Essays, poems and quotes to help you write your own permission slip, to claim a life lived sovereign unto yourself, embracing your wildness and owning your freedom.
And yes, there is grounding to be found in committing to the hard and holy work of trying to make it right.
There is also deep wisdom in knowing that sometimes there isn’t a right to be made.
Whatever it is that you’ve done.
Whatever weight you are carrying.
Whatever breach of your own integrity you’ve lived through.
Here you are. Living in the guilt and self-flagellation and inward-directed recrimination. You’re telling stories about yourself where you’re painted the villian, every single time.
So, you did a thing that you’ve named wrong, or the world has named wrong, or a loved one has named wrong or some powerful dudes who compiled a book of parables and myths thousands of years ago made wrong.
How entirely human of you.
Own it all.
Stand in the truth of it.
Make the apology you need to make to close your own open wound.
Do what you can to stanch the flow of blood in the others.
And then be done.
Listen to me, now.
Atonement was never intended to be a full-time job.
There is nothing to be gained by carrying your own apology until it threatens to bury you under its weight.
Warning: the people and structures in your life may not be comfortable with your sudden refusal to continue with your guilty confessional.
Yes, it is true.
Sometimes the one thing that others cannot handle is your refusal to apologize even one more time.
But it is done, whatever it is.
Because it is now a part of your bone and heart and guts and it has changed you.
Because in some inexplicable way, you are better for it.
Because you finally even like it there, like what it has made of you, as much as it may have broken.
Because even if you don’t understand why, you needed it the way it was and the way it is, no matter the fallout.
Because owning the damage caused does not mean that you must spend your life cleaning it up over and over again, in some groundhog day spiral of guilt.
Because you can’t undo it, you can only move on from it.
Because staying where you are is a vicious sort of quicksand, pulling you back down into a depths you’ve pulled yourself out of one too many times already.
When you say no more apologies; not in your words, or your actions. Not in your body, or in your experience…this is when the real illumination begins.
So, be done with your penance love.
Be done.
Stand tall, not in the shadows of your wrongdoing, but in the full light of your inescapable truth.
To leave, to run, to quit, to stop, to yell, to get angry, to rejoice, to dance, to sing, to fuck, to break, to mend, to come undone, to end, to begin, to scream, to cast spells, to call in what you want, to lay it all down, to rest, to get out of town, to unlock, to unleash, to go wild, to embrace, to get intimate, to hold boundaries, to eat and drink and be merry, to make art, to take a break, to bust ass, to be a bitch, to say fuck no, to say hell yes, to swear, to get in the car and drive, to go off the grid, to chart your own course, to break the rules, to change the rules, to make new rules, to become a devotee of your own truth, to name your own religion, to ink your skin, to cut your hair, to change the goddamn game, to break your own heart, to forgive, to absolve yourself of guilt, to stop doing penance, to move on, to go back, to release, to hold tightly, to love, to dream bigger, to smash the patriarchy, to seek healing, to honor your trauma, to fiercely claim your joy, to get naked, to believe in redemption, to honor your wisdom, to get louder, to find a space of your own, to travel, to ask for what you want, to name what you need, to roar your righteous anger, to choose your own name, to ask for what you’re worth, to be the boss of yourself, to know yourself and your body and your heart as holy
But, why don’t we all claim this permission from the get go?
The answer is shame. Pervasive. Externally placed. Hellbound on keeping us small.
“At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.”Elizabeth Gilbert
After a lifetime of contorting myself to fit into boxes never meant for the likes of me—it’s true. I got tired of feeling ashamed all the time
It does feel wildly subversive to say that I no longer feel ashamed.
Not in body my soul or beliefs or movement through the world. Not for who or what or how I am. I do not hold apology for the ways and hows and whos of my work and my desire and my love. There is an ownership of power in this simple fact that refuses to fit into words.
But if you see me, you’ll know it.
Sovereignty. That’s what I call it.
