Jeanette LeBlanc

Category: Body + Desire

Bring it back to the body, to the heat, to the holy wanting and sacred undoing. Here we talk about sex, and longing and the spiral at the center of it all.

  • amen to your perfectly needy heart.

    amen to your perfectly needy heart.

    We humans, we are needy as fuck.

    It’s how we’re made.

    But somewhere along the way, we buy into the idea that we shouldn’t need so much. Shouldn’t want so hard.

    Put on the armor.
    Place another brick on the wall.
    Practice your poker face.
    Never let ’em see you sweat.

    You’ve probably seen that post that got shared everywhere. The one about how ultra independence is a trauma response. And yo, last I checked, not many of us get through this ride called life without at least a dash of trauma.

    It makes so much sense. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, amiright?

    We live in a culture of individualism.
    Batten down the hatches.
    Every human for themselves.
    Don’t worry, I got this.

    Right. Except we don’t got this. Not alone. Not really. It just isn’t how we’re made.

    And when we start wanting and needing as we inevitably will (as perfectly designed as we are for the collective and communal experience of living) the voices in our heads can get awfully loud.

    You know the voices.

    The voice that says we are asking/wanting/needing/seeking too much.
    The voice that says we ARE too much.

    And at that pivotal point of extension into whatever lies on the other side of safety. At the outreach. At the possibility. At the space where we are asked to leave the safe harbor and venture into unknowing waters where we absolutely cannot go it all alone, even if we wanted to (and let’s be honest, we really don’t ) those voices can get terribly loud.

    They say that this much needing is not safe. Way too vulnerable.

    Our alarm systems start blaring and the self-destruct warning flashes a yellow-orange-red threat of incoming DANGER.

    This happens to me as much as it happens to anyone. I feel so deep and want so much, so often, that it takes my breath away. Inside of the strong and confident and sovereign woman is a tender girl who burns with needs and hopes and the wildest of wishes.

    And much of what I want and need I may never get to have. I know this.

    This is what it is to be human, of course. Not a single guarantee and a hell of a lot of wild unknowns and some crashing heartbreaks along the way. None of us get out of this clean.

    But the story of being here, alive and human, is more than just that. So much more. To allow the truth of wanting is to allow the possibility of having.

    This human thing? It’s also full of stories of the sort of magic that can happen when we trust our knowing, wanting, craving selves.

    When we remove the stigma of being ‘needy’ and instead acknowledge that for any of these dreams to come true we HAVE to know and name our own needs.

    We have to be so intimate with our wants that we trust them to live outside the safe confines of our tender hearts. Even when we might be judged or fear we won’t be met. Even when the crash and burn seems inevitable.

    And you know what – we do that. Again and again and again.

    Holy hell, how can that not be an act of bravery, of sovereignty, of solidarity of self?

    So amen to your perfectly needy heart.
    Amen to your grasping hands and your tender longing and the way your body spills over with desire.
    Amen to the wishing well pennies and the shooting stars and the crossed fingers and the wood you can’t seem to stop knocking in spite of yourself.
    Amen to the want and the crave and the burn.
    And hallelujah to the having, when it comes, to the wholeness when it arrives, to the spaces where it all comes together, if only for a moment.

    To be human is to have needs.
    To speak them is a wild reclamation.
    To be met inside of them is a holy miracle.

    Every. single. time.

  • Come Out Of The Closet (Your Body Is Here To Feel Good)

    Come Out Of The Closet (Your Body Is Here To Feel Good)

    Once upon a time I got embroiled in the comments section of a thread written by a woman I admired.

    She railed against polyamory as trauma bonding, no different from humans who enjoy a ‘vending machine of lovers’ and avoiding real connection — claiming that ‘sacred union’ was only possible in the context of monogamy.

    My commitment to ethical non-monogamy is new, but after 12 years as an out queer woman, this post felt all too familiar.

    A sweeping, blanket judgment against an entire group of people and the ways and hows and whys of their love (and their love-making), written by someone who planted herself firmly outside of this group.

    This is not limited to polyamory or queerness, this sort of projection occurs over and over again, whenever we creep closer to the edges, leaving the exalted center of heteronormative sex occurring within the realm of committed (read: monogamous + vanilla) partnership.

    man + woman + till death do us part (or some version of) + missionary + conventionally attractive + private + babies + happily ever after = acceptable.

    Exist outside the gender binary? Got a collection of collars and restraints and like it hard and rough? Want your lover to have the same parts as you? Desire more than one human or more than one gender at once? Have a secret, kinky turn on that people think is weird? Have a primary partner and one or more secondary partners? Blow the hierarchy out of the water entirely and embrace relationship anarchy as a positive force? Dream of a great big orgy of hedonistic desire?

    You dirty, deviant little freak, you.

    Truth: Sex is only palatable to the masses when it’s heteronormative, perfectly vanilla (no kinky shit, please and thank you), safely monogamous and fits into the fairytale of heading straight for marriage and babies and happily ever after.

    Anything else?

    Suspect.
    Dangerous.
    Shameful.
    Questionable.
    Wrong.

    We’ve all lived too damn long lugging around this puritanical notion that pleasure must be villainized to protect us from ourselves.

    Fuck that.

    Seriously.

    The only question you need to ask is this:

    Is everyone involved in full personal safety and enthusiastic consent?

    Ask it loudly and repeatedly if you need to.

    Yes?

    Then you go with your bad, brilliant, beautiful, pleasure-filled self.

    Fuck the masses and what they deem acceptable.

    Fuck the projection and judgments.

    We’ve all wasted way too much damn time in the closet.

    Our bodies are here to feel good.

    And what makes that happen isn’t for anyone else to decide.

    Just you and your partner(s).

    End of story.

    Remember…

    your body is not the enemy
    your sex is not a scandal
    your skin needs no censor
    you are not here for denial
    your pleasure is
    what the universe
    demands
    it is the purpose
    of your
    creation
    anything else
    is
    blasphemy

    excerpt from | Treatise of Touch

  • pleasure is the *ultimate* muse.

    pleasure is the *ultimate* muse.

    truth: pleasure is the *ultimate* muse.

    Tell me this:
    When is the last time you felt good?

    Really good. Down to your bones.

    When did you last taste your own ecstasy, take it into your mouth and swallow it into your being?

    How long has it been since your skin sang a fucking aria of satiated desire and you were insensible, pleasure-drunk, beyond words?

    When did you last make the experience and expression of that sort of hedonistic pleasure your absolute imperative?

    What are you doing to seek it, to find it, to place yourself in the path of it, over and over again?

    We can create from a million spaces.

    From heartache. From pain. From trauma and the sharp sweetness of the wound.

    Art born from the rage and ache is therapeutic and necessary. Absolutely.

    But let’s not forget what we are here for.

    What our bodies were born to see and feel and know.

    I will tell you this, the shadowlands can become a habit.

    My muse and I spent too long dancing there.

    Past the time that the work was moving us through and into the space where I became captor and captive of a narrative I no longer sought but somehow could not escape.

    I forgot what she and I could create when set free.

    I forgot the sound of her sigh and her ask and her yes.

    I forgot that I could call her to me through the simple act of claiming my own pleasure.

    And I forgot how well and how often she puts out when we dance together in that kind of ecstasy.

    Yes. Pleasure —YOUR pleasure—is the gateway to the muse.

    Find a lover who will take you, the way you need to be taken.

    Become that lover for yourself and touch yourself holy again.

    Feel each moment you are in all the way to your toes.

    Taste what you are tasting.

    Feel what you are feeling.

    Allow yourself to be penetrated by beauty and sound and light and love.

    Become a seducer of life.

    The ultimate hedonist.

    A hardcore pleasure seeker and taker and maker.

    And then you sit down with your pen or your paint or whatever the tools of your particular craft my be.

    Tell the muse you’re ready for her to come in hard and hot and ready.

    And just wait to see what happens next.

    I predict it will be damn good.

  • In The After: All The Ways I Will Love You Then

    In The After: All The Ways I Will Love You Then

    Imagine you showed up at my door, and it wasn’t the before time when we didn’t know, or the now time when we still don’t, but the mysterious after we can only imagine, when we’ll finally have something solid to rest inside.

