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.

Let us please her.

2. Poetry is not always literal. Do not assume our poetry means what it says. Sometimes it will mean the exact opposite. Sometimes I love you means I hate you. Sometimes come here means go away. Do not twist yourself into a pretzel trying to figure out what it might mean. Let me repeat this again. Poetry is not. Always. Literal. Except when it is. You risk madness trying to figure this out.

Let it be.

3. Poets fall in love easily. Regularly. Messily. With people. With ideas. With food. With the way the light falls through your hair and crosses your cheek. With the sound of our own thoughts. Love is fodder for our art. Love is the root of it all. So much love, and not all of it for you. This is the danger of loving a poet. This is the bliss of loving a poet.

Let us love.

4. When the voices in our head start speaking we don’t talk back or look for a doctor to make them stop. We write them down. On whatever we can find. Receipts. The last letter you got from your late grandmother. Dollar bills. The entire surface of our right arm. If you happen to be bald, the top of your head is fair game in a pinch. Do NOT fall asleep while we are holding anything that can be used as a writing implement. We will write at traffic lights. During happy hour. Right in the middle of a particularly romantic moment. Our words must find a home or they will consume us.

Let us write.

5. You have never been as beautiful as you will be through our eyes. You will have never known that the hard edge of your hipbone was worthy of poetry, or the curve of your smile or the husk of your voice or the caress of your cheek against our own. But if we love you, we will turn you into a poem. You will be made immortal by the power of our words. You can count on this.

Let it happen.

6. When you start to date a poet we should read you your rights: Anything you say/do or think can and will be held against you. We will write about what an ass you were that one night, about how you drive us bonkers by singing REO Speedwagon in the shower, about the ways you have brought about betrayal. Still, if you censor yourself, we will know this too. You might as well speak your truth. It’s all poetry to us.

Let us write you into life.

7. At some point, we will get ink stains on your good sheets. Your best dress shirt. That super important report you stayed up all night finishing for your boss. This will drive you crazy. But know that we will also make love to you with ink stained hands. Finger paint typewriter font onto your skin, brand a masterpiece into the spaces between your ribs with the words flowing from our palms. Tattoo you with the imprint of our hearts. Together, we will become a living poem.

Let us get messy.

8. We will love you well, with words and nuance, with bodies and phrasing, with kisses and passion, with poems and love letters scratched on coffee shop napkins. So that no matter what happens between us, for the rest of your life, something in your soul will always be searching for the poem that we were together. This will make it very hard to be your next girlfriend.

Let us love you.

9. Poetry has a long, long memory. After our love is long gone, we will still be reading your poems. You will not be the only one whose heart this breaks. Know that we will stand , reading the words written about our love – and we will ache for you  The body will remember the way you shifted and sighed as skin met skin and those words will pay tribute to the lines that were composed while we moved through this world together. Because of this, we will never truly forget you.

Let us remember.

10. If you’re going to love a poet you should know this. Our words are our truths. Our blood hums with verse. We break easily. Our words save us. Our stanzas keep us alive. If we loved you at all, we loved you truly. And you will never leave us but live under our skin and beneath the tips of our fingers and in the ink spill on blank page.

Because poetry, like some love, is forever.

The post 10 things you should know {if you intend to love a poet} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“When my heart feels so much, I need you to help it. You are the one who knows hearts. “

“I don’t know that I know hearts. I just believe in them. “

We are on the freeway, spinning toward home under a wide-open moon.   A plane is coming in, fast and low. This night the strain between us takes more room in the cab of the truck than our bodies do. The plane passes over; so close I swear that if I reached up in just the right way the frame of the truck would dissolve into nothing and it would be just my hands, holding up the plane under that wide-open moon.

Who on that plane is waiting for magic, I wonder? Who on that plane left magic behind? Is it to home and sanctuary and rest they are heading, or to the pounding and hopeful heart of possibility? Who will be met and encircled and who will walk out alone and make their own peace with the guardian moon? And who among those nameless strangers has given up ever being met, and just holds on to the moment, devoid of hope.