Somehow, through all the twists and turns and fuckery of this life, I became a woman who is sovereign onto herself.
Does this mean I’ve beaten all my demons and that I don’t give a fuck and that everything is peachy keen all the time?
Oh hell no. Not even close.
I am a woman who will forever be grappling with herself – pushing and growing and expanding and contracting. Learning and unlearning and tripping over the same lessons 50 times or more on the way to integration. It gets messy in this brain and heart and body of mine. That’s just how I’m made.
But the fact remains that there is not a person, or relationship, or religion, or belief system or organization that holds me to any agreement that negates my contract with myself.
Fact: Your shame serves nobody.
In fact, where there is shame, there is no pleasure.
It is your pleasure that the universe spirals eternally toward.
So, are you ready to be subversive?
How about revolutionary?
There comes a time in the evolution of a human where she gets tired of asking permission to live and breathe and be and love in the way that is most honest and true. When she stops looking outside of herself and she writes her own permission slip and she doesn’t look back.
They call me a permission catalyst, it’s true. But here’s the secret, you never needed permission from me. It’s on you.
What I CAN do is help you carve a path to the permission that has ALWAYS lived in you.
I’ve opened up only two new spots for Creative Sovereignty Coaching this quarter.
This work is rooted in radical permission.
To own your story. To remove the masks. To shed your shame. To speak and write and live as a human sovereign unto yourself.
Is this finally your time?
If you’re feeling the call to claim permission to live your life on your own terms, and to live and write your way into the truth of your story – simply send me an emailand we can open a conversation that has the potential to blast the doors of your heart, your creativity and your boldness wide open.
No new years resolutions for me this year. No flowery poetry. No broad declarations or rash promises or wild intentions. Not a single promise to the universe or to another.
Just my own prescription for wholeness. By me. For me.
Nothing but a steady reminder & a wild handful of hope and a dash of audacity for good measure.
To play the best I can with the cards I am dealt.
To figure out the rules of the game so I can break them when I need to.
To push myself past the edges of my limits & to grant myself a free pass tp hide in the corner & lick my wounds when it all gets to be a bit too much.
To practice & practice & practice everything on this list so many times that maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to taste them all.
And maybe, if the planets align, I might even get a bit better at one or two.
I ain’t looking for perfection. Hell, I’m not even counting on progress.
But what I am going to do is hold steady to my commitment to self. To remind myself that for all my wandering, I have always returned and, god damn it to hell, I always will.
To know that I am my own safest space. My own knight in not-so-shiny armor. My own lighthouse. My own port in the wildest storm. My own primary relationship.
My own best thing.
My 2021 rx:
Radical permission
Transformative grace
Creative agency
Sexual liberation
Personal sovereignty
Collective responsibility
Justice centered roots.
Boundary pushing art
Gentle self-forgiveness
Exquisite boundaries
Pleasure driven decisions
Uninhibited receiving
Ownership of story
Relentless self reclamation
Provocative aliveness
I won’t even come close to living this full list with any sort of totality in the new year, & I don’t intend to kick myself in the ass for it either. But damn if I don’t have the responsibility to try my best to see what I can make with whatever may come.
If 2020 taught us anything it’s that this life is all a wild crapshoot. We can plan and proclaim, promise & push – but we haven’t the slightest idea what is coming.
All we get to do is live our way into it as best we can and see what becomes of that. Let’s do it.
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.
I am entirely badass even in the midst of all this clusterfuckery.
Today we are going to own that, you and I. We have to. We need to. We deserve to. Because core woundings are hella brutal.
Because uncertainty is a mother fucker.
Because every minute of every day somebody needs something and you can’t possibly keep all the balls in the air.
Because tender hearts are so damn brave but also, it is fair to note, not always the best source of reliable information or guidance when triggered and misfiring in all directions.
Because most of the negative gossip we spread is directed at our own souls.
Because the amount on your plate could bring down an army.