    What if you came to me then, in the after. When we’d had some time to unwind the anxiety knotting our muscles and release the air stuck in the bottom of our lungs. When we were all slowly re-learning how to dance together again in real-time and space. Without screens or masks or gloves to keep us safe from threats lurking in the air and on the surfaces and in the everywhere-everywhere-everywhere.

    Do you have any idea how I would hug you? Over and over again. How I’d fall into your arms and pull you into mine and let the lines and curves of my body find the nooks and crannies of yours. So that we fit, puzzle to puzzle. Like there was never any other way we could be.

    I’d hold you way too long, past that moment of awkward automatic pull away that existed even in the before. Until the tight spiral of our chests stopped begging our eyes to draw an invisible six-foot perimeter we could disappear inside to save ourselves.

    Take a breath, love. It’s going to take a while for us to not see each other as hazard signs.

    But I’ve got time and so do you, and so we’d hold each other until it was just exactly right. Until we could sink together into something ancient and nameless. Something that would feed the hunger we’ve been feeling since way before this whole thing started, back before we had any damn idea just how badly we needed each other.

    My god, how badly we need each other.

    I’d invite you in for waffles and mimosas and the kind of deep talk that doesn’t even need words but still lays us bare and leaves us satiated. We’d lay in my new red hammock, arms and legs and souls intertwined. The desert heat would unwind the hurt in our bones and I don’t think I’d be able to take my eyes off your mouth.

    Not because I want to kiss you, even though maybe I do. It’s just that I’ve gotten so used to seeing faces hidden behind masks that I’ve forgotten how a mouth speaking truth can break me into so much confetti. And so I’d fall topsy-turvy headfirst into the wonder of your smile lines while the sky deepened from cerulean blue to cotton candy pink to fire flame to the blue-black bruise of night.

    Can you imagine how we would light every candle in the house and burn the palo santo and turn up the volume and find just the right song to dance our asses off, wild and free? Like the people we were in the before, or back when we were teenagers, or maybe like we’ve never been but always felt existing just out of reach and somehow all the apart brought us together and here we are in now.

    “Isn’t it beautiful?”, we’d say, “Isn’t this everything”?

    And it would be. Absolutely and entirely everything. And so we’d dance until we were laughing and high on our own delirious joy, and then laugh until we lost our breath and gasped until we hit that moment of completely sober truth. You know the one, right? Where you lock eyes and all the sound wooshes out of the room. We’d hold the whole of the universe inside that one moment, you and I, right there in the less than six-foot space between us. And we’d know it. And then the pin-prick-bubbles would start behind our eyes and in our noses and there’d be nothing left to do but cry.

    And so we’d cry, us two, right there in my living room. I’d hold both your hands in mine then and pull you close to me and press my lips into your hair and whisper some sort of tuneless lullaby and we’d both let it all out. Salt mingling with salt until the oceans of us crash onto some distant shore and the wave roars of grief and hope and reality fill us with something that feels like the holiness of prayer.

    And then we’d just let go. All the way. The way it always is when you strip it all down and ride the current.

    Eventually, our souls only ever want to be honest.

    And then, if that was how it was with you and me, maybe I would cradle your face in my hands and kiss you soft and slow. Maybe the magnet-charge-heat of us would take hold and we would tumble-fall into some sort of sweet oblivion of bodies starved for touch and skin past ready for that moment of undoing.

    It would be all lips and pulse and touch and teeth and the kind of need-and-need-and-need that eclipses the moon, even at its most full. And it would be impossibly tender, I just know it would be, and so desperately primal. After these months alone with our longing, separated from the animal want of it all, parallel rivers rush-rush-rushing for the exact same sea.

    And maybe that isn’t how it is for us, and the intimacy we share is the kind instead that sees and knows everything and asks for nothing. And so what we would do next I think, when the crying finally ceased, is change into our comfiest pajamas and pop some popcorn the old fashioned way. You know, on the stove, the shaking of the pan to coat the kernels and the first surprising pop against the lid making us jump even when we knew to be ready for it. Sending us back to our childhoods, just like that.

    We’d probably have ice cream too, because why wouldn’t we? Chocolate, with syrup and sprinkles or whipped cream or cherries or maybe all of it, all at once. And we’d watch something absolutely perfect like When Harry Met Sally or Beaches or Fried Green Tomatoes, laying all on top of and underneath each other, never breaking that line of connection that says I am here now in the after and so are you and thank everything good on this earth for that one small fact.

    Either way, I don’t think we’d sleep. I don’t think we’d want to. I don’t think we’d dare to. I think maybe we’d be a little bit afraid to, nervous it would all go away like a dream and we’d be back in the middle of the chaos when we had to circle each other at a distance like our bodies were weapons holding risk in every breath.

    I think we’d want to soak up the me-ness and the you-ness and the us-ness of every last one of those ordinary breaths because we wouldn’t have seen each other since way back in the before and finally we know just how tenuous that all was and how precious it all is, every last bit.

    We’d know then, in a way we never could have otherwise, exactly how blessed we are to be here and alive and together. And so we’d just stay up and keep talking and laughing and dancing and crying and loving each other. We’d keep making pleasure rise and sing from bodies too long silent. We’d keep coming back to moments so pure our hearts would ache from the truth of them, in the most perfect of ways.

    We’d keep talking and talking, our mouths tripping over each other to fill ears with the sound of words and wonder “Do you remember when?” and ‘What scared you the most?’ and “Can you believe we made it?’.

    We’d get silent after those questions sometimes, not because they don’t have answers but maybe because the answers just wouldn’t matter as much to us anymore. We’d just be grateful for the ability to just be there with each other on an ordinary night, asking the questions that mean we survived.

    Just before the sun came up we’d pour some hot coffee with just the right amount of honey into an old thermos and wrap ourselves in blankets pulled from the old crate by the door, the one I pulled from the dumpster in the alleyway and glued back together and claimed as my own.

    We’d drive barefoot to the mountain and park at the base and sit on the roof of my car and lean our heads together just breathing in the silence as we watched the sun rise in a ball of yellow-orange fire over the peak.

    The whole desert would wash with light then, and we’d be breathless with wonder, but not without remembering that lack of breath is how it ends sometimes, and not just the way things begin. Because we won’t be able to erase a knowing like that in the after— even on a morning as perfect as this.

    But still, we’d soak her in, this miraculous desert. We’d finally understand what she’s been trying to show us forever, the truth of just how much we can take. Just how brave we can be. Just how much life can exist and pulse in the quiet darkness at the seemingly desolate heart of her.

    She holds her breath, just like we do in the middle of the most impossible times, trusting the air will return, just waiting for the sun to rise.

  • We All Want. Beyond Sense. Beyond Safety. Beyond All.

    We All Want. Beyond Sense. Beyond Safety. Beyond All.

    “She was inexperienced enough to assume what they had was love because she wanted him, and want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense…

    Desire, if handled incorrectly, could become a curse”

    Magic Lessons – Alice Hoffman

    Who among us hasn’t felt that sort of desire?

    The sort that twists and turns and pretzels us back in on ourselves. Where the want itself is a hungry, knawing thing.

    Desperate and draining, total and all-encompassing. That kind of want, it happens at the edges of things, moth to a flame —drawn to the source of my own destruction—please god burn me up inside the fire of you just to keep me feeling alive. 

    When I speak of want and desire, I don’t simply refer to what we get to see and know and taste in this life. I rarely concern myself with the easily understandable surface of things. 

    No, when I speak to you of desire, I am asking you to unearth the root, to excavate the soil, to drill down to the groundwater beneath that sustains it all.

    The real answers only ever lie in the depths.

    I have said before that my life has been built on a foundation of want. I have wanted people and experiences and interactions and knowledge and I have wanted the kind of pleasure that can rip an entire life apart and name it holy. I have felt the cravings in my bones and become lost in the depths of my own longing. I have been made and I have been dismantled in the center of my wanting.

    Some of those wants I have received and had and held and tasted and known. Some I never will. Some have been held out before me, tantalizingly close, and yet I have failed to open my palms to receive, frozen in my own complex haze of trauma and hesitation and convoluted reluctance to change. 