The plane is out of sight, and still we roll down the freeway. The tension of unwanted silence stretches and expands the space between us. It amazing how impossibly large a small space can feel when we have closed something of ourselves to the one we are with.

We are all, I think in that moment, somewhere between leaving and arriving. Arriving and leaving. Often we don’t know which till long after it’s done.

We all slip-slide through the liminal spaces. The suspended animation between here and there.  That’s all there is really. I sometimes wonder if grace is just a word for the times that we manage to live in full trust of the graceless in-between.

“How do you know the difference between valid doubts and a damaged heart putting up walls where they don’t belong?”

“You don’t know. You can’t. You can grasp tight a deep-rooted knowing with all the certainty of the world, and have it be just the optimistic projection of a hopeful heart.   Or you may have all the doubts and uncertainties and wake up years later to find you’ve grown into your own happiness without even knowing that you did. And that same person you once doubted will still be there by your side, loving you well.“

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
Anais Nin

Exactly as we are. Scared and hopeful. Damaged and whole. Searching for love and terrified it will find us. Because if it finds us – and we answer it’s call – we will have to lay it all on the line. Again.

“Take a deep breath love. We weren’t made to be abandoned. It just feels that way sometimes.”

It feels that way sometimes. It feels that way enough that we’re quick to run at the slightest possibility. We read the present with the wounds of the past rising right to the surface. Casting a murky doubt in spaces that beg for trust. Better to push, to predict the inevitable end and escape before you become casualty of another goodbye.

So we stay up all night, turning our back to potential and curling into a hard ball on the sofa. Letting tears fall to the whirring of the ceiling fan and the quiet noises a home only really makes when it believes its occupants given over to dreams.   We fight the hardest battle not with another, but with ourselves. With the parts that want to run far and fast and hard, and every pulse of heart and spirit and soul that begs to stay and trust and believe.

But all planes land eventually. And some on those planes will be met, and some will not.   And for all of those people, there are beginnings and endings and middles and sunsets and wide open moons that fill the cabs of red pickup trucks with a light that just happens to be the color of hope. Light that drowns out the silence and replaces it with the sound of the clumsiest and most beautiful sort of grace.

Because I do believe in hearts. Even the ones who will live always, tucked away at the root of my pain. I believe that those hearts knew – just like mine has always known – what it was that they needed.   Without understanding or knowing. Leaving room for mistakes and regrets. I still believe in hearts.

Because all we can ever do is invite someone into our experience. We cannot control whether they enter, or if and when they choose to leave. Or even if or when we will.

You can invite them in, and you can walk through the open doors. One step at a time. Clumsy and uncertain and still full of the brilliant grace of the in between. Believing, in spite of all the odds.

Holding up your heart under the wide open moon.

{for J. and for N.  and for A.  for late night texts full of wisdom and for holding my heart under countless wide open moons}

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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.

It’s true.  Not everything will be okay. This is not okay. It’s the deepest ache. It’s a solid core of loss layered on top of loss. I know it is.

But there you are in that small, quiet room, and although it – all of it – may not be okay – you will.

You will.

I feel this deep and true and right in the marrow of my bones. You will be okay and more than okay and so much more than you could possibly know.

There will be love. The kind of love that changes everything. And maybe more heartache. And so much laughter and breathless kisses and the hard fall of tears.

There is so much more ahead.  And it is so very good.  I promise.  I know this.

I hope that I get to see you love what you are. To know yourself as gift and worth and truth.

That you see what a huge thing it is to have the courage to break your own heart.  That you have chosen wholeness – even when it has shattered you. And that you will one day see that you can be whole and broken in the exact same spaces, that they nestle side by side – and that this is the way of things.  Not your punishment for wrongdoing, or for not trying hard enough – but just the way of things.

That you can stand and look at yourself in a mirror and see your goodness right there, see the worth of what you bring on the surface of your skin, just like I do.  That you trust there is brilliance to come.

