It lives in your fingertips. In your kiss. In the spaces where no words will ever be quite enough. It shivers just beneath your skin. It travels electric from the earth up your spine and spins out into the heavens.

A cyclone of all that is and all that will be.

It’s been with you for quite a while.

You hear it when you sleep. It rises unbidden in fevered dreams. Like wind howling through trees, like trains in the distance. Like want and fear and running far, far away. Like children laughing and way everything feels when the freedom comes.

It sounds like breaking. Like coming undone. Like rising from ashes. Like nothing we’ve ever heard before.

It feels like wide open sky and coming home and the way the ocean returns again and again to shore.

And it is a wise story. A necessary story. A story of heat and desire and grief and bliss and grit and joy. A story of survival and of triumph. A story of sovereignty and chains. A story of wreckage and redemption.

It is blood and guts and gore and it is liquid honey sweet. It is bitter and it aches way down low. It is bones and smoke and scars and a low plaintive melody whispering on the wind outside your open window.

It is salt skin and hot wax and the sound of goodbye. It is lightening crash and husky voice seduction. It is poem. It is prayer. It is hymn. It is flame. It is promise.

It is reclamation.

It is holy. It is holy.

Your story, love, is holy.

It is your story.

It is my story.

It is our story.

But only you can tell it. On your own time. On your own terms. In your own way.

It is poem. It is prayer. It is hymn. It is flame. It is promise. It is reclamation. It is holy. It is holy. Your story, love, is holy.

And when you do. When you are ready, you must prepare for the earth to quake under your power. You must prepare to stand taller, to know your voice will rise clear and strong and true.

And no matter how you tell it. No matter where. No matter if you speak it or write it or sing it or dance it or paint it or whisper it in quiet darkness, know this.

We will come. We will listen. We will lean forward – open hands and wanting hearts. We will know.

We have always known this was the truth.

We have always known that YOU are the truth.

And we have been waiting.

And you must also know this. When you find the bravery to tell your story, you will also unleash the voices of so many others. Because in your bravery we will find our own. You will become both reflection and amplification.

You owe none of us anything at all. This – the way your voice travels and unbinds the stories of others and sends echoes reverberating through this world – this is not something for which you are responsible. These are not stories you must hold or answer or carry.

This, the rising of stories that follows your own, is simply your legacy, as one who held the story that asked to be told. As one who set it free.

It has always been and always will be, your own.

So unleash your voice. Speak your truth. Tell your story.

Because after all, your story is where the revolution begins.

And we need this revolution, more than you know.

The post Unleash Your Voice || The Storyteller’s Manifesto appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.