Not a week (rarely a day) goes by when I don’t hear from someone out there in this wild world of ours, someone just like you. Someone with a regular, ordinary, mundane life. Someone with joy and bliss and heartache and grief. Someone with trauma and fear. Someone struggling against demons. Someone determined to rise.

Every single one of these someones has a story. Every single one of these stories has value.

And every single one of these someones has one thing in common.

The someones that reach out to me, by email or message or social media comments – they want…no, want is not a strong enough word right now – they long – to tell their stories.

Somewhere deep inside there is a pulse of desire. A kernel of an idea. A sweet and lingering pull toward the blank pages of the journal, the blinking cursor in the word doc, the empty spaces waiting to be filled. Sometimes just to the very idea that somewhere inside of them lives a story worth telling, a story someone might one day want to hear. Possibly even a story that could matter, that could change things. A story that could delight or distract or make someone on their darkest nights feel just a little less alone.

Maybe even a story that could save.

I said that these someones have one thing in common. That wasn’t quite right.

It wasn’t quite right because of course there is more than one thing.

There is this universal thread that stitches these souls together. It weaves in and out through countries and across oceans, around the curves of different languages and customs, through the years of age and space and time. That thread is the call of stories. The nameless pull to bookstores where you get lost for hours in the feel of pages turning in your hands, where you press books to your nose and breath in the smell of paper and ink and the dreams of whoever strung the words together and bound them into the world you’re holding in your hands. The siren song that brings you together with others like you, where you slip-slide through stories, voices trading and growing softer and more true as the night darkens around you and the veils slip away.

It is said that a writer lives things twice.
Once in the living, like everyone else.
And once again in the telling.

You, sweet someone, live your stories again and again and again, even if you’ve never put them down onto a page. You turn them over and over in your mind. You layer them upon your heart.  A poem crosses your path and a line or maybe just a word jumps out and you feel this thrill of recognition, because it means that somewhere in this vast and lonely world, that poet (likely someone you’ll never meet, maybe even someone not on this earth) in some moment knew *exactly* the thing that you feel to be most true. You know the exact page on your favorite book where the author wrote those words that brought you to life, or maybe even saved you. You’ve scribbled words on grocery store receipts or in the notes section of your phone or just etched them onto the deepest parts of your heart. You visit old bookstores like some visit church, and inside the pages of story you find penance and community and redemption and salvation.

You’ve probably been this way since you were very little and you got lost in the pages of books or told your teacher or your parents that you would one day grow up to be a writer.  You’ve learned that there are many you can’t share this with. The people who will look at you with amusement and condescension. The ones who will tell you that art is not a sensible way to make a living, and words even less so. The people who will tell you that your story isn’t interesting enough to turn into a book, or that it’s already been told a million times over. The ones who red pen slash the most tender spillings of your heart.

Perhaps, it is also quite likely, that all of those people above – and all of their very loud voices, live inside of your own head.

If you’ve been reading this without being able to look away.

If you’ve been reading this and you’re heart has been beating in recognition.

If you’ve been reading this and your soul is screaming ‘yes. she is talking about me. she is talking TO me”

If you’ve been reading and those loud voices are telling you it couldn’t possibly be about you.

I want you to stop right now and take a breath. I want you to pretend you are sitting right here with me today in my living room. The light is bright through the old paned windows. There is a deep blue mid-century sofa and bright mustard yellow cushions. On the table are mason jars filled with sunflowers and bright red blossoms. There is a fan blowing in the corner to keep us cool and a soft voice crooning love songs playing on the speakers. A candle is lit and it smells like amber and roses. 

I want you to bring yourself here with me.  Right here. I want you to turn to face me and to look me in the eye.  I’m going to reach out and take your hands now. Both of them. I want you to breathe with me, all the way down to your toes. And I want you to listen like you’ve never listened before.

You are here today because you have a story.

You are here today because something deep inside you knows you need to write it.

You have always known.

You may have written me before to tell me this, or you may have started to several times and stopped yourself.

You may have only told your best friend or your lover.

Or maybe you’ve never told anyone at all.

But you know, love.

You know.

You know because the words have been piling up against the levees for so long now that it’s a wonder you can hold them in.

You know because the dams have been threatening to break and to spill a flood of story.

You know because there are oceans of worlds inside you that long for nothing but the chance to finally, finally, finally taste land.

You know because it has always been this way. And you know that it always will.

And I know that this matters. That it matters more than almost anything.

And I know that there are others out there like you. Others who are waiting to tell their own story, and others that need more than anything for you to tell yours.

My work in this world is to create a space for this to be real, for you and for all the someones out there like you, Wild Heart Writers, one and all.

In just a few short weeks, a wonderful, ragtag group of someones from all across the globe will gather. We will sit around the campfire and for 30 days we will tell our stories. We will open our hearts. We will open the dams and let the waters of words flow.

And we will finally, finally get to feel what the ocean feels when it crashes on the shore, moving the entire cosmos with the force of it’s being.

Join us.