That you own what is yours to own, both the bad AND the good.  That you do not insist on owning it all.  It was never all yours to hold.  Release to the wind, love.  Let it be carried away on the breeze.

It does not serve you now.

I know you, and your darkness and your shadow and all the things for which you practice self-flagellation.  And I still see you as good, and true and strong and powerful and exquisitely present in this world.

You have not chosen the easy way. Life has not granted you a gentle path. Not even close. But you have followed your own trail, again and again and again. You have done what you needed to move forward. You have placed one foot in front of the other and kept on going – even when that was the most difficult thing to do.

You have defined your space and your territory.  You have said  ‘This is mine.  You may not enter now’.  And you meant it. And you stood by it, even when it was impossibly hard.

And all of this, my friend, is no small thing. 

In fact, these are all very large things.  Infinite and powerful and true.

The voices in your head that say otherwise? These are born not from truth but from the stories others have created for you. These stories do not have to be yours. Even if they once were, you need not accept them any longer.

Give them back. Every last one.

You’ll write a new story now, on a blank page, with a new pen and in your own incomparable voice.

I wish for you so very much. Seaside wishes and spin the bottle daydreams. Lucky pennies and shooting stars. A safe place to fall and a high place to leap from into the deepest pool of the clearest water.

I hope that you shed the shackles of past and grief and loss and betrayal.  That you are possessiveness of your own wilderness.  That you stake your claim and encircle your space with charm and enchantment and only grant entrance to those who bring you fully alive.

I wish for you space to cultivate a relationship with your own divinity. No external god, but the divine that lives within your own stubbornly pulsing heart. I wish you the energy and emotion of the greatest love affair, given as a gift to yourself.

That you come home to the woman you are and the woman you are becoming. And then I hope you find what it is to love another in your mother tongue, a love that requires no translation and only delivers the ease of being fully known and fully seen.

A love that brings you alive and that carries you home.

No mistake, this is the phoenix fire part.

The burning down to ashes part.

The preparing to rise again.

This is a space without anchor, without moorings. Even the north star may be obscured by clouds.

But your compass lies within.

Your soul knows your truth north.

Can find it without map or directions.

You need only trust yourself enough to listen to the whispers of your valiant soul.

Lay your head in my lap, love. Tell me your stories.  The ones that have formed you into the gift that you are.

Now take a breath and let it go. Let it all go. Let the sea breeze carry it away. Let your tears fall.

You will be held now.  You will be carried. You can stop running. You can cease the endless motion and constant struggle.

You are home. You can rest now. You are safe.

And maybe, just maybe, now you can be still.

The post the solid core of loss upon loss. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

1. When you wake and feel the sadness flood you, take a moment to honor your broken heart.  She is wise and powerful.  She is never anything but exactly what is needed. She will break and break and break again, and still choose love. You know this.  Do not pretend otherwise. Cynicism is not for you, nor lack of hope. What has been reborn now will refuse to die. Nurture it and let it live. Even unmet hope is a blessing. Want teaches, if we let it.

2. Go back to bed for a while. Let her hold you. She is here and present and knows the truth of the pain and the comfort of human arms. Trust in what is offered out of friendship and without expectation. Know that you can take comfort in each other and have that be enough. Nestled bodies, mirrored pain. It is good to be seen and held in this space. Let it be good. We are human and we crave touch. There is no shame in this. Find sleep again for a brief time. Give yourself over to it because you need it badly, more than you need to work right now.

3. Shower. Let the water wash you clean. Instead of frustration at the continued lack of hot water in this apartment, trust that the coolness is purposeful today. It is not heat that you need.  Not the steam rise but the grounding down. Let the cool water bring you down from the rush and the height. Let your feet feel their connection to the earth. Resist the temptation to float above yourself now. You need to go deep inside of this. Feel the shiver rise along your skin. Hug your arms tight around your naked body. Allow yourself to feel exactly what you are feeling. Alone. Cold. Grieving. Fiercely alive.  Raise your face to the spray. Raise your heart to the truth. Raise your entire being to the day that lies ahead.

