Tonight, I found them again. And I got lost in the fever dream of memory and make believe and reality. And lost also in the wonder of what lives beneath the surface and of all the stories our bodies hold.

My body, she holds so many stories.

***

“All your life is a fever to be perfected.”

Marina Tsvetaeva

I am lying in bed tonight, at midnight, heating pad on my chest to try to calm the wracking cough. I am lying here and I am thinking that being sick somehow makes it like this, makes the truths seem closer, both sharper and softer at once. How the fever and its heat creates a lucidity that makes the edges come into full relief and surreal separation while still allowing the body to sink into things as if there was no distinction at all. The heat of it, burning from the inside out, it brings everything near enough to touch, and hazy enough to still feel safe enough to get close to.

So tonight I am here in my bed, thinking of all the true things I know and remember, and live and breathe and bleed and love.

All at once and one at a time.

Swirled and tumbling and clear and free.

***

I am thinking of the ways that some loves are groundwater and bedrock, and on them all that is to come after will rest, because they are integral to everything before and since and forever.

Of how other loves are the knowledge of what it is to come home and still others a return to breath and a filling of the lungs with air, even underwater, over and over and over again.

How all these loves have formed the self into what it is. And without them something would be different,  shifted from what has come to be known. Nothing quite the same. How the way all the pieces have settled, nestled, found that the place they belong feels good, and right.

How in the haze of this heat, all these loves are on my skin. The pieces that belong to them named and touched and owned. Like notes on a piano. Distinct and known and recognizable. Touched and blessed and given thanks for what was given and what was taken.

Some fullness is only found by leaving behind and cutting away.

How there are some people you are born knowing, and when you meet them you know that you’ve only been waiting for them to come back to you. How you’ve done this again and again and again, in lifetime after lifetime. How this is comfort and exhilaration and sanctuary.

Of how, on certain dark nights, your heart will always travel places and the questions will remain. How this is an unchosen fidelity, but one that is true, just the same.

How faith without choice holds its own wisdom and is sacred.

***

The sheets are wet with my own sweat and the cough shakes me hard. My body no longer fights. I’m just in it. And outside of it. Writing these words and letting this sickness work through me and finding some space inside of this to unlock things.

God, how things need unlocking.

God, how I’ve always craved that which is my undoing.

I am thinking of how it is that sometimes there are songs that call. That speak of stories you’ve not heard or read or known or lived. Not in anything you call knowledge or truth or memory. But somehow they live in you already.

I am thinking of all the stories that live in me already. I am thinking I will never tell them all but I will try and try and try because it is on this purpose that my blood pulses.

I am thinking of fire and rain. Of the blood red hunters moon. Of cinnamon and cloves and chosen scars and the way ink settles into skin and teeth sink into bone. How pain, the edge and burn and truth of it, can become something sought and sometimes something saving.

I am thinking of ink and the way it spills, telling truths that can’t be formed in words. I am thinking of whiskey and hot wax and honey. Of the burn and the burn and the burn and the sweet relief. I am thinking of slow dances that are over in minutes and yet last forever. I am thinking of tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows and her voice, husky with promise in my ear.

I am thinking of smoke rising and of wrists pressed against hard metal. There is a clarity there, when I allow myself the revisiting. How everything pivots on that moment. How long it took me to know that it did.

Sometimes the things we know take a long time to settle.

 ***

And then that moment. The moment of choice. Of saying yes to this. When that word, choice, was fully known and illuminated into something living and breathing and whole. And whole. And whole. And so very good.

I am thinking of candle flame. Of the color red. Of the shadows that dance on the wall. Of spinning and spinning and spinning in the deepest night.

I am thinking of desire. Of the way we were made liquid by this. Of hands and sweat and knowing and hope and the words ’you feel like beauty’. Of skin and bone and heat and slick and wet and then not two but one.

How fever and desire are similar this way. In the way they bring us into our body and beyond our body.

I am thinking about how the language of fire feels like home.

***

I am thinking of olive trees. And how sometimes what is created becomes more real than what was actual, by virtue of the intensity of its creation and the story that needed to be told.

That story needed to be told. It still does.

I am thinking of the rising of the wolf. Of how I feel her in me. Nurture and cultivate. How she is my survival. Of how, over and over again, she howls me home.

I am thinking of teeth on bone and the bruise that remains. Of the night that I did not return and irrevocability and of the way I sang my own redemption. Of the hard cost of integrity lost and regained. Of just how long and lonely that path was.