    Each of these wants has changed me, for good and for bad, whether I made it all the way to the having or not.

    And yes, in some cases the wanting and the having has proven to be my downfall. Many times I have become the instigator of my own undoing. This is just the way it is in life, where only the living of it and through it can teach us a damn thing about how to survive – or perhaps only that we were never meant to survive at all.

    Right now I want so many things. 

    I want a giant velvet turquoise sectional sofa that those beloved to me can pile onto in a puddle of arms and legs and bodies and a sleek new mid-century modern bookshelf and to know that in one month I will have a beautiful and safe home secured for my little family.

    I want invitations to black-tie affairs where I wear fancy clothing bought at thrift stores with just enough edge to keep me feeling like me, and to become a rock star serenading an arena filled with thousands of screaming fans, and to magically pay off my tax debt by next year. 

    I want a million people to know my name and my words and my work. Sometimes I want a partner. and sometimes I love my solitude too much to imagine it, and I want to live in Scotland where light and mist make magic on the regular. I definitely want to give myself wholly and completely over to love as many times as I can in this one wild ride of a life.

    I want to know the sort of hedonistic pleasure that can bring entire civilizations to their knees and I want to rise from the orgy even more resolved to be all of myself. I want to summon you and then I want you to come to me as if compelled. I want you to cross oceans in the name of your longing. I want you to want me in a way that makes you taste your own desperation, and I want you to see me wholly, illuminated, and utterly undone.

    I want to be laid bare by your insistence to know the core of me. I want to trail my hands across my own bare skin and witness the naked face of your own want. I want to lay on my bed and let my eyes follow you as you move around the room doing the most ordinary of things, knowing only that a want like this is never ordinary.

    These wants are real and clear. But it has not always been so. So many times in this life I wanted things with almost blind desperation, only to learn that the object of my longing was simply a replacement for what lingered and pulsed just below the surface. A pale substitution. An unsatisfying make do. A space filler. A way to take the edge off but never quite scratch the itch. 

    An unstable stepping stone on the wild and roundabout path meant to lead me to the real thing. 

    These are the wants that have become a curse. Where everything got convoluted and crazed, and I lost the path of my own integrity in the name of owning or possessing or having something never meant to be mine. That have left me grasping and pleading with an unforgiving universe that has always had bigger plans for me. These are the wants that have left me naked and exposed, raw and ragged on the edge of the abyss. 

    But even here I claim the wisdom of my wanting and name it fiercely my own. 

    It’s the edge of that abyss that always leads me home. 

    For you see, it is only through all of this that I came to understand one pivotal truth.

    In the end, my wants are rooted in a sort of freedom. Freedom from constraints, from shame, from the limitations of a culture invested in keeping me from the source of my power. Freedom is the air and the soil and the groundwater. Autonomy sends the roots of me deep. Sovereignty is the rich damp earth, fertile with possibility. 

    I am a desert witch who casts spells out of the words that swim in the depth of me. I am a wolf who knows the sound of her own howl. I am the spider who spins a web of longing but who only ever wants to set us all free. 

    We all want. 

    Beyond sense. 

    Beyond safety. 

    Beyond all.

    Our wants may curse and unravel and bring it all down. 

    But maybe that is only because it needed to come down so that we could see what else might want to rise. 

    Maybe, just maybe, our wants are seeds in the new garden of Eden where everything can grow without sin. 

  • Coming Out Of The Non-Monogamous Closet

    Coming Out Of The Non-Monogamous Closet

    “Don’t you DARE settle”, he said to me last night, his eyes suddenly fierce and locked on mine from across the table.

    We were eating thin-crust pizza with some sort of sweet potato-goat cheese hipster toppings, along with some insanely delicious roasted brussel sprouts. We only had an hour left together and we were filling it with a lifetime’s worth of tender truths. Suddenly the energy shifted.

    “Don’t you dare fucking compromise for anyone who isn’t open and awake. Who won’t share and invest fully in the entire process of you understanding and meeting your needs, wherever and with whomever they lie.”

    “Don’t. Fucking. Settle.”

    He repeated those words again. And then again. As if he knew, somehow, that I might one day need the reminder.

    The intensity took me aback for just a moment. I nodded. Yes. And then my whole body unfolded into its own yes like it had been waiting for that exact message.

    Don’t. Fucking. Settle.

    Over and over I have written words of autonomy and sovereignty of self and body and relationship. I’ve written about naming and owning desires. I’ve written about taking holy ownership of your own knowing and claiming it fiercely and without compromise.

    And over and over I have started relationships with people for whom a compromise of self was the cost of entry into the relationship.

    This is not on them, of course. Not the fault of those to whom I made commitments. This is only on me.

    Once upon a time a dear friend, one with a fair bit of fame and a willingness to speak hard truths, called me a fucking hypocrite over this exact thing. He wasn’t wrong. At the time it felt like a slap in the face and also the exact thing I needed to hear. It’s still taken me a long time to get right with myself on this one.

    In the beginning, when I met someone that I was interested in, I would tell them who I was. How I work. How I love and want. How it’s all open and free and infinite inside of me. How my body and my heart don’t do well in boxes or chains. How every time I try, everything suffers. My ability to love. My ability to make art. How the very center of me turns inward on itself.

    I would tell them, every time, that in order to love you fully, I need to feel free.

    But then, I fall. I crave. I lean in. I get afraid. I do not want to lose. Not again. Not this wonderful person. Not this growing love. And so I compromise. I tuck the part of me that knows fully the ways and hows and whys of my love on a shelf and I go about the business of falling in love and building a relationship.

    Here’s the problem though. I always circle back to the same place. The same knowing. The same certainty and truth of self.

    I’m here to love wide open.

    Fidelity isn’t challenging for me. And god knows, I have paid the price of my own integrity in such a way and at such a cost that I would never go there again. It isn’t that. It’s not about multiple partners for the thrill of it or the rush of newness or the charge of an illicit and forbidden affair.

    I’m simply not built for monogamy, not the way it’s packaged and sold as the be-all-and-end-all definition of commitment. And trying to fit myself into a box I didn’t build and never meant to live inside has nearly taken me out, again and again.

    “Don’t. Fucking. Settle”

    He said those words with such ferocity because he sees me. Mirrors and knows me. Understands the cost of denying the self. Knows for himself the full power of stepping into the light.

    Today I opened my Facebook memories to see a quote of my own. Timing being what it is, my own words mirrored his from last night.

    “Decline any love
    that requires
    a compromise of spirit.
    The love that will
    feed your soul
    and fuel your fire
    is one that offers
    full agency over your heart,
    your body,
    your creativity,
    and your life.

    Remember,
    your love is a gift,
    a truth,
    a holy, sacred thing.”

    I’ve told you before that I always write what I most need to know. And sometimes still, it takes me years beyond the writing to integrate the lesson.

    But here I am. I’ve never been steadier in myself, in the naming of my needs, in the ways I am seeking to meet myself in the center of my desires. I’ve never cared less about your approval. 

    I’ve never wanted more to sink into deeply honest conversation with every last person who comes across my path. Never been more prepared to understand, name, and seek a life on my own terms.

    I’ve got all the fucks to give and not a single one to spare on anyone who wants me to be any less than all of myself.

    “All a closet is is a hard conversation” Ash Beckham

    I shared that line with him last night, long after we’d set aside the food to lean deeper into the conversation. There are a million different ways to come out. We all have to do it eventually, one way or another.

    No matter how much practice I get, each new truth I tell is entirely singular. Just like each connection, each love, each holy encounter of body and heart and soul.

    And so, if there is a closet here, then this post is another coming out in an endless string of closets and coming outs that are the inevitable part of a life lived honestly and out loud.

    I’m in a process of exploration and unfolding, discovering who I am and who I want to be in relationship. Leaning into the nuance and contrast between non-monogamy and poly-fidelity and solo-polyamory. Asking hard questions about what I want. Unwinding the binding of trauma and triggers. Allowing my connections to offer their own name and timeline and purpose.

