed. know it as an act of love. make your bed tightly with the brand new sheets. when your naked skin slides inside them for the first time, know it as a gift to yourself.

let the sadness flatten you. stay in bed until it lifts. do not rush your grief. do not rush your grief. do not rush your grief.

honor the divinity that is everywhere. get down with your inner badass. turn off your phone, and your computer and your mind.  find your heart center and send it compassion. see the holiness in everyone you meet. honor it.

know your worth. know your worth. know your worth. accept no less. become familiar with the space where compromise is unkind. nuture your exquisite loneliness. let it teach you.

light candles at every opportunity. touch your inked ribs lightly when you forget who you are.

let yourself be moved. seek out art. surround yourself with artists, creative, deep thinkers, high divers and earth shakers of all kinds. accept gifts offered with whole heart. even when such acceptance is difficult.  

stop behaving.

eat food that nourishes body and soul. cook with those you love. seek perspective. do not chastise yourself for believing and dreaming and trying. open yourself always to love.

know your body as holy, your want as holy and your shattered heart as whole.

continue to believe in lucky pennies, shooting stars and signs from the universe.

get rid of what does not serve. let go of what no longer feels like you – clothing, decorations, people. holding on just fills up space that could be put to much better use. hold tight to that which brings you to your highest realization of self.

ground your feet to the earth, at least once a day. reach for the sky every night. sit in the quiet darkness and let your mind go wild. find quiet peace in the midst of chaos. drink as many lattes as you want.

own your losses, wear them clean. write the letter. speak the truth. unleash your voice.

let the music be your mourning and your memory. let the music be your celebration and your reclamation. let the music be. let it wind it’s way through you. let it all wind it’s way through you. it will anyway, so don’t try to fight.

it’s okay if you fight.

remember your inherently flawed humanity exists nestled side by side with your inborn divinity.

forgive yourself everything.

and make sure you don’t forget buy a lavender plant. fall asleep with sprigs of it on your chest.  breathe it deeply, all the way inside.

it makes all the difference in the world.

The post Buy A Lavender Plant: 115 Ways to Heal Your Own Broken Heart. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“Is the fear of losing something worth the good that having it brings? I think I just live in such a state of fear of being broken by love that I don’t even trust in it anymore.”

Oh love, there are so many things I do not know. So many I will never know. A handful that require giant blinders, protecting me from what I’m not yet willing to know. The list of things of which I am dead certain is far shorter. But of the few tender truths on which I would stake my existence, this is one that I know to be solid and real.

We are here to love, and love hard, every chance that we get. 

A wise woman once gifted me with those words, at a time when I was asking this exact question. She was right, of course. Wise women usually are. Yes, we are here to love. And yes, even with the fear of loss looming around every uncertain corner, it is worth it.

Always.

Love lifts us, giddy and hopeful, to the wildest heights. Sometimes we free fall into a gentle landing. Sometimes we get unceremoniously dumped from 30,000 feet. Sometimes love just up and leaves, and we are obliterated in its wake. Instead of happily ever after, our sunset ride is followed by a massive love hangover. And so we grow wary. Lose faith. Stop trusting. We embrace our cynicism, build walls around our fragile hearts and wail ‘I’ll-be-alone-forever-and-nobody-in-the-whole-wide-world-will-ever-see-me-want-me-love-me-ever’. 

And at our most bruised and tattered these boundaries are protective and wise and true. We need solitude during that shaky period when, in the eerie empty of 3 am darkness, the floor repeatedly falls out from under us. We need seclusion and distance and dark chocolate and dramatically scrawling journal entries and good girlfriends and movies that make us cry. But time and space eventually grant a reprieve, and we are brought back to our hearts. Back to our truth.

And the truth is that we don’t need to trust in love. Or in forever. Or even ourselves or our partners or the universe. We just need to trust in our hearts. Our wise and foolish, brave and battered hearts. Idealistic and cynical, cracked and patched and still – in spite of it all – stubbornly pumping love through our electric souls. Our hearts lead us into love. They lead us out. And then – crazy and hopeful and free– they knock down walls and move mountains to try again.

Our desire for love is a desire to be seen. To be known. To be witnessed as our truest, most naked selves. And not to be loved because of or in spite of or only if. But just to be loved. To be able to say ‘take it or leave it’ and to have our lovers say, “YES. We’ll take it.” All of it. Gladly and willingly and eagerly. Show yourself and you will be safe. Worshiped for the divine being you’ve always been. And you will be loved. And loved and loved and loved. Today and tomorrow and always. Forever.

But this world cannot promise to deliver us the sugar-spun forever we’ve been taught is our destiny. Nor can our lovers. We can’t even promise it to ourselves. And instead of grasping at false guarantees or guarding ourselves by rejecting love and forever entirely – perhaps what we really need is a new paradigm.

How about embracing a different definition of always or forever? One that is just as long as this moment. This breath. This heartbeat. So that your only task is to live this moment fully. Breathe this breath deep into your soul. Feel this heartbeat pump life through your body and into the world. And then live and breathe and feel the next one and the next one and the next.

Fear only comes from the projection of what has not happened yet. What may happen tomorrow or next week or next year or in our next lifetime. What may never happen. Fear is an imaginary dragon hell-bent on keeping you small. But your heart has done battle and survived. Your love is a fierce warrior priestess who refuses to be contained. You are what is real, here and now.

The present. Today . This moment. This is all we can know. All we hold. All we can ever promise. Anything before or after is a beautiful, wild, unknowable mystery. All of future is uncertain. All of love is uncertain. All of life is uncertain. What is ever guaranteed but change? And this need not feel unreliable or cause anxiety or be labeled cynicism or distrust or inability to commit.

Instead, let it feel like freedom and presence and truth.

Here’s the truth. We love wide open. We love people who deserve it and people who don’t. We love people who have held us through our darkest nights and people who have left us for dead by the side of the road. We love people who have earned our trust and people who should never have had it in the first place. And it cracks us, wide open, over and over again. Sometimes that love is too much. Our wounds cannot close when love keeps wrenching them open again and again. And we want it to stop. Beg it to stop. Please. Please. Please. No more. In our own moments of 3 am reckoning – whenever they arrive – we plead for something different. Something more contained. Something safer and easier and far, far more gentle.

But love is a risk, sweet girl. It always has been. It always will be.   And it is the most necessary, the most brutal, the most honest risk we ever take. Do what we will; our hearts will not be closed. They are meant to open. They are made for this. So are you love, it’s what you’re here for. It’s what we’re all here for.

Of that brief list of things that I know to be solid and true, here is another:

We are all broken by love. Broken and built. Built and broken. We are architects of unselfish desire. We are a lifesaving demolition team. We lay the foundation, we bring it crashing down around us, we kneel in the wreckage and scream the primal scream of the damned. And still, still, we love. And we become the most breathtaking mosaic of all of our fragments, all of our love, all of the pieces of our kaleidoscope hearts.

And this is so damn beautiful that it demands to be held to the light.

Hold it to the light, love.

You. Your precious heart. All of the loves that you hold. This is what is real. This is what is true. This is enough. So go ahead, give yourself over to love.

Eyes Lifted. Heart Open. Spirit Wild and Free. Forever.

The post Uncommon Sense: Go ahead, give yourself over to love appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.