4. Get dressed. Choose the tight blue pencil skirt that hugs every inch from knee to lower ribs. Add a cropped white lace shirt. It stops a fraction of an inch above the skirt and shows bare skin through it’s weave and the truth inked on your ribs when you move. Your heart will show today anyway, this sliver of raw skin seems only honest. Gold jewelry. Pile it on. Carefully. Take time with the clasp of the bracelet, with the slide of ring over knuckle. Feel the necklace around your neck. The stamped words, a purposeful reminder today. Choice within Grace. Grace within Choice. Feel your adornment as purposeful. Blow-dry your hair into a sleek, straight submission. Find the hard edge within the soft fall.  Be careful with your makeup. Glossy red lips and black-rimmed eyes, for certain. Spanish Amber on wrists and collarbone and behind the ears, the scent of your own seduction. Slip on high heels. Let the line of your leg from calf to hip to waist make them want. This is your right.

5. Go to the coffee shop. The one that always holds space for your best words. Sit on the faux leather couch because there is absolutely nowhere else to be. Look around. See the brick walls, the old door propped inexplicably against the wall. The concrete floor. The exposed beams and ductwork. See the people. Really see them. Allow yourself that luxury. Catalogue them one by one. Know that they live and grieve and love and bleed. Know that they have woken up sad, just like you. They are whole. They have been broken. Someone in this room is walking dead. Someone is full of resilient hope. What lives behind the façade? Nobody really knows. They do not know when they see you either. Can you show them? Can you make the naked pain visible on your face? Will this bring more humanity to this day? Yes? Then do it. Let tears fall right there when a song comes on that brings memory to surface, or when kindness from a love takes you off guard. There is no shame in deep feeling. Stop believing this is so. It is a story that does not serve.

6. Do the work. The work that is your purpose on earth. Make manifest the story in your heart and let the words flow onto the screen. Live raw and wide and vulnerable inside of those words, as if there were no other choice. There is no other choice. You know that. You make a life out of art and art out of your life. You are blessed, you are blessed, you are blessed. Feel that through your sadness. Know that beyond the edges of your grief. It is luxury and gift, hard won and fiercely claimed. Let nobody diminish this for you. Do not relinquish your right to this life. The words? They are why you are here. Do not ignore them today; let them guide you exactly where you need to go.

7. When he brings you gluten free muffins and a homemade card, stop your work and be grateful for the solidity of friendship. When she stays with you almost all day, not because she has to but because she can, feel the gift of her presence. When lunch is bought for you, healing vegetable soup, be thankful for generosity. When a flattering text comes in out of the blue from someone in the next room, accept it as deserved, and smile and blush and feel how lovely it is to be admired. When you pick them up at school and they greet you with joy and homemade cards, be aware of the gift and the grounding and purpose of motherhood.

8. Look at your daughters. Look at them, whole and flawed and goofy and amazing and wild and knowing and resilient. Know that life will bring them pain, and one day someone will break their gentle hearts. And that one day they will likely be the one to bring someone else’s gentle heart it’s own shatter. Know also that those hearts will beat as stubborn and true as yours does, because this is all they will have ever seen. Their entire lives. Wide open love. Giving fullness. Living from center.   Compromise and trust and faith and a commitment to kindness and the perfect knowing of their own wild souls. Let that be your truest gift to the universe.

9. Make a date with yourself and keep it. Heed the call for the burn of needle that comes at times like these. Follow the voice that tells you to mark this day of (re)birth with ink on bone. Know which words are right.  Take yourself there alone. There are things one does with others and paths that must be walked without company. For you, this is a solitary space. Make the plan. You will bare your skin.  Lie still. Find your breath. Find your breath. Find your breath. Let the pain guide you to your center. Allow it to travel to your edges. Typewriter font on ribs this time. A proclamation of uncompromising selfhood. A commitment ceremony to spirit and soul and purpose.  I am this, body and soul. Burn me, drown me, tell me lies, I will still be who I am.