I am thinking of celling fans. Of red blood on pink cotton. Of knees on carpet. Of faded blue dishcloths and the moment I truly knew what had been lost. Of how objects are just objects and memories are just memories and stories are things we tell ourselves to make things more true. And how when I tell you my stories you don’t know if they are all true just the way I tell them and how you don’t even need them to be true.

What makes something true, really?

Because truth is created to be what it is. Because the second this fever leaves my body I will be different. And the second these stories leave my fingers they are changed. And that is not untruth. That is how it is with fever and with love and with stories. The heat is alchemy. The heat is desire. The heat is the spark.

Everything becomes what it must become to serve its own purpose.  We never go through the fire without being changed.

 ***

I am thinking now of cold winter air and hot tubs with music playing below that water. Of how sometimes in the grip of fever everything in memory sounds the way it did then, below the surface, where there was no air and yet I finally learned how to breathe.

And then I am not thinking anymore. I am only feeling.

Feeling the alchemical shift. Feeling what is between us. Feeling myself always and never alone. Feeling her hands on my body. Feeling my body on her hands. Feeling all the ways I have been branded. Feeling the skin and bone and heat of me. Feeling the heart and blood and pulse. Feeling the earth under bare feet. Feeling the moon on my skin. Feeling the fever and my body shake from this cough. Feeling the howl. Feeling it spiral towards the open sky. Feeling it loosening things held tight.

Feeling the way fever dreams tell truths that are not always ready to be told.

Sometimes it is best to tell truths before they are fully ready to be told.

***
What these words mean and who these memories belong to are the work of a life lived and a fever that took hold and a heart that believes that sometimes what is born of art is more true than what is born of life.

Fact? Fiction? Memory? Reality? Figment of fevered dreams?

None of this matters. These are my stories, after all.

We all have stories.

 What are yours?

The post Fever {what a lovely way to burn} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

But in any life there is also a time to keep quiet, spaces for words that have not yet found their fullness, or where the speaking of them would bring hurt that would serve no purpose.

There are times when truth telling will lead you down a path toward a door you know is best left closed, regardless of the sweet temptation of the opening. There are backwards glances filled with the bittersweet melancholy of regret, and the words trapped in throat that have passed the time the universe gave for their expression. There are interactions where the energy required to set things straight would cost more than the setting straight is worth.

There will always be questions that must remain unasked, and things known but left unsaid. There are spaces where silence must carry the day, because language is powerful and yet entirely and frustratingly inadequate – and nothing could say what needs to be said, and so to say nothing at all is the only sensible thing that remains.

And these times too, hold power and deserve reverence.

