Okay. So it might one day happen that you’re rushing through the grocery store on a school night, somewhere on your hastily scratched list between fire-roasted tomatoes and PB&J fixins’, just rolling the cart and contemplating life and what kind of cereal to buy.

And by you, of course, I mean me. And by me, I really mean all of us. Because that’s how these things work. That’s why we tell stories, ‘cause we’re all more the same than we are not, and it helps to find a home in the words of another.

But on this particular day in this particular aisle in this particular store, a song starts playing that has only told one story for longer than you can remember. You stop, can of organic tomatoes midway between shelf and cart, heart on the floor under the wheels of the cart of that exhausted looking mom and her sticky faced toddler rolling down the aisle toward the granola bars and fruit snacks.

It happens, it does, in the achy times. The holders of memory, — the songs and spaces and snippets of moments — they seem to be chasing us, reminding us of what was and what is and the big gaping hole in between the two. They come and find us, and we end up standing where we are, grocery store or concert hall or school or office or auto mechanic, rushing to cram our hearts back into our chests before anyone notices.

Right then, it’s possible that you could crumble into a pile of blame and self-recrimination. It’s possible that the sadness could take you over, because the loss, it is real and (on a good day) you’re way past the place of blaming yourself for having really big feels.

And listen, if it comes to that there’s probably a corner over by the organic lettuce that you could go hide in to shed some tears, but there are kids to feed and work to do, and reasons enough to soldier on. And besides, you’re trying to stretch this time.

Not trying, love. You ARE stretching. Because there is nothing else to be done.

So now you get to practice. Stretch past the way it’s always been, past the myths and repetition and separation. Stretch past the lies that love looks or feels a certain way or follows a timeline or shows up when and how we want it to. Past the self-protection that wants to shut it all down. Stretch past the really small idea that you ever know what is possible or what will happen or what the universe has in store.

While you’re at it, stretch WAY past the voices that have told you that the damage is too great for you to love and be loved and have love and know love.

Because that lie is the most wicked one of all.

And you, dear, you’re not just looking for a new way, you’re working for one. Walking on purpose toward something that looks like real healing. Something inside of you that dares to show up and stay steady and sustain. Something with courage and a lionheart. So instead of letting that song take you over, you take a breath right now, and you do what you’ve gotta do.

Focus in on the wisdom instead. Ask yourself your own best question.

What do I know to be true, right now?

And then answer (yes, right there in that grocery store aisle). No time like the present and the song is still playing, after all.

You can’t hold on to what isn’t, of course, that’s true. But you can dig deep into your gut and determine what it is you believe. Not the beliefs that landed you here (those were based on some seriously self-sabotaging bullshit), but the ones that live deeper than that.

You can ask yourself what the highest manifestation of love feels like when you’re wide open and ready, and you can channel that with all you have. You can slip-slide all sneaky like past the hurt that likes to close things down and expand into the open space on the other side. You can remember that a wise man once told you that you’d be happier when you quit trying to make meaning out of everything. And that a wise woman reminded you that the hardest thing of all was to stop being at war with yourself.

So stop being at war with yourself. Just for this moment.

You can remember that you’re here to love, and the only way you ever want to fight for anything is with unclenched fists and a wide-open heart. And yeah, open hands are good at letting go. But sometimes letting go is the only thing (fuckery of a cliche that it may be) that allows for the fullness of truth and the only way to allow space for a thing to return.

And you know what else open hands are good for? Grabbing possibility and holding on tight when the time comes.

You can remind yourself that you’ve written your own instruction manual many a time before, finding almost decade-old words in the deepest recesses of your brain, floating toward you as if delivered. Back then you thought you were writing to another, rather than freezing in time for yourself to breadcrumb your way back to one day in the canned goods aisle, but no matter. They are here now for a reason.

“Find your way to living in that sweet spot – between grief and acceptance – welcoming the ache but not nurturing it, holding the angst but not feeding it – and you’ll come to a different place.“

So when this happens, because in high likelihood it will, you’re going to have to put down that can of fire roasted tomatoes and you’re gonna have to reach deeper and deeper into the place where the love lives. The place that is the foundation and bedrock of you. The one that trusts and believes and hopes and knows. Sink down into that, because I promise it is here.