Because of exhaustion and overwhelm and how deeply, deeply you want to be loved.
Because healing is amazing and pleasure is your birthright and desire will lead you home and joy really is right there for the taking.
And, also, some days you might breakdown in anger or tears or have a panic attack right in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon without even fully understanding why.
You might cry and grieve and rage and howl even though shit has been pretty fucking good and you damn well know it.
All of this can exist simultaneously without contradiction.
You’re a human being living this wide-open life. Sometimes that’s just a fuckery of a space to be.
Own it, my love. Own it all. All of it. Every last bit. Own the tenderness. Own the overwhelm Own the sideways slam and the pressure and the way it all piles up. Own the breakdown. Own the infinite unending exhaustion. Own the longing for strong arms to lay you down.
None of that negates the good or the gratitude or the blessings. And NONE of that makes you any less of a badass.
It makes you MORE.
MORE human.MORE alive. MORE honest and authentic and real.
It makes you a god damn warrior.
So do me a favor?
Whatever you are doing, stop right now.
Go find a mirror & look yourself in the eye.
Take the deepest damn breath you can manage.
All the way to your belly. All the way to your toes. All the way to the center of the earth.
Repeat after me: “Yes. I AM entirely badass even in the midst of all this clusterfuckery.”
And believe it.
Whatever you do, for as long as you can, hold that truth as solid and irrefutable and yours to own.
Because it is. It always has been. It always will be.
I’m not interested in reading about “well behaved” women.
No nice girls for me.
Give me your outcasts and your witches. Your dykes and your butches and every last one who refused to conform to the script they were handed at birth.
Take me to your untamable and uncontrollable and unfuckwithable. Find me the ones who never met a rule they wouldn’t break.
I want to sit in circle with the midwives and the healers. With the whores and the dancers. The ones who chose the terms of their own inevitable exploitation and alchemized it into the keys to the cage.
Give me the ones you chained and burned and left for dead. The untouchables and undesirables. The ones who saw the shadows of their oppressors clearly, held up a mirror, and cast a spell to turn the evil back on the ones who meant them harm.
I want the women who went against the grain and pushed the limits and changed the paradigm and cooked dinner and washed the dishes and picked the kids up at daycare and did their part to topple the patriarchy in their spare time.
The nasty women. The subversives. The cast out. The sluts and the sex workers and the queens who never had a chance at the god damn crown. The glass ceiling crashers and the unlikely CEOs and the starving artists who wouldn’t compromise their passion for anything.
I want to know the ones who reclaimed the language of cunt and queer and bitch and took it back for their own and plastered it on billboards and t-shirts as a call to freedom.
Send me the princess who rescued the prince and left him to fend for himself because she had better things to do.
Show me your girl warriors and your mama revolutionaries – the ones who fought the battles and nursed the babies and made it back to the front lines in time to march. Put me into orbit with the single mamas who worked three jobs and went to school and still made time for the holiest of pleasures.
The ones who brought down regimes but never denied the truth of their own tender hearts.
The ones who turned their blood into art and refused to let you look away from the truth of their womanhood.
The women who claimed the right to name the terms of their own femininity and gender and presentation, regardless of biology or birth certificates or oppressive laws written by old men in white suits who sit in church on Sunday’s secure in the safety of their gender.
Give me the drag kings and the burlesque dancers and the queer theorists and the feminist scholars and the girls who can’t tell you how or when but know they will fight with everything they have to name the terms of their own existence.
Sit me at the table with the woman who survived violence and who named her abuser, the one who paid for law school with her Only Fans, the tattooed burner who will never fit in at the school bake sale with the other khaki pant wearing moms, the bullied 13 year old who will go on to change the god damn game for the ones who come after her because fuck if she’s going to let this happen to anyone else, the quiet ones with a time bomb ticking in their chest who are biding their time and waiting to break free.
No, it’s not the well-behaved women who call to me. Send me your sovereign, your autonomous, your wildly free.
