“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.

Dear one,
As women we often anchor ourselves to all the solid things around us. And then, without warning, we find ourselves in a place where nothing is certain. There is no longer anything to tie ourselves to.  Nothing to create an illusion of security in an insecure world.

This is the time to find the anchor within ourselves.

Grab a mirror. Look at yourself until it begins to feel uncomfortable. Until you want to turn your head. Fix your gaze on the woman who looks back. Now look past the surface and see all the women inside her. Name your motherline. All the strong women who have come before you. All the women who have lived through their own personal hells and joys.

Your sweet grandmother. Your amazing mother. Your own fierce self. Meditate on each one, their strength and what they passed to you. Honor all that they have given to bring you here, all that you have given to become who you are.

Now take that overwhelming passion inside you and harness it. 

It is valuable and true and you have spent too long offering it to everyone but yourself. Gather the energy and nurture the spark that lives within. This is divine creatrix power. This is the birthplace of all creation. Pull in everything that you have always given to others and hold it close. Coax it to the surface. Claim it as your own. Hold it in your center until you hum with it. Until it burns. Until it begins the necessary process of distilling you down to your essence. Your core. Your one true thing. You.

Now you are ready to really begin.

There is no prescribed path. No steps I can give you to deliver you to some neatly anticipated outcome. But we begin with a question.

What brings you to your center, to the root of you?

If you don’t yet know (and it’s okay if you don’t) you will have to try and try and try until you find it.

Get messy. You can do yoga and dance and write and meditate to dubstep until the beat pounds through your bloodstream. Get out the paint and canvas and markers and glitter and glue and see what comes.Hula hoop until your hips spin with enough energy to recreate the universe. Spray paint the truth of your heart across your living room wall. Go deep into the heart of the natural world. Get hopelessly lost and then perfectly found in the middle of the deepest forest or put on your best boots and drive somewhere the streets hold no memories and walk until you find yourself. Talk to the birds and wild beasts. Scream at the sky. Change everything. Write and write and write until you cry. Cry and cry and cry until you’re empty. Find a downtown club and dance till you sweat and ache.

Strip yourself down. This is not a one-time thing.

Here’s the truth. It’s going to be uncomfortable. 

You’ll move in and out of truth and peace and beauty and breakdown. You’ll want to run away from yourself. You’ll want to run toward the first thing that offers external comfort. But hold steady. Just like you’d want a lover to do. Nurture that inner fire.  Stay there. Right there.

Bring it home.

This journey lasts until the end of your life. You will find yourself over and over again, and the woman you discover will be both new and familiar every time. You’ll know. And then you’ll forget. You’ll feel just as lost and without anchor as you do right now. But you’ll begin to see the beauty in the middle of the broken pieces. Each time it will get easier and easier to remember.

Easier and easier to find your way back to the purest essence of you.

Every time you lose your way, just come back to the mirror. Face yourself again. See the woman who gazes back at you, with all that she has and all that she’s lost along the way. Learn to recognize her truth and beauty and wisdom. Greet her with kindness. Offer her love and thank her for her wisdom and service.  Smile slowly.

And begin again.

The piece above originally appeared, in edited form, in the first issue of Amulet Magazine.