What do you believe? What do you know to be true? What does your heart tell you is still possible? Just how big can you love?

Whatever the answer to the last question, I guarantee is exponentially bigger than you can imagine. It always is.

You are here to love, and to heal (you’ve written all those words to yourself under the guise of writing for others too). The world knows it and mirrors it back to you every damn day. Give yourself grace for not always remembering, but deep down, I know you know it too.

The outcome of love (this or any other)? Not yours to know, nor control, nor wrangle into submission. Love is a slippery thing, and also when it’s time to stop sliding, all you can do is root down and hold your ground.

So find your roots. You’re gonna need ‘em.

So, what is yours? That can of organic fire roasted tomatoes and the cart full of nourishment. The eyes able to see the truth, the wisdom that knows it is time to seek healing.

And yes, the heart. YOUR heart. Fumbling and messy and wise. The heart that finally knows fully what it wants. And if you get steady enough with that, there’s not a sad song in the world that can shake you.

So pay for your groceries. Load up the car. Return to your home and sit down to type. Because moments of wisdom, they come and they go.

But a story written lasts forever.

The post A Story Written Lasts Forever (a self-talk story for the heartachy times) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

This is me raw. No makeup, no attempt to pretty up. Just me, bare and real in the morning light. 

Sometimes I need to show up like this, to remember that I can. 

And today I’m not going to carefully craft a post, any more than I wanted to put on my game face, because that’s not where the energy lies. 

Today my heart is pounding truth, and I want to say every cliche thing I can think of to shake us all the fuck awake. Today I want to remind you of what we’ve all written or known or spoken at one time or another and what we all too easily forget. 

It’s all too short, my love, too brief, too rare, too delicate, too transient, too impossible to hold. The whole of this life, our loves, our spirits, and souls and bodies and beings. 

Here and then gone. Just like that.

We get to have what we have, and then we don’t anymore, and sometimes there is warning, and we can prepare, and sometimes there is not, and one tsunami of a wave knocks us over and tumbles us up and spits us out on the sand. 

But no matter how it goes down, love, none of this lasts forever. 

We don’t know how long we get to be here. We don’t know how long we get to love, or laugh or dance or sing or write or cry or show up for those who need us. And while we are here, we’re almost guaranteed to fuck up every last one of those things, just by virtue of being so impossibly, frustratingly human, fragile assholes that we are. 

So my god, dive into the cliche with me, right now. Sit for a second and remember how slippery our hold on all of this is. Remember how fucking blessed you are to love and be loved, in every second of every day. 

Remember that nothing is promised to you, but everything is possible. 

Don’t act out of fear or scarcity. Not out of anxiety or grasping. Just act because it’s all too precious and all too delicate and all too important not to give our all and our everything. 

If you love someone, good fucking god, say it and say it and say it again. 

If you need to leave to save yourself, then leave and do not look back. 

If your heart and soul are forever connected to someone, and you know it in your bones, for the love of all that is holy, fight for them with all you have. 

If there is a place or a person or a dream or a love calling to your soul – move mountains to get to where you need to be. 

If you’ve lost yourself along the way, claw your way back to your own beating heart with the last bit of strength in your body. 

If you have work you need to do in the world, or a story you need to tell, or a truth that needs to be spoken. Do it or tell it or speak it like it matters more than anything else. 

Right now, I can’t think of anything more holy than this. No larger imperative, nor deeper truth. 

Show up. Like you never have before. Fuck the protection and old wounds. To hell with saving energy for another day, or letting our doubts or scars win the round.

There’s no time for that.

To hell with it. Just go out and love, as hard as you can. Be brave. Reach out and hold on tightly to what matters. Do it like you might not ever get a chance again. 

Because you might not. Do you hear me? You might not.

The post be brave. love hard. dive into the cliche. (this life is too short) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“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.