“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.
“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.”
Has anyone ever tried to convince you that fashion was frivolous?
That self-expression through clothes or makeup or accessories was a waste of time? That your selfies were a desperate grasp for validation? That feeling beautiful or sexy or just damn good in your own skin wasn’t a worthy pursuit?
Fuck ‘em.
Your ways of living into the wholeness of yourself — clothes and makeup and shoes and perfume and whatever the fuck else makes your outside feel like it matches your insides — are a fierce and authentic way of embodying your inherent charisma.
Of calling in the people who get you, of giving fewer fucks and showcasing your enviable moxie, of taking up space in this world.
And you, my dear human, deserve to take up so much space in this world.
So go ahead. Rock the fuck out with your bad self. And look fine doing it. I’m not talking fine by some unrealistic and dangerous industry or culturally defined beauty narrative. I’m talking fine like you owning your life and your skin and the totality of you.
I’m talking fine like wearing the clothes that bring a swagger to your step when you walk into the room so I can’t help but stare. I’m talking fine like taking yourself a whole lot less seriously. I’m talking fine like painting your lips red and showing a hell of a lot of skin or covering everything and leaving me biting my lip at the mystery of it all.
I’m talking fine like you, entire. Nothing shrinking into the shadows. Owning the room and the space and my eyes. And knowing it.
Some days, this is the most worthy pursuit of all.
To the one who grieves loudly, or for longer than people believe you should, or in ways others find uncomfortable or inconvenient or messy.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who laughs at top volume and who always wears the clothes that feel the most like you, regardless of their stares. To the one who takes up space and covers the world in glitter and lacks the apology most find acceptable.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who has learned to ask for what they want and who dares to demand what they deserve. Who wears desire like it was an outfit made only for them, who claims their right to pleasure.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who cannot blend in because of ethnicity or expression or ability. Who sticks out in every crowd. Who faces the fears and the condemnation and who becomes the uninvited poster child for a cause or a label or a community without their consent.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who lives outside the margins and colors outside the lines and never quite manages to fit into the predictable or expected or polite.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
Too the one who is invisible in their own spaces of belonging. Who does not wear their otherness on the surface, and so is unclaimed or unwelcome by the people with whom they most identify or wish to belong.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who holds hard boundaries and releases righteous anger and who starts revolutions in the name of what they know to be good and right and true.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the paradigm shifter. To the earth shaker. To the change maker. To the pot-stirrer. To the call-it-like-you-see-it, no holds barred truth teller.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who lives inside a small box that someone else built and stuffed you inside without ever asking you who you were or what you wanted. Who knows they are made for more but who is told to sit down, stop dreaming, be quiet, stay safe.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one whose story has been silenced by the greater narrative. Who flies under the radar out of necessity or safety or preference. To the one who so badly needs to be heard by a world that refuses to listen.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who rocked every damn boat they ever put you on.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who lives with illness or trauma or disability, who finds daily life harder than most could imagine, who the world would rather not see, or acknowledge or assist.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one born into a body that does not match your soul.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who refuses to dial back the dreams they call childish or unrealistic or ridiculous. Who practices that acceptance speech in the mirror and gives imaginary interviews and still sees their name in lights when they close their eyes.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who lives wild. who pushes the edges. who thrives in unconventional spaces. who says the things others are not willing to say.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who has come to learn what they want in life, in work, in love, in relationships. Who refuses to settle for anything less. Who has walked away to save their own life and who will do it again and again and again as many times as it takes.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the agitator. The bridge burner. The holy roller. The open road freedom chaser. The off the grid wild heart. The one who refuses to follow the rules.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who devotes their lives to a justice greater than themselves. Who places humanity at the center. Who gives up so much to offer the world everything they have.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who makes art that nobody understands or sees or buys or wants. To the one who would rather make art than pay bills or collect possessions or fall in love or do what the world expects.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who falls in love too fast, or too often, or too completely. Who offers their whole patchwork heart, again and again, who loves with everything they have as if their own life depends on it.
