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.

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.

The post Teach Me How To Be Loved appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.