    I am calling in the deepest sort of nourishment and pleasure and medicine, even when that falls way outside the boundaries of what the world expects. Refusing for a single second longer to compromise what I know of who I am and how I love.

    In order to love you fully, I need to feel free.

    The time for settling is over. I’m ready to see what’s possible from here.

    “Rebellion is when you look society in the face and say I understand who you want me to be, but I’m going to show you who I actually am.”

    ― Anthony Anaxagorou

  • Yes, Chocolate Is A Love Language

    Yes, Chocolate Is A Love Language

    How can you love me, let me count the ways…

    Good morning texts.

    When I roll over, blurry from sleep and still staggering the divide between dreams and reality, and reach for my phone to silence my alarm, I want to see your name. I want to know that of all the things you could be thinking and all the people in this whole wide world you could have made your first hello, that it was me who was on your mind. I am thinking of you. I am thinking of you. More than you know I am thinking of you.

    Chocolate.

    Dark and rich and layered with flavor. Add some tart fruit, or a hint of spice to wake up the inside of my mouth. Watch me as I eat it, the way the flavor lands and unfolds across my face. A warm pan of not quite cooked brownies, right from the oven. Surprise me with some when you come back from the store with eggs and milk. Crack me off a bite and feed it to me with your fingers and hold my gaze as I lick off every last bit.

    Mix Tapes.

    Speak to me in lyrics and melody. Find a line that whispers my name and echoes our magic. Send me a song that makes you want to spend all afternoon in bed, losing hours to heat and sweat and desire. Pick up my long-ignored guitar, gathering dust in the corner, and strum me a tune. Walk up behind me when I’m washing dishes and pull me back into your arms and croon the lyrics in my ear. Pull together a playlist of your favorite childhood songs and tell me the stories behind every single one. Use the music to say the unsayable, the undefinable, the unknowable, the all. Let us have an entire conversation consisting only of shared songs, no words necessary when the music holds so much.

    Play with my hair.

    Let me lie with my head on your lap while we watch tv, or nestle into your chest when we finally collapse into each other’s arms and all is silent. Without words, begin to run your fingers through my hair. Softly but firmly, rhythmically. Feel my body unwind, my breath deepens, all my defenses drop. Watch as I unwind entirely, become putty in your hands, purring like a satisfied cat, safe from the whole wide world.

    Read my words.

    To attempt to know me without reading what I write is to forever remain on the periphery of my heart. My words are my everything, more than I can give you in voice or thought or even the deepest conversation. The most complete fullness of truth that I can muster. The whole reflection of me. To love me fully, dive into the way I use words to translate my experience and my connection to the whole. Show me you find beauty there, that you see me there. That you want more.

    Fix. My. Shit.

    Take my car for the long-overdue oil change. Load the dishwasher. Change the burnt-out light bulb so that when I come home late at night there is a light over the door. Mow my lawn early on a Saturday morning. Sit in silence with me and fold the laundry. I hold this entire life on my shoulders, keep all the balls in the air — to be given space to let down the weight, even for a moment, is everything. And in that space, I can breathe, and let down my guard, and offer all the more of me to you.

    Steal like an artist.

    Plagiarize the beauty of the world and bring it to my doorstep. PIck roadside flowers. Send me other people’s poems. Tell me what shape you see in the clouds and how it made you think of me. Snap a photo of the sunset when you’re across the country and let it steal the breath from my lungs too. Show me what it is that moves you, what hurts your heart, what brings you to tears, what makes you think. Share with me the ideas and people and art that changed your life. Paint me a picture in words, in watercolor, in melody. Relentlessly steal from the beauty of this world and place it at my feet so that I can see through your eyes, it is always an honor to see what moves you, what changes you, what brings you back to me.

    Pleasure.

    Recognize my inherent hedonism. Make it your highest mission to bring me pleasure. Keep your gaze on me when I swallow the first pour of whiskey and the burn slides down my throat and blooms in my chest before landing warm and full in my belly, or the way I close my eyes when I take the first sip of a rich, full-bodied red wine into my mouth. Take me to a restaurant where the food explodes wildly or unfolds gently in layers from first bite to last and watch the way my body responds. Watch me respond to music, to poetry, to a hug that lasts and lasts. Pay exquisite attention to the surface of my skin when you touch me there, the way the shiver rises and my lips part and the most imperceptible moan escapes. See my face when I turn while hiking to take in the view I’ve seen a thousand times already? Know that that awe and wonder is the same when I see your face for the thousandth time.

    See me.

    There are a million ways to love me, it is true. And a million ways I want to love you back. With words and actions and the wholeness and holiness of your human body in the spaces where it meets mine. But really, what is it that any of us want but to be seen? To have someone look at us with wide-open eyes (and heart and mind). To see below the surface, what the rest of the world misses in the rush, rush, rush to be and do and move. To slow down. To pay exquisite attention to my ask. My please. My wish and want and daydream. Not because you will be able to meet and answer them all, but because it matters to you that I know that I’ve been heard.

  • Creatures Built On A Foundation Of Want

    Creatures Built On A Foundation Of Want

    We are creatures built on a foundation of want.

    And sometimes that wanting is nestled so deep it dare not show itself, for fear of being seen and known in a way that makes it too real to be denied. Sometimes that want becomes a small, hard kernel of longing that you can’t speak, because to speak it would be to make it real for the world. and to make it real for the world would be to acknowledge that it is not what is true in the here and now, that it may never be.

    Because this is true. What you want may never be yours to know. It may never have been or it may never be again. There is no way to be human and not know this – to not hold the truth of this, gritty and hard between your teeth, to swallow it down and give it a home in your being.

    And it doesn’t matter what it is that you want. A love. A life. To make your art. To speak truth without repercussions. To be fully you without the constant threat of losing. Infinite tenderness. Holy justice. The wild taste of true freedom. A stable ground underneath your feet. The space where bare skin meets bare skin and everything is salt and the crashing of wave after wave. A full bank account. A body that does not hurt. A heart that feels whole again. A safe home. A respite from the world that is found in the power of art or in strong arms that don’t let go or inside a fortress so tall the villains can never get in. To be seen and known and fully met in the moment when everything is crumbling. Something so small it feels unimportant. Something so big it feels like madness to even dream.

    What matters is that the want has knit itself into the core of you, and no matter how you try to deny it – it sits and roots in your belly. Holy and longing and insistent in its need. That want is a small, sad, quiet thing. It is a craving animal. It is desire that lives whole and hungry. It is a sacred prayer to possibility.

    It rises in safety and silence and in moments of conflict, ravenous in the way it wants to rise through your torso and through your throat and flies through your mouth, forming truths that cannot be unspoken or even unknown. Truths that hang in the air, crystalizing and freezing your longing right there in the air in front of your face.

    Sometimes, my want comes up and out of nowhere.
    Sometimes, all my denial and all of my toughness and all of my avoidance are spent, and all that is left is the entirety of the want, naked and needy.
    It whispers and it howls.
    It cries and rakes at the earth.
    It does battle with its own inherent contractions, at war with the ways it refuses to surrender to sensible or defined.
    It tumble trips out of me, a ragged gaping wound.
    It is soft and smooth and fully formed and ready to be met.
    It holds out both hands and whispers ‘please, meet me here, please’.

    I am on the bridge between here and there.
    I am on the field that Rumi built with words, the one that lives between right doing and wrongdoing.
    I am safe in the home of my own knowing.
    I am curled in the shadowed corner of my room, hoping you will come through the door and offer me everything.
    I am standing in the middle of a vast, empty space – bare of everything except the truth of this.

    That want breaks me wide open to a world where hope can be born and throws up walls of boundary and protection to define my space. It stills me so that I can rest and pushes me unceasingly forward. It is guide and it is protector.

    I am the me that lives now and the me that lived then and all of the versions of me that ever were and ever will be.

    And in all of these, no matter how much I try to imagine or want that it could be different, I want.

    I want and I want and I want.

    And finally, I understand what is most true.

    My want is the path that will lead me home.

  • Terribly and beautifully and painfully alive.

    Terribly and beautifully and painfully alive.

    “Are you okay, beauty?”

