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It’s the truth that sets you free, right?  Coming clean, that’s what I preach.

I don’t always tell you everything. Did you think I did?

You want the truth of me right now? Tonight? Should I tell you that right now there is no compassionate mother in me. I am snarling and impatient and snappy. They pull me from this. And this is what compels me.  I don’t want to mother. Not right now.

I’m not supposed to say that. It doesn’t fit within the selfless narrative I am called to embody.

Right now I want a shack by the beach and I want to create and I want to be fed green grapes and bittersweet chocolate by pretty girls with nothing better to do. And I want to toss back shots of whiskey at an old bar with men whose skin has been worn to leather from a life on the sea. I want to weave my way steady to the bow of a boat and let the spray encrust me with grit and the waves fill me with the sound of home. And then I want to return, to my weathered wood cottage, and turn the music up loud and light incense and candles and cigarettes and lap dance for the muse until she puts the fuck out for me every single time I ask. Because it’s hot, what I’m making, and even she – fickle as she can be – doesn’t want to miss a second of this flame.

I’m probably not supposed to say that either.

I want a bike with a basket big enough to get the food I need, and the chocolate and the whiskey and the wine and cigarettes.  I want endless miles of coastline to ride along, until my legs ache from honest exertion. I want to let go of the handles and remember just how good my balance can be when I trust it.

I want a bonfire right outside my front door. Where the lovely girls and pretty man-boys cavort and dance and strip off all their clothing to tumble into the sea where the kisses always taste like salt.  I want this every single night. Until even my skin is permeated with the burn-down-rise-up scent of wood smoke and sand and sea. I want to be singed with the heat of it. I want it, saturated, in my pores until my breath feels gritty and real again. Until the skin on skin gives off the heat of flame. Until even the words burn as they are birthed.

I know I’m not supposed to say all of that.

I’m not supposed to like this about myself. This selfish that lives inside. Supposed to keep it hidden.  Soften it for you. Take the rough off my edges. Round out my sharp corners. I am told they are wrong.   The wants. The excessive need for solitude. For life on my own terms. Not ladylike. Not generous.  Not mother. That I’m not who you knew. Not who you know, even.

I don’t like it. But then I do. My wants speak to my needs which translate the terms of my survival.  The compulsions of art that will drive me and put me at war and seduce me into the crucible at the center of pure creation. There’s alchemy in owning it all.  Unabashed. Unapologetic. Without shame.

Oh, I know I’m not supposed to be shameless. This world, it’s got all kinds of words for women like me.

But there’s more to this than just me.

Because I have daughters. Because living on my own terms comes down to more than just my own survival.

My girls, they will know me as human. As creatrix as much as mother. As ugly and dirty and real as much as calm and patient and loving. See my struggle as well as my bliss. My unmet longing as counter to my grace. My deep rooted insecurity and my narcissism. My hard fall of tears as much the sweetness of my laugh. The way we all can storm and cry and flail and then fall into my big marshmallow bed, a tangle of limbs and heart and tears, and fall asleep intertwined, secure and at peace.

And they will know what it is for a woman like me to live in fullness with herself. To fight for it. To know she is within choice at each moment. To make contracts with self as the path to wholeness, even when this comes at great cost. To find the integrity within that space, even if that looks different than what the world would call true. To understand that even fullness can sometimes feel dark and bleak and empty.

That even regret and unmet hopes bring untold richness to what will be born. That it can be a raw and primal thing, this unceasing drive to make something from within one’s self. That great art is birthed of both great pain and great joy and sometimes directly as we navigate the tenuous space between the two. That we birth our art as we birth ourselves. Both, often, in the midst of struggle.

I think I’m probably not supposed to say that either. I’m supposed to make it gentle.  Pretty it up a little for everyone.

But I want them to know well the selfish and the selfless that lives within each of us, and the delicate dance between the two. To experience the wilderness of reclamation and the surrender of relinquishment that is a part of every negotiation we will walk as women who burn and ask and risk.   Who refuse to follow the rules given us by culture and upbringing and expectation.

I want them to know it’s okay to exist from the center of absolute unknowing. To live the ugly and the confused and the sad and the broken,  honest and out loud. That it’s equally okay to dive into the bliss.

I want, by the very root of my life, to show them a narrative that diverges from the one this world would have them live.

A narrative that is bloody and powerful and full of heat and sweat and sex and a sweet, holy joy that is owned and chosen. And a grief and teardown that is owned just as fully.  And an autonomy of self that rushes from within their goddess center, and a voice that rings true and tells the stories that will be key to their survival.

Stories that can be lived and written and told by no other voice but their own.

I cannot teach this from within a container of acceptable and predictable.