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.

so when you find a poem like this
-and you’ll know by the
chill that rises along your arms and travels
down your spine
the one that pulses truth
the one that says
this poem may one day be the
one thing that stands between you
and the siren song of the shadowlands –
when you find a poem like that
write it by hand on the prettiest paper
careful cursive, just like they taught you in grade school
fold it carefully
edges lined up with precision
make the crease lines just so.
take it out
every so often
even when everything
is perfect
and tomorrow looks like infinity
and you swear you will never
sleep alone again
but just in case
memorize the words
and the words between the words
you may need them again
quite likely, dear one, you will need them again
and again
on blue black nights at 3am
and the days when the sun has baked your bones dry and
still the rains won’t come
and when the ground is too hard for rest
but not steady enough
to rise from
when you call and call and they do not come home.
when those days come
you won’t remember right away
so deep will you be in the sweet mess of grief
but eventually you will remember
and when you do
take the poem out of your back pocket
unfold it carefully
smooth the creases and lay it flat.
brush your hair and your teeth
maybe put on some lipstick
whatever it takes to
remember your beauty and worth
then take a breath
because even though it seems impossible
that a poem could have so much power
it is quite entirely possibly that
this poem will
remind you of truth
when heart and ego are wrecked and ruined
it will sustain you
when food loses it’s lure and the air is so heavy
you stay in bed until noon.
this poem will be talisman and guide
on the journey back home to yourself.
so give it a chance
what is there to lose, anyway?
you have already lost it all, after all
you were holding so tightly and you lost, anyway
so go ahead
read it aloud
through your tears.
give it the cadence
that is the exact opposite
of the love song you don’t think
you’ll ever be able to hear again without crying
speak in in a voice that sounds nothing like the one you used to whisper her name
this is where you get your voice back
roll that poem around in your mouth
suck the letters between your teeth
blow them out like rings of smoke in winter air.
take them into your fists and throw them into the darkness
after all
there is a reason your body quivered
when you read this poem for the first time
there is a reason you listened to me
and took the time to write it out and
that you saved it for today
there is a reason you remembered to do this.
so dammit – read the poem.
put your whole being into that poem
breath and body and blood and guts and tears.
read it again
and again
let the refrain rise
until the truth of it is a light composed of syllables
until the light is a bullet proof vest made of words
until the bullet proof vest is enough to protect you from your own fury
until your fury becomes the vast heat of power
until the power lodges in your belly, red hot and burning true
and then, and only then
howl that poem at the night sky with every ounce
of fire you have ever known
call it back to you as if you own it
and then stop and breathe for a minute.
slow and steady.
and see if you don’t feel differently.

this is what it is
my bravely broken one
to let a poem save you.

The post to let a poem save you appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.david whyte

This past week – hell, this past month – it has been intense. Everyone I’ve talked to says the same. Of the deep sadness and the storm of anger and the descent to the underworld. Of the tears and the anger and the heartbreak and the grief.

I don’t know if it is the stars or the planets or the gods and goddesses demanding our attention. I don’t know if we’ve held too much on lockdown or poured it out until we are empty or ignored the howl of the wild that has called us home.

But I know it’s been a wild ride. Disorienting. Dismantling. Undone and undone and undone.  And I know that so many of us have been mired in the muck of it. 

I know so many of us, myself included, still are.

For me, it was waters rising without notice and levees bursting and ocean rushing in fast and hard. And instead of swimming, like I always have, I went under, swallowed salt, spun in the surf till the kelp tangled my legs and held me under long past the point my lungs screamed for air.

No mistake, it took me out.

And I let it – because sometimes there is nothing to be done but let grief have its way.

Even when you don’t know precisely why you’re grieving, or why the ghosts picked just now to dial up their haunting. Even if you thought you were doing just fine and you had no idea that you were holding that much pain and that much lonely and that much empty locked up in your bones.

You don’t know until you do.