    “Not so much, but it’s really something I should not discuss because it should never have been in the first place. I’m sure karma and her friends are raining down upon my head. I deserve to battle alone…”

    No.

    That is a lie. A lie that your heart tells you because you are punishing yourself for the crime of being human.

    You and me? We are so very human.

    I don’t know the specifics of your story. I don’t know the exact reason you feel that karma has decreed that you suffer in solitude. But since I am human, just like you, I can fill in the blanks, and I can imagine.

    So from that space, I will tell you now. It is not true. You don’t ever deserve to battle alone. None of us do.  So, do me a favor, dearest, and shut that down right now. Even just for the time you read this letter.

    Now, it’s true that I don’t know a damn thing for sure about your story. But shared experience holds a pretty clear mirror, and I see beyond your words. I feel your heart, and I know.

    I know, love. I know.

    You have loved, haven’t you?  You have loved someone you believe you shouldn’t, and it is over, and you hurt, and maybe someone else has gotten hurt as well, someone you never wanted to hurt along the way.

    You are punishing yourself for that. Holding yourself responsible, neon-lit scarlet letter upon your chest. Your heart is broken, but you don’t think you have the right to feel that grief, so even the sadness becomes another marker of all the ways you have done wrong.

    But here’s the thing, I don’t know too many people who have gotten through very much life without at some point and in some way, loving someone we’re told we shouldn’t. If karma decreed that we be alone for the human act of loving when the world says we should not, then most of us would be destined to exist in perpetual solitary confinement. Some sort of horrible self-constructed purgatory, forever and ever.

    Our hearts are beautiful and mysterious and sometimes selfish and not often very forward thinking.

    And they do what they are here to do.

    Love.

    To seek love and find love and open to love, again and again, and again.

    To fill in what is empty in us.

    To allow ourselves even momentary kindness, or touch or desire.

    To be seen and known, even for a brief time or a time outside of time, no matter what lies on the other side.

    Bravely and recklessly. In kindness and fullness and in greed and desperation.

    So, without knowing anything about what is happening for you right now, know this:

    If the act of loving, even outside of contract or social acceptance or what the world decrees is ‘right’ makes you deserving of anything, it is entering the room with all of us who have stood where you are now standing.

    All of who have loved and lost and broken, who have brought hurt to others. All of us who have confused and tangled our own hearts, or made questionable choices to quench our own desires, or stepped outside of our own integrity to taste what called to our souls or our bodies or our longings for things we cannot even name.

    This is a part the humanness that connects us.

    Threads woven between broken and stumbling souls.

    Fumbling and scared.

    Wanting and open.

    Holy and whole.

    We don’t get here clean. We can’t. It’s not how we were made, us miraculous, stumbling, terribly messy, deeply wanting humans.

    And my god, if I don’t believe we all deserve infinite tenderness inside of this truth.

    I didn’t always know this. I didn’t know it when I made the choices that cost me my own grasp on integrity and all the stories I had told myself about who I was and the things I would and would not do.

    Not when my choices left me dazed, months later, when it felt as if the entirety of the life I had known had burned down in the wake of my own decisions, collateral damage beyond my comprehension.

    I didn’t know it when a few short years after that someone dear to me broke my trust to have a hidden relationship with someone I will love until the day that I die. I didn’t know it when I yelled and wailed and walked through the night with tears streaming down my face, sowing the seeds of anger and resentment and letting them take hold and root down deep.

    I didn’t learn this lesson until I fell into a love that was a remembering.

    A love where past and present and future and countless parallel lives tangled and exploded into life, as real and anything I could touch or taste in front of me. A love that was my first experience of what it was to be seen and loved for who and what I am, never once asked to be anything or anyone else. A love so holy it could never have felt wrong. This love, the groundwater and memory and inevitability of it, it pulled me forward in spite of everything I thought I knew about what was good or right.

    In the process of this loving, I chose a path that was not the one the world would have had me make. One that brought great hurt to another and once again risked the foundation of the life I had rebuilt from the ashes. And in the process of this loving, I made a choice not between goodness and wholeness, as I first thought, but instead a choice that was an integration, finally, of the two.

    In the aftermath of this love, there was a difference inside of me. A self that refused apology, that recognized that a such a love, it demands that we listen. It asks if we are willing to taste, to allow, to open. In the aftermath of this love, I found redemption and forgiveness was finally made possible.

    When there is a chance for a love like that, I learned. We take it. And we don’t always take it the way we believe we should. And we don’t always take it without betraying others, or ourselves. Sometimes, integrity, the real and rooted kind, is something we only find through the path of that betrayal.

    And if that was true for me, then it was also true for the others who had broken my trust and brought hurt to my doorstep. There was no forgiveness of self without the forgiveness of others.

    It is true, when we stumble off the path that marks our relationship with our own integrity, that profoundly personal and incomparable relationship, there is work to be done. Hard, painful, deeply humbling work.  None of my words are here are to offer excuse or absolution. That is between you and whatever and whoever you answer to in the deepest part of your soul. It may require penance or the hard work of rebuilding or the letting go of what refuses to repair.

    And every last one of those will hurt and come with costs I cannot know or name.

    So no, I’m not handing out free passes or making light of what has been done. God knows I am still carrying the marks of my own choices. And god knows, it may be something you live with now and forever, as it has been for me. This knowing of what it is for your actions to impact another, maybe even someone you dearly and deeply love, is not a thing that can be undone. I’m not going to sugar coat or gloss over that reality. But I’m not going to let you sink into the pit of self-loathing either.

    And I am going to tell you that there is redemption, even now, right there waiting for you.

    It’s true, redemption and forgiveness are sticky things, almost always. But never more so than when we are asked to shine that light on our own hopelessly human hearts.

    And maybe its presumptuous of me to type this, when I don’t really know a damn thing of what your heart is living right now, and there are days when I know my own work of self-forgiveness is a patched up, beaten around work in perpetual progress.

    And possibly this is simply my own attempt to remind or even convince myself that I am worthy, in spite of the times in my life when I’ve left the path of my own integrity, and brought havoc by the act of my own loving.

    Or maybe it is only this, that we need to meet each other here. That we must.

    We must remind one another of the fact that we are here, and alive and human, so terribly and beautifully and sometimes painfully alive. And that very thing is what makes it so blindly brilliant, so achingly true.

    We are not defined only by our actions in the moments we step off the path. I cannot believe that because that would damn me and you and all of us. I believe that ultimately, what defines us is the way we keep stepping back on. The way we trip and struggle through the wilderness of our selves, the way we wander through the dark desert night believing ourselves worthy of being cast out. And still, somehow, when the light rises in the sky, our path appears again, and we step back on, put one foot in front of the other, and onward we go.

    And you, my dear friend, are finding your way back to the path. Even if you can’t feel it or see it right now, you are.

    And you deserve to be there. And so do I. And so do all the rest of us.

    We are here, you and I and everyone we loved in the light and all of those we have loved in the shadowy spaces.

    Our hearts doing the thing they are made to do, pulsing and yearning and casting aside all doubt in the hope that we will be met and seen and known in holiness and in wholeness, with our guilt and our scars and every last ounce of hope remaining in our bones.

    Here we are, you and I. Hearts beating. Still loving. No matter what.