Your story is waiting for you.

bit.ly/yourwildheart

The post Your Story Is Waiting For You appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

No doubt, questions can hold a tremendous sort of power.

Tonight I find myself wondering – what might that question be for you? The one that you hold tucked deep inside. The one that hints at itself from time to time, appearing, and disappearing like mist, slowly revealing itself as the key to self-discovery, awakening, or transformation. The one that can’t be forced, but that must rise, organically, from the center of your very being?

If you get quiet with yourself, right now, I have a feeling you likely have at least some idea what that question is for you.

And what If I told you that you didn’t have to seek or force or find an answer to that question in order to harness its power – at least not in the way that you might think.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Almost two years ago I was feeling utterly lost and alone. No job. A relationship imploded. The holidays. Single Motherhood. No plan. No idea. Unsure of who I was or what I wanted or where I was going. One night that December I sat down and hastily wrote out a list of 30 questions.

It turns out those very questions would allow me to chart own map home. I just didn’t know it yet.

All I knew that night is that everything was crumbling and nothing seemed certain and that the solid ground I thought I could rest on was suddenly unstable in every direction. In that moment, I had no answers – no innate knowing. No fucking idea what I was going to do.

Without answers, I turned to the questions.

If I was empty of knowing, the only place to start was inside of the questions I longed to answer.

If I wanted to find myself, it seemed I would have to relearn (and unlearn) who I was. What I knew. What I wanted. What was waiting to be born. Who I was becoming.

And so I let the questions rise. Questions that would take me forward and backward and root me in the present. That would lead deep and high and far and wide. I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I just wrote.

I knew somehow, then, even if I couldn’t have yet articulated, that the path I was seeking wouldn’t be found by getting it all figured out. Instead, all would be slowly revealed by allowing the questions to be named, to fill the space around me, to settle deep into my bones.

And then, as Rilke suggested, I could throw myself into living those questions in fullness until I one day lived my way into the answers. Whatever those answers might be and however long that might take and whatever might change along the way.

The first messily scrawled version of these questions – written by fountain pen after tears and whiskey and one of the most alone and lost sensations I had ever felt – showed no hint of what they would soon become.

After all, they were never intended to be anything other than simple journaling prompts – a guide just for myself.

It turns out that these particular questions had much bigger plans.

That night I hadn’t the slightest inkling that the unlined paper I was holding was the beginning of my new path, a new vocation, a calling, a community, a home. But I knew it held something. A whisper of possibility. A hint of what may come. All I really knew for sure is that they were the beginnings of the map that would lead me back to myself.

Back home. A place I desperately wanted to be.

It was months later before I fully realized the power of Rilke’s quote. Months of writing into the questions (and writing and writing and writing) and inviting you all to live into the questions with me (and watching with wonder what unfolded from that invitation). Only then did I fully understand that it wasn’t the just answers that hold power.

It was the living questions themselves that were the catalyst for all the rest because it was the questions that called in all the rest of you. You restless seekers, and you word witches, all you steady and true pinpricks of light against the darkest night sky.

The questions did more than trace my way back home. They cast a searchlight that allowed us to find each other.

Because beings like us, for all the depth of our knowing and wisdom and wanting, tend to get tangled sometimes. It is that brave ability to forge our own way in the world, to forgo the expected, to take the road less traveled, that sometimes leaves us – on those darkest nights of the soul – suddenly without meaning or moorings. We uproot as a matter of our nature, us seekers, and yet we crave a way to root down even in the most inhospitable soil.

Yes, It is our very ability to step into wide open discomfort that often leaves us lost. But it is also that very thing that allows us to be found.

Again and again and again.

And so we found ourselves living in the expansive space inside the questions. In the dance of unknowing. In the learning and unlearning and remembering and letting go. Allowing the questions to unfold within us and between us and around us. Individually and collectively and universally on a sacred journey.

Wild Heart Writers, one and all.

The writing mattered, of course it does. It always will. But what mattered more was the willingness to give ourselves over to the practice of inquiry. The peeling away of layers. To sit with the discomfort of the spaces without requiring the answers to flood in immediately. To expand and let the question live inside, to fill in the empty spaces until it is ready to become what it wants to become.

The questions are the crucible – they hold the alchemy of transformation.

And when the answers are ready? Holy. Holy. Holy.

That’s when the magic begins.

If you are ready to live inside of the questions within a beautiful community of Wild Hearted Writers, we open the doors in less than one week for the 2018 Wild Heart Writing Journey.

If your living questions are ready for safe space, supportive community and fierce inspiration, come and join us as we dive into the depths of inquiry, the power of story, and the safe space where the answers fly freely.

xo.
J.

Do you want to know the question that changed everything for me?  It is one of the questions included in the upcoming 30-day writing journey.  If you’d like me to send you this question, and a sneak peek into the essays that make up the daily structure of the course, send me a quick email or comment here and I’ll send it to you right away. 

The post What is the most powerful question? appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Writers are often an introverted group, preferring the company of words to people, but that creative fire — left to its own devices — can burn itself out rather quickly.