10. And then, when the plan does not work. When the schedule runs behind and you show up late and the artist has gone home and the ATM does not work and your credit cards won’t release an advance and you start to realize that it will not happen, let your shoulders fall and allow yourself the disappointment. There are some things we want that are not ours to be have. Some weeks will not provide you with what was wanted, regardless of how deep your desire runs. Do not deny yourself this simple heartache. All of grief demands it’s own expression in it’s own time. Suppression is only a delay of the inevitable.

11. Take yourself home. See the prayer candle burning on your patio. Kneel before it. A most holy death. Reverence. Endings before beginnings. Beginnings hidden inside of the end of things. The resilient flame, almost 24 hours old. A letting go that stays steady. This is sometimes the way of things. We can say goodbye and still hold true to what is true. We can release love to be what it will be and yet still love in wholeness and fullness. The flame calls you to honesty. The light illuminates the pathway home. Sometimes to die is the only way to find continued life. A song plays in the background at random. Be Still. Be Still. Be Still. Yes, maybe now you can be still.

12. Fill your home with candle flame. Light every one in the house until the glow fills every corner.  Sit by yourself. Alone by choice this night. Because there are nights when alone is the only true thing we can possibly be. When company and laughter and talking would be more false that we can bear. Avoid the music that holds the core of this story. Avoid it fully and completely, until you can avoid it no more. And then let it play. Turn it up. Fill yourself with it until the tears come. And then let them come. Let them fall. Let them shake your shoulders and pound your heart and twist your body. This life, it is not as you imagined it. Full of blessings upon blessings, oh holy yes. And holding grief upon grief intermingled with the good. There is room for both. For holy gratitude and the depths of sadness that runs like groundwater beneath it all. Embrace the complexity. Own the paradox. Right in the center of this space is the core of all that there is.

13. Sit down to write. In the dark. Let your fingers fly across the keyboard in a way they have not in months. Feel the freedom of truth spill.See what can be released with the tears. It is always interesting to learn what lies on the other side. Grief fully unleashed is its own wild muse. Just you and the candlelight and the words.With all of your unmet dreams and all the hope that refuses to die.  With the visions and the knowing and the disappointment and the grief and the blessings and the want and the quiet and the spaciousness and the light and the darkness and the music and the yearning and the truth and the love and the love and the love.

14. Know, in the end, it is only the love that will ever matter. Know this in your bones. Know it as the only truth. Know it as purpose and meaning and light. Know it as you know yourself. Deep and solid and whole. This is your 38^th birthday. It is only one day in a long line of many days you have been granted. Only one of many you will hopefully be given. Give thanks, even for this sadness. It is proof that you are alive. And this, in the end, is the one holy gift for which we must always be grateful.

15. When fatigue finally comes do not fear the dark. Let your body feel the honest weariness in your bones. Let it take you over. Blow out the candles one by one, except the prayer candle outside that lights the way home. Remove your adornments as carefully as your placed them on your body. Hang up your clothing and tidy your space. Dismantling what was created in love can be as much of an offering as the building, if you let it. Turn off the ringer on your phone. Let the quiet be our gift to yourself. Slow your breath. Feel it steady and sure. Hear your own heart beating as clear and true as ever. Sink into the cool white sheets. Feel the air of the fan on your naked skin. Surround yourself with pillows. Curl onto your side. Let the quiet of this night be its own gift.But do not go to sleep without blessing it all.

Blessed be this worthy sadness. Blessed be this knowing love. Blessed be the finding home. Blessed be the kitchen slow dance. Blessed be the magical sunset. Blessed be the strong arms. Blessed be the true north. Blessed be the unmet hope. Blessed be the unwavering light. Blessed be the hard goodbye. Blessed be this holy life.