 Listen closely love, even the deepest silence carries its own sweet wisdom.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Wendell Barry

~~~~

Sometimes, at the end or the beginning or deep in the middle – those silent spaces demand a reckoning all heir own, and they itch to find voice, and a safe space to surface.  A place, in their own quiet way, to become.

An incomplete lifetime of things I have not said aloud.

I really, really, really hope you don’t fall in love with me. This would be a spectacularly bad idea. Especially right now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I want nothing more than a small cottage. A weeping willow hiding a front yard hammock. Streaming light and hours upon hours to write. I do not want any of this with you.

There is a plea trapped in my throat. It is one word. Stuck on repeat. You. Youyouyou.

You are cute. Like really. And funny and smart and wow. I think I want to kiss you. Please don’t tell my girlfriend.

My greatest salvations have been right at the center of my deepest sins. I cannot apologize anymore for the ways I have hurt you. They have been the saving grace of my own survival.

You make me feel giddy. Like my butterflies have butterflies. Jesus, I hope you say yes.

When she one day has your baby, it just might kill me.

In the center of my empty, it is teeth on bone I remember, and I am filled with longing.

I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry. Until the end of my days, I am sorry.

In what world of male entitlement do you exist that makes it okay for you to touch a stranger like that? I am not property, nor do I need to qualify my no. The patriarchy has not served you well, you chauvinistic asshole.  Fuck. The Hell. Off.

I want to kiss your tattoos. All of them. You have a lot of tattoos, in so many delicious places. I hope you don’t have plans later. This could take a while.

When I see a penny on the ground, before I make the inevitable wish, it will be to you that my mind travels, and I will remember.

All the you’s in this poem are not the same. All the me’s in this life are not the same. Walt Whitman said he contained multitudes. I am my own multitudes. And if you are all also multitudes it makes tremendous sense why we can’t quite get ourselves lined up to finally get together. I lie awake at night wishing we could get back together. We will never get back together.

I sometimes dream about the rasp of your five o’clock shadow against my cheek. I look for substitutes just to feel this again. None of them will ever be you.

I will never tell you where I hide the chocolate.

To me, you – and what we shared – will always be the definition of holy.

Will you ever go home so I can just be alone?   I am far more enamored with my own company than I will ever be with yours.

I want to twist that curl of hair that falls over your eyes around my finger. I’m obsessed with it. I’m scared you’ll think this is strange.

In some parallel universe, one existing outside of time, I believe we are what we could have been.

More than anything, I’m afraid I’ll never reach beyond the confines of this small life and step into all that I know I could be. More than anything, I’m afraid you don’t want me to. More than anything, I am afraid it will take me years longer to find out for sure.

Oh. We’re talking about you again? Gee wiz, how fun. Let me settle in here. Get comfy. History tells me that this is going to take a while.

I want. I want. I want. Please.

I will always think I am too much. Or not enough. Or both at once. I wonder if anyone will ever see through that and know that I am neither and both, and that it’s okay – either way.

Are you sure you’re not gay? Goddammit.

Where’d you learn to be such a goddamn asshole? Seriously. You. Fucking. Suck.

Come home. Comehomecomehomecomehome. Please.

You are a better writer than I will ever be.

I see you sometimes, barely contained in your own skin. I see you pushing against the walls, feeling for a crack or a sliver or an escape hatch. One day you’re going to blast out of that safe little life you’ve built for yourself. I want, quite badly, to be there when you do. Please, say that you one day will. Perhaps, if you do – I will be waiting.

It all the ways that truly matter, it will always be you.

~~~~

In the spaces inside the silence, in the depth and breadth and weight of these spaces, it is sometimes true that entire lives are lived.   Inside of the silence we love and we lose. We hurt and bleed and rejoice and become strong. We fight, and we lay down arms and either surrender or walk away.

Inside the silence we find truth. We wither and we bloom. We grow into and out of people and relationships and ways of being and entire lives, both lived and unlived. We learn the boundaries and edges of ourselves. Inside the silence we discover the wisdom of choice. Of choosing, again and again, what we offer to the world and what we keep close and just for us. We learn that there are seeds that will only germinate in quiet.  We come to know the voice that speaks without words or sounds.

We get comfortable with the tenor and timbre and cadence of the voice with which we will one day speak aloud.  We discover her  resonance and we do battle to honor her and save her and bring her to life, again and again. We come to call her our knowing, our intuition, our gut. We honor the wisdom of all that can never be said.