Because if they feel trapped or small or lost at 20 or 30 or 40, I hope they shall take the freedom to run for the sea and to heed her wild call. To hear the whisper through mountain top pines speaking ancient truth and knowing deep in their bones that the forest will hold their scared vows. I want them to burn sage and creosote and speak ancient incantation and call forth the goddess. I want them to splash paint on canvas under full pink moon while the coyote howl and the fire rages and to not fear the wild power that wells up from within on such a night.  I want them to own their sex as holy.  To know their desire as a divinity. To place a ring on their own ring finger and make promises that they will never speak to another. Unless they want to, and then I want them to do exactly that. To know it’s all in them, as it has been in all of us, all along.

And me.  Their mother?

I am never more than a sliver of space from the center of the paradox. From the glorious reality of complete contradiction. Not unbalanced, no. The {im}perfect center. Point and counterpoint. I seek it others. And when I look deeply enough, I find it in myself.

I don’t want to be where I am, but I cannot be where I belong. I am always searching for home, always seeking the next idea, the next embodiment of what may be. I am broken, and I am whole.

And yes, there is an unrest there, an ceaseless searching. A wolf who comes calling, whispering, howling. She leads me to hunt and prowl and burn. And she guides me to that delicate sliver of space, right at the core, that is pure peace.

I am opened finally, to a relentless sort of hope. For that forever love that the movies try to prove to me is real. And I believe. God damn, after all this time and all this ache, I actually believe.

But I also want to be pressed hard against a rough wall by someone who has the right not to give a fuck who I am or was or ever will be. I want a family of kids and grandkids and chosen souls and a 40-year partner in crime to surround me until the end of my days. And I want to be left the hell alone – to get old and grow gray and soft with the company of books and seagulls and worn wooden floors and chipped pottery that holds my morning tea. To take lovers when I want and discard them when I don’t.

I’m probably not supposed to speak that, am I? Not supposed to honor the way they swirl together, am I? That contradiction between the safe and the wild that lives in all of us. We are to choose one or the other and not look back. If we feel a pull to that which we’ve left behind or that which we have not yet found, we are to ignore and suppress and forget. There are truths that are easier for others to bear if we commit to never speaking them aloud.

Once upon a time I silently agreed to do just that.

I cannot.  Not any longer.

Tonight I feel the glow of the candles on my face and the cool of air on my back and the peace of the rain that falls and falls and falls outside. It quenches the packed, dry earth of desert and something in me as well. Taking what was hard and making it soft. Liquid. Inevitable. The way water flows. Just like it was the last time my body met another body and current met current and it all flowed into mystery. The way I move when I stop fighting my nature.

Until it’s all liquid alchemy. Wet heat. The way home.

I don’t care anymore what I’m supposed to say. This is my story. You can listen if you want. You can join me if you will.

Because these words and this life are my own.   Even when I contradict itself.  Even when I make every sense and no sense at all. Even when it changes from minute to minute. Whether they ring true or untrue. These things are nobody’s but mine.

And I’ve got a story to tell.  And so I begin and begin and begin.  Again.

 {images by iamchanelle photography}

The post The Truth Of A Woman Like Me appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I remember. I remember.  I remember.

~~~

It is true, perhaps, that we have always known. But even remembering is a process.

It is possible to miss what you have never known. For the strange to feel familiar and for the untouched lover to call you home. There are moments in life, fragments and slivers of time or touch or experience, when everything spirals into itself. All else fades. There is only what there is, and nothing more.

In those moments, our memory is returned to us, and we are awakened to what we have always known.

Perhaps it is simply this: That all of life is not a learning, but a remembering. Remembering that knowledge built into our bones, the wisdom spliced into our genes. Recognizing lovers from past lives, rediscovering truths long ago experienced, recalling lessons learned and learned and learned.

If we were born with the collective wisdom of the cosmos implanted in our being, our task is only this: to live and seek and love until we’ve removed barriers that unlock it all.

The most painful of this remembering is in the moment of unlearning.  Rejecting false truth.  Releasing embedded dogma. Clearing the things that do not serve.  It’s a harsh awakening to reject limitations long accepted as certainty. But only then can we hold to the light what we have deeply, always known.  Only then can we inhale this knowing deep into our consciousness. Only then can we call home what has always been ours.

Only then can we remember.