Blessed be. Blessed be. Blessed be.

The post 15 Things to do when you wake up sad on your birthday: appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

steal words from the past and
ink them along  your lower left rib
in a promise to never risk this.

then risk it.

let it get fucking messy.
get naked and swim around in the
havoc you’ve brought forth
by loving
claim fiercely only the brief moments
you are given.

then take more
take everything
take with relentless fury
take until the taking looks like giving
and the giving looks like a prayer.

love like holy looks when it says your name
like a confession booth redemption.
and like on your knees supplication
to gods you don’t believe in

then see what happens if you believe in them.

love like the cadence of poetry.
like nails down your back
like a battering ram
like a mother holds her child.
like a consecrated temple
and like a seedy hotel room affair.

love like everything depends on it.

because it does
and it doesn’t

so love them both
love wrong till it’s right
love like they tell you
you could not
should not
can not

and then do.

love like you had the chance and didn’t take it
love like you did and didn’t make it.
and in the quiet, desperate moments
before giving up everything.
love like you’re just about to come…
undone

now hold on.  don’t let go.

love with your hands
just like your grandparents, arthritic knuckles clasped tight on their 50^th wedding anniversary
like a newborn baby
palm curled around your index finger with a  grip so fierce you’d swear he could hold the weight of the world.
then let it all fall down.
and love like a fist fight
like a palm reader
like fingers trailing across braille.
like rock paper scissors
and like sign language speaking silent truths from across a crowded room.

love with your mouth.
like the sweet expectation of  the moments before your very first kiss
and like the screaming match where you hurled words like they were the weapons that would set you free.
love like the taste dark chocolate and red wine mingling on your tongue
and licking a cherry popsicle on a hot summer day.
love like leaving bite marks on pale skin
and like swallowing bitter truths so you don’t hurt him anymore.

Love like the past
like wandering through an antique shop and feeling the whispers of long ago memories in dust of discarded things.
Like old, soft leather and the hard crack of a whip,
Like a long forgotten love letter slipped in the back of an old book.
Like a typewriter with sticky keys that keeps on spelling his name no matter how many times you tell them you’ve moved on.

love like the day you walked down the aisle and the day you signed the divorce papers
like the way you drew in that shaky breath right before she touched you for the first time and
like you stopped breathing the day he went away forever.
love like you haveall the answers to all the questions you’ve ever asked and like you’ll never know a single one.
love like a tangle of hands and mouths and limbs
that goes on forever
and like it all ends.  Right now.

so love in the brutal tearing apart of everything you’ve ever known.
and like your scattered pieces are finally being gathered together.
like your wholeness matters more than your goodness.

your wholeness is the only measure of goodness that love will ever know.

love like you loved Superman when you were five
like you loved New Kids On The Block when you were twelve
like you loved that boy in math class when you were 16
and that girl at the bus stop when you were 22.
love like you learned to love yourself yesterday
like the way you’ve found only yourself at the end
of every choice you’ve ever made.

love is at the end of every choice you ever made.

love like maybe possibly mmmmm ok,  sure. If you wanna?
love like Yes! Yes! Yes!
and like saying “Hell no. I am worth FAR more than that”
and meaning it.
love like long lost soulmates
and like fucking someone who
could not tell you your own name.

love, you need to know your own name.

so love like a car crash
like a hospital emergency room at 3am
like a war zone
like a bomb shelter.
like a selfishness
like a submission
like a saint
like a sinner
like happily ever after
and like the sweetest one night stand.

just love.
stop pretending you can’t,
stop pretending you don’t want to
stop listening to them when they tell you shouldn’t.
love because you must
because you can
because you don’t really have to

but by god, you know that you will.

bring it all
down
on the side of
love

The post Bring it all down on the side of love appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I am holding my hands open to you now, palms up. Place your hands in mine.  Feel the pulse of shared experience.  Trust me when I say that I know this story.