To the one who nobody understands. The outcast. The misfit. The picked last for the team. The never quite right. The desperate to belong.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
To the one who has hurt others on their path to wholeness. Who has cheated or lied or been unkind but who knows this is not the sum total of their beautiful heart. The one who holds regret, who seeks redemption everywhere.
YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH.
You have never been too much.
You are a growing and changing and evolving human being.
You are complex and nuanced and hold multitudes within.
You are heart and soul and spirit and fire and roots and wings.
You can wear red lipstick and still be feminist as fuck.
You can fall madly in love with your whole entire being, body and soul and still search for magical solutions for your undereye circles or your muffin top or your adult acne.
You can be so solidly grounded in the grace of growing older without having to give yourself over fully to the passage of time. You can dye your gray hair away or get treatment for your wrinkles and still know that being over forty (or fifty or sixty) is fucking fine.
You can long for love and partnership and still fiercely protect your solitude and sovereignty. You can be sex-positive and have a libido-like-woah and still not date, choose to love yourself and go it alone, for now, or forever or until it all changes yet again.
You can be broken-hearted and angry about our current political climate or the struggles of those you love. You can ache and cry. You can read and research and donate and do direct action. And you are still allowed to laugh and dance. To celebrate the wonder of being alive in this world and fiercely protect your hard-won joy.
It is possible to like fluffy pop music or trashy novels and still possess a fierce intellected and move through the world knowing you are a force to be reckoned with.
You can adore fashion and makeup and post all the selfies you want without it being a means of validating your insecurity or low self-esteem. It doesn’t need to mean that you’re surrendering to a patriarchal misogynistic culture or are hiding or camouflaging your true self in the name of external approval. It can for fun, or celebration of the way it makes you feel more like you, deep in your bones.
It is possible to have a public self and a private self and countless selves in between and for this to not be insincere or inauthentic, simply a choice to share different parts of you with different people or circles or spheres of influence. We don’t have to be the same everywhere and to everyone, granting access to part of your life does not mean you owe the entirety of it to everyone.
It is possible to care deeply about being smart and kind and beautiful, and it is also possible to create and recreate the definitions of those words, all words, only for yourself.
You can love him and love her and love them both. In past and present and some imaginary future, and not need to take on any of the labels the world pushes on you for doing so. Your love doesn’t require you to fit inside a box of anyone’s design.
If you want those labels, if they fit like your favorite jeans and you bloom inside of them and somehow expand inside of you into something that feels like home and wholeness and belonging, then you can grab them and paint them large on a marquee and add lights so that everyone can see the list of names you have chosen for yourself.
You can hold your family of origin or choice in deep compassion and love and still choose to extricate you from their reach, from the spaces and places that desire to hold you to a past version of self that is no longer true.
You can be free and deeply honest in some spaces and on some topics and still have locked closets and buried secrets and undiscovered layers, without it making you any less true. You and only you get to decide what to offer and what to keep.
It is possible to accept a thing as truth today and reject it tomorrow. To write things you will one day no longer believe, to change your world to suit your new views. To learn and unlearn over and over and over again without it making you inconsistent or hypocritical. It simply means you are here and human and willing to own your process of continuous evolution.
It is possible to outgrow and evolve or discard your own myth and to untangle yourself from your own metaphor.
It is possible to be a walking contradiction, to honor and insist on your own multitudes, to luxuriate in the paradox of being. To take the words that feel right for you and discard the rest. To create your own guidebook with the things that resonate and ignore everything else.
Nothing in this may ring true for you, and that is just as it should be.
The whole point, the only one that matters is this: this is your life. You get to be filled with beautiful contradictions. To embrace your multitudes. To be unapologetic about all the parts of you that don’t make sense to anyone else, and even the ones that don’t always make sense to you.
This is your life.
Write your own story, every chance you get.
xo.
J.