     

    ______

    Photo from header image by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

  • a treatise of touch

    a treatise of touch

    come here.
    come closer.
    feel my breath?
    good.

    do not
    look away
    right now you are
    mine

    right now
    i am
    lifting hair
    from neck
    running my finger
    gently there.  across
    the line of
    clavicle.
    down curve of rib
    following
    concave of waist
    coming to rest on
    the hard of hip.

    revel, now
    in the shiver that
    rises
    along your spine

    it means you are awake.

    stay awake , lover
    because this is
    a treatise of touch

    bless your righteous bodybless it’s ancient hungerbless it’s sacred needbless the magnet pullthe utter madnessof wantand the selfish hauntingof desire
    {image via unsplash}

    this is
    a dedication to
    the divinity
    of want
    this is an ode
    to the fierce hunger of
    your
    animal skin
    so bless your righteous body
    bless it’s ancient hunger
    bless it’s sacred need
    bless the magnet pull
    the utter madness
    of want
    and the selfish haunting
    of desire

    right here
    on electric hipbone
    right here
    on staircase spine
    here on nape of neck
    on hollow of throat
    on line and curve
    on slick and sweat
    here in the space where
    body meets body
    where want answers want
    where primal, exalted lust
    delivers
    you
    to your
    knees

    we all
    pray best
    on our knees

    so let us pray

    sanctify the body holy
    the wicked desire
    the backroom covenants of flesh
    the slow slide of acquiesce
    the hallowed space of want
    the heavy shudder of yes
    the burn of craving
    the bliss of the fire.

    find now
    the center of your
    longing
    meet it where it lives
    coax the tender tremor
    tease response from
    edge to depth to surface
    to bone
    to salt
    to sweat
    to skin
    to teeth
    to yes
    to this

    this is the
    consecrated profanity of
    seduction
    this is the space where
    shame is shed
    you are a vessel of want

    you are a master of desire
    you are the fierce of supplication
    the gentle of domination
    you are holy
    you are holy

    you are holy

    ask for what you need, lover
    take what you want
    bring it home
    refuse the disgrace
    with which you were raised
    claim your untamable
    unbind your wild
    petition the air for your
    every desire

    this body is not the enemy
    Image © chanelle sinclair

    this body is not the enemy
    your sex is not a scandal
    your skin needs no censor
    you are not here for denial
    your pleasure is
    what the universe
    demands
    it is the purpose
    of your
    creation
    anything else
    is
    blasphemy

    so tattoo want along your rib
    name it religion and church
    and the rite of communion
    take the body and the blood
    sprinkle it with holy water
    let the salt steam rise

    and listen
    just listen, lover
    always
    our bodies tell us
    where
    to
    begin.

     

    Listen:
    The poem:

    https://soundcloud.com/jeanette-bursey-leblanc/a-treatise-of-touch-jeanette

    The soundtrack:

    Treatise of touch: the official playlist for shedding shame and owning desire}

    30 questions to bring you closer to your wild heart.
    Join me for a month of prompts and write your way back home.
    30 days | 30 questions |30 dollars — begins Feb. 14th 2016

  • What do you want, lover?

    What do you want, lover?

    what-do-you-want-loverWhat do you want, lover?

    Tell me. What do you want? Right now. Don’t be shy.  Don’t look away. I’m right here. I’m listening. There’s nothing else I need right now besides you.

    You, and the truth.

    So, tell me every last thing.  What do you want? Do you want love? Lust? The hard edge of a soft body?

    How do you want it? Rough and insistent?  Like a gentle caress? Or again and again, until the heat and sweat and electricity are spent and you drift into a long, slow sleep.

    And where? In the depths of secret shadowed corners, or on a patchwork blanket under warm noon sun?

    Does it make you uncomfortable that I’m asking you this? Yes? Good. We need discomfort, sometimes, to get to the heat at the core of things.

    And it’s that heat we are craving right now. It’s been a long, cold winter. So much has been dormant, both inside and out. The world is awakening. The ground is fertile. The earth moves and breathes and undulates with the energy of things to come.  And here we are, right in the simmering crimson midst of it.

    So, what do you want? Say it. Out loud. Even if you never have before. Especially if you never have before. Tell me where your desire lives? What calls your want home to you?  Show me the spaces where you are insatiable? What brings forth that low moan at the base of your throat? What touch makes ancient tremor and shiver rise along your spine? What brings you to your knees?

    you-were-not-placed-on-this-earth-to-practice-denial-jeanette-leblanc

    Name it lover. The time has come. To feel the weight and heat of it. To let it take shape and form. Feel it spiral deep inside you. Feel it gather force and radiate outwards. Hold the power of it, feel its mighty urgency, welcome its holy heat.

    Are you afraid to speak it? Why? Has someone told you that this is not to be spoken of? That you mustn’t give it a voice. That you certainty can’t ask for it. Good girls don’t do that.

    That ends now. Right here. Not for a second longer. This is a lie that has never served to do anything but keep you small and complacent.

    And you are anything but small.

    So shed the shame of your sex, goddess. It’s not yours to hold. It never was.

    Your desire is here to teach you. It awaits a response. You were born to answer its call.

    So, ask for what you need, lover. Take what you want. You were not placed on this earth to practice denial. Your pleasure? It’s what the universe demands.

    Anything less is blasphemy.

    “So, ask for what you need, lover. Take what you want. You were not placed on this earth to practice denial. Your pleasure? It’s what the universe demands. Anything less is blasphemy.”

    Don’t look down. There is no shame here. No shyness. Only the bold of speaking your truth. So raise your face. Open your eyes. Meet my gaze. Part your lips. Breathe deep. Repeat after me.

    I am a sacred body of want. I am soft tissue, hard joint, hallowed skin. I am a consecrated vessel of desire. My body is the answer to the questions of the cosmos. I was born for this. I am holy in my insatiable need. I am holy in my animal submission. I am holy in my fiery control.

    There is no bargain to be made between wholeness and goodness. Between desire and divinity. You need not choose. They are the very same thing. They have always been.

    So tell me what you want.  I am listening.

    tell-me-what-you-want-by-jeanette-leblanc

    {this post was originally published in the Spring Issue of Amulet Magazine}

  • A crush is all hello….

    {Today I went looking for a finished post that would work for Valentine’s day.  I thought I’d find a love poem, or a post written to women on the hard side of heartbreak.  Instead I found this.  Written ages and ages ago, and just waiting for a day like today.  Here’s to the crushes, the mad, crazy, weak in the knees moments that make us all believe in possibility.  Happy Valentines Day, everyone}

    ~~~~

    That moment?  The 56th time you check your phone for texts on an ordinary Tuesday?  You know you are really only looking for one name…photo-2

    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}

  • Teach Me How To Be Loved

    Teach Me How To Be Loved

    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.

    Teach Me How To Be Loved Jeanette Leblanc peacelovefree 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 sweet and inarguable wisdom of want.

    the sweet and inarguable wisdom of want.

    I want to travel to cities around the world to wander alone.

    I want to raise my face to the warm sun, a flowered sundress swirling around my thighs, bare feet on hard earth.  I want the floppy hat on my head to blow off in a sudden gust of wind  just so I can chase it down the street, giggling the entire way.

    I want a purse that holds a well-used journal and a really good pen. What more could I need?

    I want enough money for food and dusty books and things I want because I want them.  Wanting because I want will be reason enough to have.

    I want no timeline, no agenda, no company. I am free to watch and absorb. To talk only when I want to. To turn cartwheels in the street, or laugh out loud, to make love to a delicious stranger, to let the delight of random things roll through my body and take me over for no other reason than that they delight me.

    I want to give myself over to an orgy of desire and hedonism. I want to dance naked on a beach with a group of wild lovers, slide my bare body through the slick coolness of my ocean home until my gills return.   I want to eat things I have never heard of, let the juices from unfamiliar fruits drip down my face and lick my fingers and let it all dry in the sun.  I want sit at a long, well worn bar and tell my stories to an ancient bartender who does not speak my language but knows that my story is his story is everyone’s story.  I want to let the whiskey burn a path down my throat as I lock eyes with a brown-haired goddess whose hips move with the rhythm of the ancients.  I want to ruthlessly claim the joy of all experience, take it right to my center and taste it’s rough edges.

    I want to recite poetry on a street corner, turning my floppy hat upside down to collect change from passersby. I want to throw these foreign coins in foreign fountains and wish for nothing but an extension of  reality.  I want to spend the last of my earnings on a glass of fine red wine and a loaf of crusty bread and some pages of blank paper and see what magic comes from that.

    I want to follow my ceaseless longing, wallow in the lonely ache until my own company becomes the most exquisite companionship. I want to belong to no one and contain myself wholly.  I want to give myself over to every last thing that makes itself available to me with the knowledge that i am only becoming more.

    I want to spend so long without speaking or hearing voices that the only sound in my head is the truth of the poems that are waiting to be born.