This is a story we all know. We reside in one space and desire pulls us to another.  Yes.  It is brutally human, breathtakingly real.  We often look for what we don’t have along roads we never meant to tread.  The things we find there shake us to the core.  We are seen and known and witnessed in ways we have never been.

Of course, if she is the catalyst for you leaving, then she is the catalyst for you leaving.  Nothing can rewrite that part of the story.  Not your word choice.  Not the way you paint it for others. Not the justifications or the rationalizations or the things you wish were true.  Deep down, you know what is true.

She feels like home, like breath.  Like something I have always known and always wanted but never claimed.  She is like memory and holy water and the intermingling of lives not lived.

This love that feels like home. Yes. I know this.  Know it well.  I understand the love that is memory.  Lust that is holy.  Desire that overwhelms and teaches and heals.

I know, from the inside out, the power of life changing love.  The force of it.  The sweet inevitability. The longing to run headlong and offer yourself as sacrifice to what feels like salvation.   I know how the body quakes and soul expands and spirit explodes in one blissful realization.

But I also know the other side.

I know it is difficult, this leaving of one thing to dive headfirst into another.  I know that the new relationship often struggles to hold the weight of being the undoing of the first.  I know that after being defined for so long as a part of a partnership that is vitally important to define yourself for yourself.

And so I would say this, love.  Even though it may not be what you want to hear.  Even though it might be wrong.  Even though you are not me and my experience is fundamentally mine and not at all yours.  Even with all of this, there are things I want to say.

Hold some space around you as you go through this.  Be cautious of the urge to dive into another life. Another love. Another partnership. Take the time first to learn where your edges and center live.  To learn the blessings of your solitary heart.  To learn your solid ground.

You need some room to go through the grief that will come. The guilt. The ache of the teardown.  And yes, you’ll need to be held and heard and carried.   Your body and heart and mind and soul will need to be loved and loved hard and good and long.  But there are going to be interminable lonely nights that you will walk through alone. That you must walk through alone.

And diving into that free fall, blissful though it is, is sometimes a way to avoid rooting into yourself.   Instead, imagine what could happen if you decided to build a shrine to your own divinity.  Become solid with the ways and hows and whys of your existence in this world.  Learn how you breathe and eat and sleep and dream when you are not intermingled with another.

This does not mean deny what is.  This does not mean closing yourself to love. Not this love, or any other.  It does not mean following grief with grief.  No, not that.

It means loving yourself first.  It means romancing your own mystical soul.  It means taking yourself on a date and buying the good wine.  It means getting comfortable with Saturday morning solitude and mowing your own lawn.  It means long walks in warm rain, and catching eyes with a stranger in a coffee shop and smiling and looking away, and then looking back – knowing you are fully free to do so.  It means sharing body and heart and soul on your terms and your timeline and with gratitude and reverence.

It means trusting yourself to know what is true, even if it is exactly the opposite of what I’ve said here.  My advice may be right or it may be wrong. But in the end, there is nobody who can live this life but you.  It is all yours.  In the leaving or the staying.  In the yes and the no.  In the heat and the heart and the lonely and the grief.  All yours, and only yours.  And you will live it exactly as you should.

You will do it with a beauty and grace and fierce wisdom that will amaze even you.

And it will be perfectly, exactly right.