And when you do it’s too late for it to be stopped. And so you play the sad songs and you drive down the highway at 2am paying visits to past lives and you ask why? and what have i done?  And ‘please, just bring her home’. You scream your loneliness and your rejection and your ‘it wasn’t supposed to be this ways’ at the moon.  

And that moon? He doesn’t do a damn thing – just looks on with all his brilliant and steady wisdom – shining his light on all that hurts.

And when you stumble into the bathroom and gaze in the mirror, you barely recognize yourself.  Eyes red and swollen almost shut. Body weary and aching and empty and yet so full of the deep well of sadness. Head screaming and heavy as if you drank your weight in whiskey instead of spilling an ocean of tears.

Where does solidity lie when everything is taken up by the free spin of a nameless and borderless grief? How do we ground when we are groundless?

The only answer. We don’t.  

We don’t, because we can’t.

This is what it is to be brilliantly, achingly alive. Alive in the shatter. Alive in the empty. Alive under that 3am moon – the one who holds all the answers and yet won’t answer a single question. This is what it is to belong to things we cannot possibly understand. This is what it is to trust in the terrifying wisdom of our own becoming.

And so, If you are alone tonight – like I am alone. If the ache and the empty in your chest feels cavernous and so vast that the words that could save you are ricocheting in deep space – no way out and nothing that that can fill you.

If you are crying or screaming or puking or on your knees, grasping at handfuls of dirt.
If you are emptied of all but the keen edge of longing. If you are unsure how you got here and have no idea how to find your way home.

If you couldn’t name a home on the map or in another to save your own damn life.

If you crave kind touch until the surface of your skin hurts.  Crave it the way you you need air to breathe.

If it is dark and cold and time stretches before you impossibly open.

If he hasn’t called or she won’t return. If they said forever but they forgot to mention the expiration date. If you cry out in the dark and nobody responds.

If the one you love is in the next room, and still you sink into a loneliness deeper than you’ve ever known.

If you’ve crossed oceans upon oceans looking for what you’ve lost and the boat has capsized and there is no way to stitch old love notes and a pile of regrets into a life vest that will help you survive the storm.

If you have gotten in the car and driven for hours, visiting the signposts of your past like so many ghosts in the night.

If you have cried, these last few nights, the way I have cried.

Tears that open you ragged and raw, so many tears that they run wild, so many tears that they cover everything. Like the rain here in the desert runs through the washes because the earth is too parched to hold it all.

If you can no longer hold it all – like i could no longer hold it all. Then go ahead. Let it out. 
Give yourself over to the grief. Let it bend you, the way only grief can bend you. Knees to earth and hands to heavens. Let it be hard and let it be beautiful.

Sometimes we are living and life is full and there is so much goodness and still – the hard hits and when it hits it takes everything we have. It does not need reason or justification. It does not fit in a container or explain itself. It is just is. The way only grief can be. The totality of it is the point.

Grief half-lived is grief unfinished. And make no mistake, it will return.

And so if you are feeling it. All the way in and out and all around. If the air is heavy and even that strong silent moon has gone dark.

If right now this is how it is for you, know this.

You are not alone.

I’m right here with you. We are all in this together. In the sticky mess of it. In the ugly and the messy. In the wild spiral. In the inevitable path to acceptance that feels so far away from the sweetness of redemption.

You are not alone. In the weakest moments. When you know you shouldn’t, but you beg again. When you know you shouldn’t but you picked up that drink. When you know you shouldn’t but you send the text anyway because it’s the only honest thing to do – emergency flare into the dark. When that fight or that surrender is all we have to remind us we still have agency when it seems there is nothing left to choose.

Even then – there are candles lit in the dark for you. I’m playing the saddest song and it’s filling this space and I’ve saved room for you here. There are soft pillows and warm blankets and you can lay your head here on my chest and find my breathing to lull you to a place where you can finally rest.

Because in our pain we must find each other – mirror to mirror the grace of our shared humanity, the stunningly broken beauty of our shared grief.

And you can let your grief see my grief and let our tears mingle into some kind of healing alchemy, and you’ll know what i know.

That we are never alone.

I promise. You and me?  We are never, ever alone.