~~~

She knew then. As if she had always known. Although everything in her life until then had told her otherwise. Although the path ahead would be difficult and pain was inevitable.  But there it was in front of her. The memory of her own divinity. Her one true thing. She knew it as if she had always known.  As if her entire purpose in life had been to find her way back to this space. There was fire ahead. A burning down and a rising from the ashes. There would be collateral damage, guaranteed.  But she was ready. She remembered how to spread her wings. She had rediscovered a long missing part of her heart.  She answered the call of her memory. Nothing could ever be the same again.

~~~

We live by accumulation. Stockpiling lessons and truths and relationships and labels. We gather them tightly and hold them possessively, give them the responsibility for our continued safe passage. As if what has already been can guarantee safety and stability for what is to come. As if protection is found in what is owned and completed and understood. We ground ourselves in limitations and say thank you to all that keeps us locked in our patterns of forgetting the truths of our birth and our beings.

How often we are wrong.

How often we only meet ourselves in the midst of a great storm. When the wind has ripped us from the moorings of all that has been. When we are stumbling and ungraceful and foolishly unknowing.  It’s in the center of the worst that we come to the root of what is. To the place where things can become. To the spaces and people who can deliver us back to our memories.

It takes a long, hard fall to find the solid ground that will support our inevitable rise.

But rising requires memory, and it is memory we find when all else is stripped away. It is memory that exists when the logical mind has been silenced. It is memory to which we are delivered most often when life has brought us to our knees.

Listen. Do you hear that? It is the song of your spirit. It is the howl of your wild. It is the truth of your bones, wisdom born in you. It is the words that have been waiting to be spoken aloud. It is the fire burning in your gut. It is the lover you have not yet met, but have always somehow known, calling you home.

It is your memory. It has been with you always, and will never leave. You carry it nestled deep, safe at the very molten core of you.

Be still now, love. Find a quiet place, and let the universe blanket you with peace. Turn your palms up in welcome, raise your face to the sun. Say thank you to all that has brought you to this place.

It is time to remember.

~~~~~
And then, finally, we were together.  And in the space of that first meeting lived the energy of a thousand years and lives and loves too numerous to count. This memory pulsed in the air between us; a living, breathing entity that demanded reverence. It floated in the air, tingled on the surface of our skin, burned low in the center of our longing. If you had been there, a silent witness to this moment, you would have seen not just two people. Instead, you would have seen how such a love had cracked open a collective memory, and released the love of a thousands souls who had gone before, and a thousand more who had yet to become. And in our first kiss we were flooded with all of this, and with a holy gratitude.  

We had remembered.

The post it is time to remember appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I know nothing.

She is sitting in a park when I speak these words for the first time.  I picture her there.  Worn blanket hastily pulled from the trunk and hastily thrown on cool fall grass.  Leaves overhead beginning to spiral their way into the approaching dormancy of winter.  Reverberation of slamming doors ringing in her soul.  Crisp autumn air on tearstained cheeks.   I give her the wisdom I need the most.

I know nothing.

Whisper those words with soft lips, hollow throat.  Breathe them in and breathe them out.  Let them echo in you for a while, love.  Grant them sovereignty to swirl and swoop and root down deep.   Feel the tingle of truth they raise on lips and fingertips and skin. Let them become, inside and outside and all around you.

I know nothing.

This is the lesson of my fourth decade.  The absolute lack of certainty. The unlearning of truths.  The releasing of dogma.  The submission to the wisdom of emptiness.   The surrender at the beginning of unknowing, and the grace that finds me at the end.

I know nothing.

Can you feel the freedom of that?  The lack of projection.  The release from worry and supposition and what if?  Knowing nothing gives space for letting go.  Room for continuous rearrangement.  Reconstruction. Renewal.

I know nothing.

Five years ago:  I sit in a room.  It is a retreat of wisdom and laughter and silent meditation lead by a woman who is both teacher and student.  I am barely able to contain the pieces of in-progress-destruction that are my heart and soul and life.  Our guide tell us to lift our hands in front of us.  Wiggle our fingers in the air.  “All that you can touch is all that is real” she says.  And she laughs a laugh that tastes like freedom.  I remember this now and feels it mingling with my unknowing, alchemizing along the way into something that feels like the deepest sort of knowing.

I know nothing.

These three words.  They become mantra and survival.   They become graciousness and surrender. When I wonder and worry and stress.  I know nothing. When I crash headlong into the rhetoric of my own stubborn dogma.  I know nothing.  When I don’t understand.  When I can’t explain.  When I’m about to collapse from the weight of my own expectations.  When gearing up to high speed crash into the paradox of love and loss.  I know nothing.

Iknownothingiknownothingiknownothingiknownothing.

If you breathe it deep enough, there is room for the unknowing become a singular, spacious everything.  The unknowing cracks open your heart.  It strips you of the confines of certainty.  It brings you to a fierce embrace of all that can never be known.  It leaves room for the wild soul within, the one who doesn’t concern herself with knowing, because she’s too damn busy with feeling and doing and revolutionary being.

I know nothing.  Neither do you. 

Lover, be brave enough to follow your unknowing as it spirals continuously inward and outward from the edges to the center of your existence and back again.     What you will find  – at the root of all that you do not, cannot and will not ever know – is the core of all that is.

Right here.  Right now.  Forever.

The post i know nothing {wisdom for a life of beautiful uncertainty} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.