You know what I’m talking about. We call it writer’s block. Frustrated Artist Syndrome. The whole overdone trope of the artist pacing in his slovenly garrett tearing his hair out — full of angst and unable to write or paint or make music. And always alone.

But here’s the thing. Writers — artists, musicians, creative beings — we gather. Somehow we pull away from our art and we dust ourselves off and we emerge into the outside air. And then we find each other. Introverted or no, there’s a magnetic force in play that brings creatives together. Over and over, through the ages.

We find one another because we need one another.

Deeply.

unknown photographer, vintage snapshot print, July 1915

Leonard and Virginia Woolf and their contemporaries — renowned intellectuals, artists, philosophers and other early 20th century badasses — formed the London based Bloomsbury Group — creating works that had long reaching impact on literature, economics and feminism.

The Saturday evening literary salons at Gertrude Stein’s 27 rue de Fleurs welcomed that Lost Generation of post-war Parisian expats that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Joyce and Matisse into ‘a haven for the sacred sparks of insight visited upon humans…Stein’s apartment was a church with art as the divine matter.

And perhaps the most famous of these magnetic creative gathering points — The Chelsea, in New York City. To read it’s list of residents — Dylan, Bukowski, Joplin, Miller, Mapplethorpe, Ginsberg, Warhol, Cohen, Kerouac is to take a deep dive into the exploding literary and music scene of the 50’s and 60’s — an unintentional artists colony smack dab in the middle of Manhattan — a legend around every corner and more stories than the walls will ever tell.

All of these wildly talented artists convened in these spaces and places because they needed each other. Needed to be fed by the convergence of ideas and passion and creativity. To be supported. To find understanding — to discover others whose demons would play nicely (or at least creatively) with their own.

I need this. You need it too.

You know you do. Even if you look at that word that I keep using — Writer (With-A-Capital-W) and think… “that’s not me. I’m not a real writer”. Quiet that voice — right now. You’ve got a desire to write and a pull to the story — of course you do, or you wouldn’t be here.

And if you are putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or joining letters into words and words into sentences in the quiet safety of your own mind, then you, my dear, are a Writer.

And I would be willing to bet that you feel that hunger to gather with others. To find that tribe. To discuss. To dive deep. To drink. To dance. To seduce the muse. To be understood. To be uplifted. To join your fire to their fire and all of our fire. To burn. To rise. To create. Together. En masse.

In community.

Because you need it. To maintain the spark. To fuel the flame. To keep burning and burning and burning until your story can be born. Because when creatives gather? That is exactly what happens. Watch out. That combined creative fire? It’s magnified for all.

You need this. And we need you.

When my, ’Wild Heart Writing’ course launched a few years ago I watched as the women and men in that space formed their own version of what Hemingway and Bukowski and Woolf claimed for themselves so long ago.

Though this wasn’t a decrepit hotel in Manhattan or a ritzy salon on Paris’ Left Bank — simply your typical Facebook group — we created community. We formed a tribe. We showed up as ourselves, raw and vulnerable and lit from within with the power of what was being created. Not just words and stories and ignited hearts — but a swirling force of creative energy — far greater than any one of us could have created alone. We lifted and legitimized and most importantly of all we saw each other. Fully.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Several years later — the community, and the sharing and the combined creative fire — it continues to burn.

And let me clarify one thing. I did not create this community. I created a course that helped weave common threads among strangers. The birth of the community was alchemy and mystery and full on magic. The creative community creates itself, and it grows itself and it becomes through the sheer force of that much passion in one space. It is inevitable and it is necessary and it is a thing of great beauty and love.

“We know that community is sacred. The fire where we gather, sharing our stories, tending to the light and release, is where we resurrect ourselves and remember ourselves. It’s where we die and labor ourselves anew. It is a holy place where we see with tender eyes and let ourselves be fully seen. The sweet honey loving of the Wild Heart Writers so naturally calling out what they liked and loved about another’s writing was beautiful. I find myself still posting here because it feels like a home for my wild heart and wild words to come and be real and revealed. Even though the course is over, I truly hope the writing and the group has just begun.”

Winter Session participant, Tulasi Adeva

Soon we begin again. Welcoming another group of creatives and soul searchers and wild hearts. Opening our arms to another collection of those who know that the best way to find yourself, is to get lost in the wild, and then write your way back home. Growing the writing community that started by the most perfect sort of serendipity.

I would love, more than anything, if you would join us — to make this commitment to yourself and your writing community, to be welcomed into our tribe of Wild Hearts.

I’m positive Hemingway and Fitzgerald would totally have my back on this one.

Xo.

Jeanette

“The Wild Heart Writers space allows me to feel alive and connected to my own wild heart and all the beautiful, messy, raw, honest, amazing pieces of me I see in all of you…You give words to the deepest truth inside me, that I don’t have. I give understanding to you that is true and real and known. You inspire me. I risk showing up. We expose our nakedness and see our common humanity”

Winter Session participant, Kathy Whitman

The post Do you need a creative community? appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.