“We’re all just walking each other home”
~ram dass

The post you are not alone appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Even though everything smells like love and loss and burning.
Start with this.

You are here and it hurts.
It hurts because of all you’ve lost.
Your heart is a 3am siren, driving through that sucker punch bruise of a night sky.
Never a sign of anything good.

Here, nothing feels good.
Now you’ve begun.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy.
There is not enough air in the room.
The quilt on your bed is eight hundred pounds of weight keeping you from movement.
There is no going back

There is never any going back.
Now you’re getting somewhere.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon.
He is listening but does nothing.
There is nothing he can do.

You are on your knees in the grass,
clutching handfuls of earth.
This is progress.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you
It is the darkest night you’ve ever lived through
You’ve lived through.
You’ve lived.

Do you hear me?
You live.
You make it.
You survive.

There is a faint tinge of light on the horizon and you made it.
Now we’re finally moving forward

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you and there is a grief wail building inside of you.
Through the earth, through your toes,
Your legs, your belly, your chest and lungs,
The reach of your arms, your curled fists.
Your neck
Your jaw
Your face
The top of your head.

Have you ever seen a building implode?
Yes. This is you.
Now you know you have begun the work of healing.

You are here and it hurts and the world feels impossibly heavy and you are shouting bargains at the moon and there is nobody else to hear you and there is a grief wail building inside of you and you crumbling.
The ground shakes as her own broken pieces slide rough against each other.
There is a red earth landslide and everything is tumbling into the sea.
On the ocean, a wall of water rushes toward land.
Disaster cannot be prevented, only survived or not.
The earth knows well the pain of things that cannot be fixed.

Your pain cannot be fixed.
There is no shortcut through this.
This knowledge is the key to everything that will come next.
There is more to come.

Sometimes healing looks like falling apart.
Sometimes falling apart is the path to what can be built.
Sometimes, we go through the darkest nights and there is nobody but the moon to hear.
He always listens.
Now you listen.

There is not enough air in the room but you are breathing.
There is nobody here but you are held.
You have broken and the world is breaking and we will always rebuild.

Do you hear me, love?
We will always rebuild.

The post We will always rebuild (a poem for the grieving) appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Here, I am at home.

 I am always and never at home. 

The rain is coming down outside. Hammering onto this parched desert soil with a force that makes windows turn waterfall and employees frantically try to block the flow of water rushing in under the double doors in front of me.

People walk in – drenched – plastic bags hastily pulled over heads. The scattered few who listened to the forecast and brought umbrellas look vaguely smug.

Us desert folks, we don’t prepare for downpours like this. We pride ourselves on the resilience it takes to grow roots in hard-packed soil. But the free flow of water? It’s a rare and wondrous thing.

It’s a long, long way to the ocean from where I sit.

I swallow the last long-since-cool dregs of my latte. A deep, long held sigh releases. My shoulders drop.

My wild heart, she is weary today.

I am swirling with thoughts of all the ways that we break. Feeling this in my bones. All hard bite and liquid surrender. How life does not give us a single blessed guarantee. How the foundation of all that we build is this wild and vast unknowing.

How, in the end, all there is for us to do is choose where to stake our faith and our trust. Not because we are promised anything or can rely on external security. But simply because we want, and that want asks us to choose.

Because want always demands choice.

Choice. To place our feet upon a path. To walk through the unknowing with all the ferocity and grace we can muster in our weary and hopeful hearts.

For the moment, the rain has let up. Even a storm needs to rest. Seeks pause while it decides what it is that it will become and where it should become that thing that it is destined to be. 

There’s a wild sort of beauty in the sky now. It’s all potential and possibility and life and destruction and elemental force. Letting its own want push it in the direction of choice.

And here on the ground? All there is to do is to wait.

To move through the world and make our best guess of where safe ground lies. To decide how to best move ourselves in that direction. Or to choose exposure. The vulnerability of staying in place, walking out under that ominously low gray sky and knowing that there are times you have to risk in order to fully receive that which brings life.