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: Harness Your Divine Creatrix Power appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

~~~~~~~

You wake up.  The sky is blue. The children laugh.  You forget to clear the breakfast dishes and the honey dries into sticky lacquer on the cover of the library book.  There are only hours separating you from the implosion.  You do not yet know this.  You may sense the approaching tempest, the remnant of some primitive instinct whispering losslossloss in the spaces just below the wind.  But you do not predict that this is the day.  You do not know to savor the aching sweetness of the final moments.  We never do.  Ignorance is not protection; this is the way of things.

But with a sharp crystal shatter it is done.  It’s a harsh slice, a vacuum of undoing.  Reality settles cold in the vastness of newly empty spaces. There you stand, dead center, eye of storm.  Face lifts to the heavens. Tender kneecaps find solid earth.  The body bends in a supplication that is the exact opposite of prayer.  Shrapnel of unwritten love letters spins the room round.  Scattered shards catch light and glitter with the fierce tenacity of things that will never be. It’s all slow motion now. There is a reckless beauty in the breakdown; this is the way of things.

You have stood here before.   You will stand here again.  In goodbye there is no first time or last time.  There is only this time, and the wrenching ache of it.   We are born with the knowing that this will come and come and come again.  The muscle memory of heartache holds no comfort.  Preparation is futile. Practice does not make perfect.  It is still – it will always be – gasping breath and primal howl and bleeding out from the places we hold most sacred.  The force of it will flatten, guaranteed.  Heartbreak has its own agenda; this is the way of things.

You pick up the pen, a desperate purge of words. You bleed letters now.  You always do when it comes to this. It’s a bitter end scrawl on neat lined paper.  You look down. Thick black ink seeps from pen, covering the soft pad of fingers, the raised veins, the curve of bone.  Darkness spreads across the page.  Your hand and just-written words are obliterated by stain.  It is fitting that truth flow has left body marked and words concealed.  It will eventually wash away.  The visible stain and the slow fade to forgetting; this is the way of things.

You stand later that night, on a street wet from rain.  Arms wrap around frail body, a desperate attempt to hold yourself whole.  Hazy streetlights glow, bone truth echoes in the damp night air. You look up into windows containing lives that could have been yours. But things fall apart.  Lives continue their trajectories without you. The heart gains new fault lines with each loss.  They slip against each other, and things fall down.   When the ground stops moving we patch things together as best we can. We are all earthquakes waiting to happen.  Parallel lives and the aftermath of disaster; this is the way of things.

And it finally comes, as it must.  That cry from your deep, ancient center.  The gash of loss. The frantic exile from skin and want and home. The full moon calls forth your grief song now.  Tear off your clothes, light fire to dreams.  It’s just you and the wolves and the unseen wild things.  The world spins on, – it always has and always will. But you belong right now to the exquisite otherness of loss. Give yourself over to it.  It is the only choice.   There is no place for you amongst the tame, pretty things. You must follow the spiral down.  The inevitable descent into the underworld; this is the way of things.

But dawn comes. Shadows lift.  You are shivering.  Naked.  Alone.  As alone as you have ever been.  The sun rises.   The earth’s waking rhythms are a call to rebirth.  From the ashes you emerge.  There is a tender ferocity about you now.  A solid core of strength at the center of grief’s deep well.  It is true, you think, that freedom is the only language our hearts know how to speak.

It is true that there are things in life that can never be explained to those who have not lived them.  It is true that loss is sometimes the only way to become more of yourself.    It is true that survival sometimes only comes from inviting a million different deaths. It is true that the first notes of that song will always transport you to a state of breathless worship.  It is true that you can be loved in a way that changes everything, and find that everything has remained exactly the same.   Layers of truth are always hidden in the folds of great loss; this is the way of things.

Your skin is a glorious road map of scars gifted by love and by devastation.   Your heart is inked with the essence of unspoken words and stories yet to find life.   Your breath will always remember what it was to love without translation. Your bones are the only things that know the whole truth.

The horizon calls to you now, speaks your true name. The name you were given by the universe the day you were born and the name that is whispered by the wind with every rebirth.   The name your spirit recognizes as belonging only to you. You walk forward as if compelled.

You walk eternally, hopefully forward.   This, always, is the way of things.

The post This is the way of things appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

***

“Are you happy?” they ask. The question comes from concern, a need for affirmation, desperation for a guarantee that they will one day reclaim that word for themselves.

Happy, I ponder? And try as I might, I can’t make the word fit. I let it roll around on tongue, slow and mellow. It feels foreign, belonging to another time and space. Perhaps I left happy sitting on that red couch with my two soul sisters, warmed by the afternoon desert sun, knowing nothing of the seismic shifts to come.

Happy is a sweet, pretty word. It is the domain, I think, of people that have not yet had shit happen. Life is layers upon layers of brilliance and pain and loss and gain and grief and guilt and celebration and rapture. Happy does not have enough substance or grit to encompass a life torn down and an existence built from the rubble.

***

The ache never leaves, you know. You just tuck it away tenderly and hold it close because sometimes the ache is the only thing left of something that was once beautiful.

Sometimes I want to tell them things – the women who write and ask if I am happy, or if it was worth it, or if I would do it again.

I want to tell them that someday you might see him in some random coffee shop, enjoying an Americano. And you will exchange meaningless small talk as if you couldn’t trace the map of his scars with your eyes closed.

I might say that it will be all that you can do to stop yourself from reaching up to touch his cheek;  your fingers aching for the memory of that eternal five o’clock shadow. You’ll want to tell him this, but instead you will fill up with unshed tears. They will build in your chest and explode – a million tiny pinpricks of painful light blooming outwards  and trailing like fireworks across your skin.  Because that touch will not be yours to have. Those tears not yours to cry. Those words not yours to speak. Not out loud. Not to him. Not in that random coffee shop over a steaming Americano.

And I would say that this ache is not the ache of mistake, or regret or quick-let-me-go-backwards-and-do-it-over-differently.  Not necessarily. Sometimes it is just the ache of an unexpected reminder of what was good, and the nostalgia brought on by a table that holds one cup of coffee, not two. And you welcome that ache because you have learned to welcome all that is real and true, even when it hurts. Because it is yours to have and know and hold. Because what is real is also solid, regardless of all the rest.

And when you walk across the room to sit at your own table, only a few steps separating this life from that one, you will finally understand. Happy is no longer enough to contain the totality of this life that you have claimed.

***

Will you have happy moments? Oh yes. Moments of such pure and simple happiness that you will be made still and humble and profoundly grateful. Moments so sweet and so good that you will bubble over with childish giggles.

But more often the moments will too vast to be contained. Moments so brilliantly beautiful that your heart will pound with their magnitude. So bittersweet that your heart will ache with their complexity. So life-altering that for a moment or two or ten, your heart will appear to stop entirely. Because this is life. The moments and the moments between moments and the moments after the moments when you see the world with clarity so brilliant it is blinding.

This life? Sweet baby jesus, it’s a wonder. It’s an intense, magical, steal the breath from your lungs, bring you to your knees roller coaster ride. It demands reverence and humility and penance and gratitude shouted loud from mountaintops. It will have you wailing at gods you don’t believe in, scratching for a hold in dirt too dry to plant yourself. It will bring you to the gift of your humanity and the core of your tenacity and the very center of your grief. It will leave you rejoicing in the kindness of strangers, in the devotion of friends, in the way your lover moves your body to rapture. It will teach you to stake fierce claim to what you know to be true and to be infinitely tender with your precious heart when your truth slips from your grasp.

And sometimes you will be blissed out. Or sad.  Or pissed.the.fuck.off. And you will grieve. And laugh. And love. And experience ecstasy. And come face to face with demons and fight the battle of your life. And at some point along this wild ride, someone may ask you if you are happy.

And you’ll smile and say simply “Yes.  I’m happy.”  And you’ll dive into the depths of your magnificent life, knowing that you are so much more. And so much less. Just so much.

So very, very much.

***

“The red couch is still in my shed”, she told me on my last visit to her home. “It’s totally trashed, probably ruined beyond repair.  I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it, you know?”

“Thank you”, I said “That makes me happy”.

The post Happy appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.