    I want to sleep in a room with tattered wallpaper, overlooking a square in a town older than memory. I want to perch on my windowsill and spy on old men riding rickety bicycles and lovers having petty quarrels and roaming dogs and children playing hopscotch in the street below.  I want a bed that has been used by lovers and mothers and babies and old people and to feel them there with me as I sleep, living and breathing and fucking and birthing and dying in the space where I take my deepest exhale.

    I want the rush of sweet sin and the holy hush of ancient temples.  The worship of bodies and the profanity of prayer.  I want to be brought to my knees by both.

    I want to disappear into a crowd and reappear in the spotlight of a burlesque show.

    I want to live ruthlessly.  To invite because I want to invite.  To sever because I want to sever.  To trust with reckless abandon my own intrinsic knowing.

    I want to ride dusty trains to destinations I cannot pronounce, dive into conversations with lost souls and found souls and everyone in between.

    I want to walk so far and so long that my body aches and my skin is covered in salt sheen.  I want to end with my toes dancing in the waves and my hair blowing wild around my head.

    I want to receive a spontaneous invitation from a ridiculously handsome man to attend the wedding of people I have never met.  I want to dance with him under unfamiliar stars to songs sung in an unfamiliar language.  I want to close my eyes as he whispers in my ear words that require no translation.  And then I want to leave him, abruptly, and spend the entire evening letting the bride’s raunchy grandmother regale me with tales of her her younger years  –  stories of crazy adventure and tortured suitors and unrequited love and fevered, desperate affairs.

    I want to spend endless days in musty antique shops discovering memories of my future in relics of other people’s past.  I want to hold them to my ear and listen to old love stories in the whispers of dust and long ago,  building my own memoirs from the lure of things discarded and things yet to be known.

    I want to smell like fresh dirt, yellow roses, steamy sex and exotic perfume. I want to taste like oaky wine, and trails of tears and dark chocolate melted in the desert sun. I want to feel like gritty sand and smooth silk after a rainstorm and the skin of a peach by moonlight.  I want you to be able to catch a glimpse of me from across a crowded square and instinctively know these things and be filled with your own yearning for yellow roses and gritty sand and desert sun without really understanding why.

    I want to be lit from within by the unending intoxication of this blessed life.  An internal bonfire of all I have been given and all that I have claimed and all that I have let slip away in my quest for wholeness.  I want to burn down in the fire of selfish desires and selfless sacrifice and use the flames to light the spark that moves you toward your destiny.  I want to live in the glory of the ashes that remain.

    I want nobody to be waiting for me, but everyone to trust in my eventual return.

    I want to travel to cities around the world to wander alone.

    ~~~~

    Tell me, lover, what is it that you want?  For in the wanting, and the naming, your truth can be found.

    "Tell me, lover, what is it that you want? For in the wanting, and the naming, your truth can be found". Jeanette LeBlanc

  • You’ve Got To Claim Your Right To Rapture

    You’ve Got To Claim Your Right To Rapture

    This is your time.

    Yes it is. Right now. This day. This moment. This now.

    All yours.

    You don’t have to wait. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t always have to finish what you started in order to begin something new. And there is no more room for playing small.

    Small is so very last year.

    You’ve been gathering momentum for a long time. This is a year of tipping-point greatness. Your year.

    What are you waiting for?

    That’s right, ease into it now. Pulse with the life force that has been waiting just for you. Feel that rhythm vibrating through the universe and running through your soul? Undulate with it. Let it carry you away, ecstatic dance style. Spin a dervish whirl until you are dizzy on the wonder of life. Ditch the layers that are holding you down. Get naked. Come on now. Don’t be shy. Right now, in this exact moment, you are free.

    Keep your eyes open wide to witness all the fierce moments of grace that surround you. Reject that not-enoughness that has been desperately grasping for a hold on your magnificent spirit. Choose authenticity over approval. Be done with trying to fit into someone else’s notion of who you are. Get comfortable with entitlement. We’re done with asking permission.  No more of that, missy.

    You’ve got to claim your right to rapture.

    So, love too much. Way too much. Live from the center your wide open heart. Know that you don’t have to push yourself to expand in order to fill the space you are in. You are already infinite – just as you are. Let your freak flag fly. Every last thing about you is perfect. Even the weird bits.  Especially the weird bits. Those, my dear, are exactly why I’m already head over heels in love with you.

    To hell with self-acceptance. That’s way too small an order.  I want you practice radical self-celebration. Throw a party in your own honor. You don’t need a wedding or a baby or a new job. You are reason enough. You are ALWAYS reason enough. Make today the anniversary of your arrival.  Rent the ballroom. Open the bar. And whatever you do, don’t forget the piñata. Fill it with every last piece of magic inside you and around you.   Now. Knock. That. Fucker. Down. and invite the world to gather you up again. To hell with the blindfold––you don’t want to miss a second of this.

    Know that every time you get beaten down and emptied out, you are also spreading the fragments of your divinity into a universe that desperately needs you. Let the kindness and the raw, aching beauty of the universe shatter you over and over again. Find peace in the knowledge that your whole is composed of the sum of all of your beautifully broken pieces. Because breaking is becoming. We never lose ourselves. We don’t break forever. We just find new configurations of wholeness. And every one is breathtakingly beautiful.  YOU are breathtakingly beautiful.

    That thing you’re afraid of? That label you shy away from? That word that seems too bold? That audacious goal? The life you think you don’t deserve? Aren’t talented enough to have? Aren’t brave enough to claim? Fuck. That. Shit. None of that baggage you’ve been carrying around has a place this year. Kick to the the curb. Now. This year only has space for the bold and the audacious and the brave. Don’t try to convince me you are not those things. I know better and your excuses hold no weight here. You are brave and bold and audacious and one hell of a goddess. Always have been. Always will be. 

    So fill every step you take with intention. Then remember that intention is worthless without action – so get a move on, sugar. You know that whole ‘there’s no time like the present’ cliché? Actually, the ONLY time IS the present. Stop holding back. Let yourself go. Right now. All the way. You’ll be soaring before you even realize you’ve taken the leap.

    Deal resistance a death blow and make sweet love to your art all night long. Put on your fishnet thigh highs and your patent leather stilettos and your special occasion lingerie. Seduce the hell out of your own creative soul.  It’s time for an epic lap dance. Dance for your paint and canvas, for fingers tripping across keyboard, for the open arms of motherhood, for the layers of flavor in the meals you create. Wind your hips down for the click of the shutter, for the 3am bathroom poem, for the late night lesson planning. Spin around the pole like fingers stringing beads into necklaces, for bodies twisting into asana, for holding a mama as she brings life. This will not be a quickie, love. No wham-bam-thank you ma’am. No – tonight is for slow, deliberate kind of love-making that changes everything.

    And when the morning light filters in and you slowly leave sleep behind, you’ll awake with the vague sensation that something has changed. Give yourself time to remember that something has. That EVERYTHING has. Revel in it. You are here now. Fully present. Fully alive. Fully claiming your rightful glory. A Radical goddess. An Audacious Artist. A Mystical Mama. Celebrating the beauty that can only come from you. Flying high. Owning It.

    Nothing will ever be the same again.  

    And damn girl, you throw one hell of a party.

    {But for the love of all that is good and holy leave the discarded fishnets and the paint spills and all those dirty dishes from the party for someone else to clean up. Because you’ve got places to be and things to do. After all, this is your year. Get moving, chica. }

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  • dusts floats on rays of light

    Dust floats on rays of light dancing just above my head. Sheets are rumpled from sleep; covers long ago lost to the floor.  Long morning shadows slice across her back and my face; alternating diagonals of light and dark with no regard for boundaries. Shadows do not see the end of her and the beginning of me – we are just parts of a space moving toward illumination.

    These tiny details mesmerize and imprint in that split second before my neck arches back on the pillow.  The forgetting happens just as quickly.  All that remains is the endless expanse of skin against skin.

    The air holds our awareness of the passage of limited moments, but there will be no rushing today.

    The spaces between abject disillusionment and fierce connection dissolve.  Breath mingles and awareness travels across length and breadth.   There are days when knowing expands and you grasp fully that love is both mirror and magnifying glass.  What are strength and weakness but the same really, in the end?