And even in that, sometimes the forecasted storm never arrives. We batten down the hatches and brace ourselves – cover the windows and pound up makeshift walls. And then, without fanfare or drama, the storm decides that destiny calls it elsewhere, or to become something other than expected.

Sometimes the battle we brace for is actually surrender. Sometimes the security we seek isn’t at all what we need. Sometimes it’s the embrace of the unknowing that delivers us to grace – however wild and untamed and raw and real that grace may be.

And sometimes the storm comes. It hits hard. And when it does, we cannot find shelter. We are swept up in its force under cracked open heavens. And there is nothing to do but let the flood waters rise and yes – sometimes things break and sometimes we break and sometimes it seems that the damage is catastrophic and that nothing will ever be the same again.

And sometimes this is true. Nothing will be the same again. It can’t be – not in the wake of a storm like that. Things are uprooted that cannot be regrown. Things come apart, are ripped from their moorings, are carried along by forces beyond their control. And even when the waters recede we return to find the landscape changed. To find nothing as it was before.

 Sometimes nothing can ever be as it was before.

To live through this is to be acutely awake of all the ways that we break.

To live at all is to be acutely aware of all the ways that we break.

The light changes now. The deep of the storm mixes with the bright edge of what is next. It’s the kind of light that holds promises, the hard and true kind. The kind of light that stirs something deep. The kind of light that only comes after.

Me and my wild and weary heart? We walk outside under that hard promise of a sky. Where everything seems sharply defined. The edge and the center. The brutal and the soft. The broken and the healed and the whole.

We spin slow, right in time with the wind that tangles hair and the cadence of beat and the pulse of light. And we make a promise. To honor all the ways that we break and all the ways that we knit back together. And we bow in reverence to the storm and her teachings. To honor the way that even this far from the sea, the water can still wash everything clean.

The way the water will always wash everything clean.

I return inside and sit with the blank page in front of me. Right now I am called to only two things. The words ready to live on the page and the memory of her hand on my lower back this morning as we walked again into the unknowing.

And I am reminded, once again – that to live at all is to break and to break is to make space for becoming. And in that becoming, all of the rest is made purposeful and good and true.

In the weary and grace and the storm and the raw and promises and the redemption and the light that illuminates this wild and vast unknowing. Without fail. Every single time.

Blessed be.

The post All the ways that we break appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

there is no way to save this.

there
is
no
way
to
save
this.

the ending
was written
long before
you ever heard
the tentative starting notes
no last ditch efforts
no swan song redemption
there is no rescuing
to be done
here

so, let it fall
let it all come down
crumble like earth quake
like forest blaze
like armageddon times
stand amidst the rubble
with trembling legs
and stardust skin

survey the damage
hold your grief close
usher it inside
name it truth
and go ahead
let it twist you
it has to
there is no other way

there
is
no
other
way

fall to the ground
let it take you down
on your knees now
so that the debris presses deep
into tender bone
marks your skin
with the harsh truth of
never again

because this?
this was fated
like the falling was fated
like the bliss was fated
like that night where
infinity touched your soul
was going to happen
no matter what
you could not have changed things

you
could
not
have
changed
things.

it’s not just good things
and beginnings that are meant to be
sometimes
endings
are written first
and we live
just to catch up
to the inevitable
finish

you know this
you know it lover
you held on
you repaired
you patched
and you kept it all together
as long as you could

but
now it is time
to let it fall
to release fists clenched
tight around emptiness
to open
to let go
to admit
that it is done

now
it
is
finally
done

forgive yourself
this ending
this aching unmet dream
do not name it
failure
or
catastrophe
it is not
another mistake
for you to own

it simply
is what
it is.
it is what must be
what was always
going to be.

lift your eyes
let it all out
all the full moon howl
and the primal wail and
the grief
you’ve kept locked
in bones.
let it all come
down now

let
it
all
come
down

release your walls
now
invite the potential
of wide
open spaces
all the way in
and know that
after endings
come the beginnings of things.

begin again, lover

always
always

begin again.

The post always, always, begin again 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.