Inside of the silence, we come home.

~~~~

Tell me, of the spaces inside your own silence. How have you learned to trust in those spaces? Do words live there, or music or colors or just shadows and light? Share, if you wish, in the way that feels safest to you. Leave your name behind. Take a new one if it feels right.   Post it here. Write it in your journal. Close your eyes and name the silent truth within your own body.   Send me an email and know I will keep your truths as close to my heart as my own.

Above all, honor the wisdom of your own silence. Know that it is true and strong and whole and good.  Know that it needs no explanation or justification. Know that it is what it is, and nothing more or and nothing less. Know that it is everything. Just like you.

The post Even The Deepest Silence Carries Its Own Sweet Wisdom appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The stories burn for release.  We are writers by birth and by destiny and by intention. Not by choice. If we never scratched another word on a coffee shop napkin, this would not change.  A writer is not someone who does. A writer is someone who is. Denial will result in an unceasing ache and a relentless empty.  Our words are the truest way we serve the world.

Truth:   We will always have another mistress

Her name is Muse. We serve her with devotion. Do anything to please her and keep her close. Courting. Seduction. On our knees, desperate pleading. And when she leaves us, as she always will, we must write our way back into her graces. She responds only to action and dogged intention.

Truth:  We will stop at red lights

Pull over onto the dusty side of the freeway in the middle of nowhere. Gas station parking lots. School pick up lines. We will leave your arms at 3am after hard, hot sex. We will write with whatever is available and on any surface that presents itself. When the words come burning clear and true, we must answer.   Sometimes the words will be lost anyway. Gone into the ether as if they never were. We will mourn them like a lost child, convinced they were our most brilliant.

Truth: It is terrifying sometimes, having so many words living inside 

They beat snare drum steady in our chest. They burn and scratch and push and pull. They are thirsty for freedom. They crave the danger of the edge. They want someone to promise safety. They don’t give a single fuck. Sometimes we can subdue and tame and become master of this beast, but often we are at its mercy. The words are their own living, fire-breathing dragon. We must get out of the way, and give them space to work through us and birth themselves.

Truth: There are days when writing is survival

On these days the spilling of words on page is the only thing that will save us from the demons and from ourselves. The only path to burn down and rebirth. The only way out and through. The very thing that keeps us alive.

Truth: We need to write more than anything

It is the most relentlessly driving force. But many days we’ll do just about anything to avoid having to write. We will hide and run and resist with every last bit of strength we can muster. It’s the ultimate dichotomy of the creative soul.

Truth: We live nestled snugly inside paradox

We inhabit our contradictions. We are both walking peace and writhing confusion. Our only certiantly comes from the solidity of mystery. Creativity thrives on ultimate possibility and infinite potential. We couldn’t do it if we were any more sure of anything.

Truth: We’ve been writing since we were 8, or 11 or 15  

Or forever in lives long since past. We likely began with sappy, hopeful, angsty, rhyming odes to boys and girls and sunsets and ocean waves and bus stop daydreams. Mostly about love. These days we’re not so concerned about rhyming. But most of us are still awfully preoccupied with love.

Truth: You spill blood, we hemorrhage novels

Our cuts seep with the precise cadence of our lover’s sigh as our fingers slid from ribs to waist. They feel like a grieving mother hitting the ground, tearing her hair out with the wail of centuries of torn from her chest. They taste the way the ocean feels on bare skin, like salt and wet and cold and freedom. Sometimes we need to cut ourselves, clean slice across soft expanse of skin, force it all to rise to the surface – just to access the truth pulsing through our veins.

Truth: We live in metaphor as much as in reality

There are endless ways to draw our own blood. We know them all. We also know that the best way to staunch the bleeding is the exact same way we are both emptied and filled. To sit and spill our guts and our grief and our joy and our sex and our longing and our wanderlust and the time we finally found our way home. To write until we are spent. Until the words are done with us.

Truth: Don’t wait up

Rise yourself over the city at night and look. The lights still burning at 3am are those of night workers and insomniacs and the broken hearted.  And writers. Always, the writers. The witching hours between midnight and dawn belong to us. To the candles and whiskey and the sex and cigarettes and the ink and the click of the fingers against keys and the stacks and stacks and stacks of paper scrawled with layers of truth and bullshit and true love and glory and vice and battle. In the quiet time when the ghosts dance the real work gets done.

Truth: We have learned to speak in the spaces between words

In the infinite pause at the top of the incline, in the curve of the comma. In the expanse of the inhale. In the silent slide of lips along clavicle and the closing edge of teeth on hipbone. We know that one almost imperceptible moan can contain an entire love story. And that tears can be the personification of the erotic and that the metallic bite of copper is the exact taste of grief. And that in these soundless spaces we say more than could ever be conveyed with the smooth slide of pen across page and the words of a hundred languages at our disposal.

Truth: To be an artist is to be both archaeologist and surgeon