    Our bodies fit; a puzzle of infinite possibility.  Light kisses golden along collarbone and shoulder and I follow it– nimble lips along unyielding bone.  My back presses against soft white sheets; my heart against hers.  Our legs wind serpentine, this dance a sacrament of touch.  Inhale matches exhale until breath catches on words that need not be spoken.  Our hands tell all the stories that need telling now.

    We have been offering ourselves as sacrifice to gods we do not yet understand or know if we should believe in. Today we offer ourselves only to each other; gods be dammed.

    We have cracked ourselves open, pushed hard against unbending convention and screamed a defiant yes to the rush of fear that followed.  Secrets content to hide in the shadows have been ushered into the light and welcomed home.  Passion and possession loop and twist, a roller coaster where all seemed lost and then found again.  We have confessed and cried and torn at each other with words and hands and bitter silence.  Expansion and contraction, it seems, are never entirely without cost.

    Hearts are raw, eyes unveiled.  We see all, but do not turn away.  But it’s all softness now, yielding flesh and lithe curves and the rightness of coming home. Hearts mirror hands and lips and sounds released from deep inside.  Moments pass measured only by quickening beat and rapid breath.  The light climbs and shadows shift until the room is a reflection of renewal.

    Yes, time is measured now, but still we do not hurry. Bodies stake fierce claim, even in lingering uncertainty, that this is ours to have and to keep.  Now all the rush and butterflies of the initial free fall are balanced by depth and aching tenderness of two souls who have lived and loved a lifetime in a few short years.

    And we live and love a lifetime in this brief moment.  Bodies weave spells and tongues speak incantations against skin as soft and salty as the ocean that calls me home.  Waves crash now and we are worn down and broken and shifted in the wake of their withdrawal.  Shifted and broken yes, unrecognizable perhaps, but always at the root of things exactly the same as we began.

    Life calls to be awake to sacred moments. This is hallowed ground here; we are hallowed ground.  I am turned toward her now. Only her. Body, soul, mind, and broken and beating hearts.   Nothing will be sacrificed today; no spirit of martyrdom welcome in the offering of ourselves to one another.

    She is mine, this girl, and I hers.  All questions can be measured against this moment. Measured against geometry of light and shadow, against slow slide of time on the bedside clock, against trail of fingertips across stomach.  Against ragged breath and locked gaze and grasp of interlaced fingers as we find our way home. Again, and again we find our way home.

    Head falls back against pillow.  Her weight is heavy on mine; her head nestled against the curve of my neck.  Breath returns to normal.  The world refocuses.  I open my eyes and see the dust still floating in the rays above my head, as if nothing has changed.  I twist and twirl my hands upward, languid, wanting to be a part of their lazy path.

    It is miraculous, I think, how something so ordinary can sparkle like magic in the right light.

  • to be moved…

    {I want to be moved}

    I want to be moved
    damn it.
    so move me

    move me
    make me
    feel
    push me past
    my resistance
    info that wide open space

    give me something
    beyond
    the ordinary
    beyond what you give
    to the rest of the world

    show me your naked soul
    and I will gasp at your beauty
    show me your unveiled eyes
    and I will weep at your truth
    show me your heart
    cracked and broken
    and I will hold it
    with more tenderness
    than you could ever possibly
    imagine
    and if you trust me
    if you give me time
    I will show you how
    those very cracks
    make you whole

    I crave a depth
    uncommon
    I crave a meaning
    deeper than
    surface
    I crave a glimpse
    of spirit
    divine
    and I crave a touch
    so primal and
    earthly that it brings me
    to my knees.

    you bring me
    to my knees.

    I want transcendence
    I want to be shattered
    I want to gasp at the
    brilliance of
    ordinary moments
    and extraordinary times
    and these are the most
    ordinary
    extraordinary times

    so shatter me

    I want to know the secrets
    your bones hold

    I want to see drums of passion
    beat
    behind your fluttering
    eyelids
    I want to know what moves
    you
    Where your center lies
    and just how far I can go before
    I reach the edge
    of you.

    I want to feel
    everything
    push myself to feel
    more
    push myself past the
    pain
    lean hard against discomfort
    fight numbness
    and complacency and
    comfort

    in search of
    more
    in search of this
    in search of that blinding
    searing
    goddess power
    to touch the
    muse
    to
    break the spell
    to move the world

    I want to be moved
    dammit
    so move me.

    {4.22.11}

     

  • you can’t take your eyes off of me

    you can’t take your eyes off of me

     

    you can’t take your eyes off of me.

    can you?

    not now
    not here

    yes
    there have been plenty of days
    {there will always be plenty of days}
    where I am the forgettable
    wallflower
    turning myself almost
    inside out
    to keep you from seeing

    please don’t look

    but when I move into this space

    this one

    right here
    right here

    with hips swaying
    and head held high
    mouth in sassy
    smirk till lips part
    almost ready to
    speak

    you lean forward

    yes. you do.

    you lean forward,
    transfixed by the moment
    before the moment
    the potential tucked
    inside my breath
    just waiting for
    my exhale to
    lay claim to
    something extraordinary

    and
    in that moment

    i own you

    yes I do.

    it is not pretty face
    or strong body or
    divine catwalk style
    {though those may be lovely to some}
    it is not sway of hips
    or curve of lips
    or anything superficial
    that captivate right now

    because baby,
    floating on the surface is
    far too easy to
    to rely on

    and this isn’t about easy

    nothing so peripheral could hold
    such power.
    not really.

    it seems silly
    to think there were days
    when I believed
    {and still, I sometimes believe}
    that I could measure
    the value of
    my existence
    in a reflective
    piece of glass

    look at me
    look at me

    my eyes would plead
    am I good enough?
    see me please
    prove to me that I
    exist
    am not invisible
    show me I do not blend
    chameleon into
    this beige life

    and in my desperation
    I became smaller
    and you looked away

    of course you looked away

    but that was then

    before the
    knowing

    knowing that
    it is not profession
    or skill
    not intellect
    or accolades
    not even talent or passion or drive

    no, it is nothing
    that comes from
    my looking
    or my doing
    I can’t write it with slick words
    or capture it in bright pixels
    I can’t paint a pretty face
    or saunter in stilettos and
    expect to hold
    your attention

    no, this is not about easy

    but it sure isn’t hard.

    the secret to this
    particular
    spellbinding
    is my

    being.

    it is my being that
    holds sway
    keeps captive
    your attention
    and desire

    you want

    the very act of being
    fully
    to be content with
    no elemental
    half-life
    but with expectation
    of every breath flooding
    every last atom
    in this universe
    into pulsing awareness

    I am an
    enchantress
    when fully engaged
    in being
    vibrational frequency
    shimmers liquid
    across depth and breadth
    and I am on fire
    from the inside out

    and then you are lit
    from the outside, in.

    and when I am no longer
    content
    with the effort of
    not contracting
    but instead choose to
    expand

    I expand

    and I fill this space
    refuse to be contained
    by labels
    or expectations
    or boxes designed to keep me small

    hell no.
    not now.

    now is my time
    this is my space

    and you can’t take your eyes of off me.

    I’m not growing up here
    I’m growing out
    out
    in all directions
    possessing this space
    every last inch,
    every last fiber
    every last sound

    and all of you.

    yes, this is poem is about
    being
    this life is about
    being
    and right now

    i am all about being

    but
    this is not just about me
    did you think that it was?

    no, I own this particular swagger
    only because I know that
    this spark
    is in every last one of us
    and we can all strut
    and smirk
    and own the room
    just by being

    I know the fire that burnsyou can't take your eyes off of me-4-2
    in your gut
    and I know your fears
    of being seen
    and of being invisible
    and I know the tears that crack you
    wide open
    and the chasms that threaten
    to swallow you whole
    and I know your heart sometimes pounds so
    hard that you’d swear
    it could be heard around the world
    if only people would wake up
    and listen

    and I know you are so ready
    to expand
    ready to
    embrace
    your particular
    way of
    being

    So no, this could never be just about
    me
    because
    quite frankly
    you
    are so damn amazing that

    I can’t take my eyes
    off of

    you.

     

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