The post Uncommon Sense: Romance your own mystical soul appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

~~~~

That moment?  The 56^th time you check your phone for texts on an ordinary Tuesday?  You know you are really only looking for one name…

I really like that moment.

That butterflies before a coffee date moment.  That c’mere, ‘cause right now I want to melt myself into your bones moment.  That you just turned toward the window and the light hit your face and for a second my heart actually, seriously stopped but I can’t tell you that yet moment.

No matter how many times you’ve had to walk away, a crush is all hello.  All drawn out contact and pleasepleaseplease.  It’s a longing for things that make you blush.  And want.  And tremor deep inside.  It’s slow slide anticipation.  Tender possibility wrapped in the most bliss-filled ache.

Maybe you don’t write your first name with his last name the way you did back then.  You don’t have a pink flowered journal where you daydream names for your one-day children.  You’re not so sure about the feminist ramifications of changing your name for love, and besides, your children already have their names.

But you’ve daydreamed the sound of his yes, and the feel of his arms and that tiny smirk of a smile.  You know just how it would feel to twist one of those curls around your finger as you leaned closer. Exactly how the rasp of his five o’clock shadow would brush against your cheek.  When he hugged you and your shirt held onto the remnant of his cologne – you knew that week there would be no rush to do laundry.

You’ve imagined what the way her lips would press against yours in that first electric moment.  Tried to conjure the sounds she might make as you as you lower her down onto cool white sheets.  Predicted what she would look like first thing in the morning, when the remnants of night visions still linger in her eyes.  You can remember with exacting detail what her pianist fingers look like wrapped around her coffee cup the day you met to talk about feminist theory, even if you don’t fully understand why this particular memory makes a shiver rise along your spine.

It’s the sweet angst of ‘if I asked would she say yes?’ and the second guessing of  ‘damn, I wonder what he meant by that?’ and ‘I think-I hope-he might-I mean maybe….’. And will she be there?  And what should I wear?  And oh, my…there he is.  There she is.

And here you are.

Oh.  My.  Yes.   I like that moment.

{enjoy the {crushable} soundtrack on spotify. as always, feel free to add your favorite falling in love-lust-longing songs to the mix}

The post A crush is all hello…. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

It’s scary. This love thing. The sweet vulnerability of extension. The naked of ‘here I am’. The tentative reaching of outstretched arms. The wide open of hope.

We all get a little lost here. Wish we knew how to do it better. Wish it were cleaner and more gentle and a little easier to understand.

We welcome the head long rush of it just as we try to run away.

Teach me how to be loved.

We all say this over and over again, in different words or with the shift and sway of our bodies or in the silent spaces where words are left behind.

Teach me how to be loved.

Let me show you how to love me well. School me in the workings of your heart, in the language of your bones. Let my open palm memorize the shape of your face. Tell me the stories of your scars so I can trace them with the honor of understanding.

Do you see this fault line? It is where I was broken, over and over again, by the ones who came before you. Are you willing to take that in? My wide open eyes? My truth lives there, if you look for it. I have been loved by those who didn’t care to discover all that I am. Will you be the one to see me whole?

It gets tangled sometimes. The purity of beginnings become a hazy twist of expectations, the intermingling of past hurts and future fears. We are the product of all that has already been, and of all that we hope will one day become. We carry with us the bone memory of the loves that we have held and all that has been lost. We don’t ever come into love without the echo of our past singing it’s siren song.

Can we do this? Can we find in this love a gossamer thread of redemption to coax into a late night tangle of limbs and lazy Sunday mornings? Will you follow me into the interplay of light and shadow? Will you dance with me here, where the light and dark within me can mingle with the good and bad of you?

Teach me how to be loved. It is a relentless forgiveness that allows us to return here, again and again.    Past the tears and the leaving and the broken spaces. Back into the hope of more, the possibility of again.

We are made for this. For the sweet vulnerability of now, for the outreach past fear and into unknown. For the extension and unwrapping. Even for the fault lines and the bittersweet of no longer ours.

We are an ancient sort of resilient.  Made for the falling and the rising.  Made for rose colored glasses and honeyed lips and finding new home in another. Made for the burning down and rebuilding from ashes.  Made for the holy wonder of beginning again.

Teach me how to be loved.

Show me how to love you well. Our hearts speak fluent optimist even when we try to cloak the hopeful whispers in layers of pessimism masquerading as protection.

We are here to love. To speak our mother tongue to lovers who may stay or may go. To learn the body rhythms of forever and of just for now. We are here to open to the bliss and the risk and the possibility inherent in every beginning.

Teach me how to be loved.

Let me learn how to love you. Start now. I’m paying attention. I was made for this.

So were you.

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