We dig deep, unearth all of the broken and discarded and fractured pieces. Pottery and garbage and bones and beauty. We dust them off and lay them out and step back to look. We study your history and make sense of your story and then splice you back together into letters and paragraphs and chapters. And on our pages you are more than the sum of your parts and yet exactly what you’ve always been meant to be. This will be disconcerting. And beautiful.

Truth: If you love us, even for a time, you won’t walk away unscathed

Loving a writer will fill you and buoy you and shatter you and save you again and again and again. You will become the muse and the one thing standing in her way. We will love like you’ve never been loved and tell stories you never wanted told. We will push past your boundaries and call you safely home. We will love you with wholeness and fullness and notes on scraps of torn musical scores and with the way we whisper your name in the darkest night. Even our touch will feel like a story. You will never be the same.

Truth: Lists like this are utter bullshit

We are infinitely variable, us writers. The beast and the scotch over ice and the muse and the love and the blood and the 3am incantation and homecoming and the paradox  – all of it – these are my words, and my naked heart projected on this screen. Nothing more than that. And if you are a writer you have your own pulsing, beating, brutal, brilliant heart. And your own muse and ritual and truth. And only you will know exactly how it loves and lives and breathes your art into life and builds your life into art.

And you will know that there is only one thing you ever really need.

To write.

Don’t let me stop you. Don’t pay the slightest attention to my ramblings. These are nothing but midnight meanderings fueled by a hard shot of whiskey and romanticized by a blood red candle flame and filled with the unceasing longing of my own ocean heart.

But you? All you need is a blank page and a good fucking pen. Light your candles and pour yourself a drink.  Séance your ghosts and seduce your muse. Dance only for yourself. Make it hot. Feel the truth of your bones leading the way.

And don’t let me try to tell you a single thing about your own truth. Or your life or your creativity or the ways and hows and whys of your loving or your life or your words. You know how it is for you. You’ve always known.

So quit the excuses. Sit down. Breathe deep. Own that burning drive inside you.

And write the fuck out of your life. 

The post 10 Truths Of The Writer’s Soul appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Of course you don’t want to face it. Not now. Not ever, really. But let’s go there. It’s time.

You want different than what you have. You don’t love him, not anymore. You’re not fit for this glass-walled corner office and the perpetually tepid coffee from the staffroom. You hunger for graffitied concrete, crumbling brick, and a hard shot of whiskey that burns all the way down.

You want dogs, not children. You actually like olives on your pizza.  That thing you did, in the dark corners of a secret room, it’s eating you alive.  And no, that longing for her, it’s not ever going to go away.

Come clean, now. Chin up, love. No, it’s not going to be easy, or even gentle. Truth telling rarely is.

But you can do it. Indeed, you must.

It has been so long since you have given voice to what lives at core of you that you’ve forgotten exactly what was true to begin with. The lines between reality and justification blur until the agony of all that has been stifled drives you to the earth.  The silenced wail held tight in your chest slashes through your center and tightens its noose until even breathing seems impossible.

Exhale now. Let it go. No matter what darling, you’ve still got to breathe.

Come clean, love. Lay down the burden of life only partway lived, of half-truths, of circumvented clarity.

It’s been so heavy. The weight of all you are not saying is holding you tethered to an existence far too small for the immensity of you. Shred the explanations, the excuses, the masks, and the veils. Drop all the tired layers that obscure your heart from the world.

Lay it all out. Leave your inside voice behind. Scream till your voice threatens to leave, and then wail some more. Let it loose – get primal and raw and messy. Cry all the tears you’ve sealed deep inside. Every secret passage scrawled in your journal and kept under lock and key. Every smothered bit of knowing you’ve kept locked down deep in your bones.

Let it go.

There is nothing to be gained by holding on any longer.

Life calls for one thing and one thing only, that you live from the clear and present center of yourself.

That you live your life as a blazing testament to your truth, whatever that may be. Wherever it might take you. Whoever you lose or leave along the way.

It’s true. Sometimes truth is a vicious wrecking ball. But amidst the rubble lie the embers that will spark your emancipation.  Your truth, spoken clear and true, is the light that will illuminate spirit and wisdom and a path that is all yours. Your voice fans the flames that will sustain you on the journey you were meant to take.

Do you hear that?

It’s your voice. Your mother tongue. The language of your soul. The one you were born knowing but forgot how to speak. It has returned to you now. It will never leave. It comes from the deep-rooted center of you, and rises unadulterated and whole. Echoes into the world and lights your way.

Fierce and gentle. Strong and mighty. Pure and clear and true.

Do you hear it? I do.

The post come clean {the sound of freedom} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

“Is the fear of losing something worth the good that having it brings? I think I just live in such a state of fear of being broken by love that I don’t even trust in it anymore.”

Oh love, there are so many things I do not know. So many I will never know. A handful that require giant blinders, protecting me from what I’m not yet willing to know. The list of things of which I am dead certain is far shorter. But of the few tender truths on which I would stake my existence, this is one that I know to be solid and real.

We are here to love, and love hard, every chance that we get. 

A wise woman once gifted me with those words, at a time when I was asking this exact question. She was right, of course. Wise women usually are. Yes, we are here to love. And yes, even with the fear of loss looming around every uncertain corner, it is worth it.

Always.

Love lifts us, giddy and hopeful, to the wildest heights. Sometimes we free fall into a gentle landing. Sometimes we get unceremoniously dumped from 30,000 feet. Sometimes love just up and leaves, and we are obliterated in its wake. Instead of happily ever after, our sunset ride is followed by a massive love hangover. And so we grow wary. Lose faith. Stop trusting. We embrace our cynicism, build walls around our fragile hearts and wail ‘I’ll-be-alone-forever-and-nobody-in-the-whole-wide-world-will-ever-see-me-want-me-love-me-ever’. 

And at our most bruised and tattered these boundaries are protective and wise and true. We need solitude during that shaky period when, in the eerie empty of 3 am darkness, the floor repeatedly falls out from under us. We need seclusion and distance and dark chocolate and dramatically scrawling journal entries and good girlfriends and movies that make us cry. But time and space eventually grant a reprieve, and we are brought back to our hearts. Back to our truth.

And the truth is that we don’t need to trust in love. Or in forever. Or even ourselves or our partners or the universe. We just need to trust in our hearts. Our wise and foolish, brave and battered hearts. Idealistic and cynical, cracked and patched and still – in spite of it all – stubbornly pumping love through our electric souls. Our hearts lead us into love. They lead us out. And then – crazy and hopeful and free– they knock down walls and move mountains to try again.

Our desire for love is a desire to be seen. To be known. To be witnessed as our truest, most naked selves. And not to be loved because of or in spite of or only if. But just to be loved. To be able to say ‘take it or leave it’ and to have our lovers say, “YES. We’ll take it.” All of it. Gladly and willingly and eagerly. Show yourself and you will be safe. Worshiped for the divine being you’ve always been. And you will be loved. And loved and loved and loved. Today and tomorrow and always. Forever.

But this world cannot promise to deliver us the sugar-spun forever we’ve been taught is our destiny. Nor can our lovers. We can’t even promise it to ourselves. And instead of grasping at false guarantees or guarding ourselves by rejecting love and forever entirely – perhaps what we really need is a new paradigm.

How about embracing a different definition of always or forever? One that is just as long as this moment. This breath. This heartbeat. So that your only task is to live this moment fully. Breathe this breath deep into your soul. Feel this heartbeat pump life through your body and into the world. And then live and breathe and feel the next one and the next one and the next.

Fear only comes from the projection of what has not happened yet. What may happen tomorrow or next week or next year or in our next lifetime. What may never happen. Fear is an imaginary dragon hell-bent on keeping you small. But your heart has done battle and survived. Your love is a fierce warrior priestess who refuses to be contained. You are what is real, here and now.

The present. Today . This moment. This is all we can know. All we hold. All we can ever promise. Anything before or after is a beautiful, wild, unknowable mystery. All of future is uncertain. All of love is uncertain. All of life is uncertain. What is ever guaranteed but change? And this need not feel unreliable or cause anxiety or be labeled cynicism or distrust or inability to commit.

Instead, let it feel like freedom and presence and truth.

Here’s the truth. We love wide open. We love people who deserve it and people who don’t. We love people who have held us through our darkest nights and people who have left us for dead by the side of the road. We love people who have earned our trust and people who should never have had it in the first place. And it cracks us, wide open, over and over again. Sometimes that love is too much. Our wounds cannot close when love keeps wrenching them open again and again. And we want it to stop. Beg it to stop. Please. Please. Please. No more. In our own moments of 3 am reckoning – whenever they arrive – we plead for something different. Something more contained. Something safer and easier and far, far more gentle.

But love is a risk, sweet girl. It always has been. It always will be.   And it is the most necessary, the most brutal, the most honest risk we ever take. Do what we will; our hearts will not be closed. They are meant to open. They are made for this. So are you love, it’s what you’re here for. It’s what we’re all here for.

Of that brief list of things that I know to be solid and true, here is another:

We are all broken by love. Broken and built. Built and broken. We are architects of unselfish desire. We are a lifesaving demolition team. We lay the foundation, we bring it crashing down around us, we kneel in the wreckage and scream the primal scream of the damned. And still, still, we love. And we become the most breathtaking mosaic of all of our fragments, all of our love, all of the pieces of our kaleidoscope hearts.

And this is so damn beautiful that it demands to be held to the light.

Hold it to the light, love.

You. Your precious heart. All of the loves that you hold. This is what is real. This is what is true. This is enough. So go ahead, give yourself over to love.

Eyes Lifted. Heart Open. Spirit Wild and Free. Forever.

The post Uncommon Sense: Go ahead, give yourself over to love appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.