PS: Want to embrace your own beautiful paradox? Download my free pdf writing prompt to help you explore your own beautiful contradictions.
Dearest,
I know how hard it is has been. I know how you’ve been stumbling in the darkness, feeling the weight of that missing spark, that essential aliveness. Unable to hear the voice of truth – so long drowned out by responsibilities and obligations and fear and trauma and grief.
Or perhaps it hasn’t been that hard and really, you know that life is good and you are grateful and it’s not entirely heavy. But there is an undeniable feeling of disconnect. Of distance. Of separation from self and purpose. Close enough you should be able to touch it, and yet – for some reason you cannot. And the frustration of this dips and loops and causes confusion and fatigue.
I see you, and I know these spaces. Intimately.
I have come to refer to my essential self, my innate center, the pulse and spark and beat that is wholly me – as my wild heart. It beats steady and true. It is untamable, unbound by expectation, unconstricted by rules and regulations. This is my way of naming and knowing that piece of myself that is unchanging and true. My compass and guide. The space I return again and again.
And it is true that, in the course of living this life, I have lost my wild heart – my connection to self – again and again. Perhaps this is also true of you.
It may also be true that you believe that you’ll never find your way back.
But what if your wild heart is not truly lost or gone or missing?
What if it is simply that in order to survive you closed the door, locking it tight or ramming it shut or hiding the whole thing behind a brick wall so you wouldn’t be reminded of it or tempted to go looking when it was not safe or wise to enter. And over time that door became obscured by debris and covered in tangled vines and perhaps you even forgot it had ever been open.
But what if making your way back to your wild is not a complicated affair – not as complicated as we would make it, at least. Sometimes it is simply a matter of finding the portal that clears the path, the one that lets the door swing wide open – intentionally and yet without force.
So all that is needed then is to walk through, into the light that pulses with remembrance, and reunite with that which has been denied.
It is true that most of the time your wild heart – which is to say your truest essence – is closer than you think.
25 portals to your wild heart
In the music, the low base, hip spin of the downbeat. In the lyrics that take you home. In the melody that sounds exactly like freedom.
In the way that as the day has settled into night and the house is finally quiet and the candles throw your shadow against the wall, casting the curves of your body as art formed of darkness and light.
In the darkness when no light remains and suddenly everything is finally seen, full and whole and holy.
Under the moon, with only her as your witness, bare feet on wet grass, and the spin and the howl and the hands clasped in unspoken prayer.
In the wilderness where a tangle of trees and mossy forest floor whisper and the wild things blink their eyes in the darkness to silently welcome you home.
In solitude. In silence. In becoming and belonging wholly to yourself, responsible to and for no one else.
In the ocean. In her pounding surf and relentless force and eternal return, in the salt and wet of her – the baptism of the way she brings you to a state of almost painful aliveness.
In the unknowns. Inside of the questions for which there are no answers and yet you could write novels without trying – because the question itself holds that much.
In the strength of allowing the questions to hold that much.
In the liminal spaces. The in-between. The worlds between here and there where all is suspended.
In the heat and sweat and salt of desire. In the space where body meets body and it all slip-slides into everything and nothing, all at once.
In the contradictions. The hard and holy. The grit and grace. The juxtapositions and the paradox and the things that shouldn’t be but are – and in the breathtaking beauty of this.
In community. In tribe. In a village of souls who see and honor and know. Who lift and hold. In the gathering around the campfire, where the pain slips away in favor of the music and the dancing.
In truth spoken after long silence. In the reclamation of voice, the throat chakra set free, the deep knowing finally said aloud.
In boundaries held – the hard spoken no that is the deepest honoring of self. In the holding of this, even in the face of hurt or misunderstanding or loss.
In the harsh acceptance of unmet want. In the grief that drives you to your knees and the love that lifts you back up again.
In the forgiveness. Not of him or her or them or the wider world. In the way you extend that toward yourself, and say yes. self – I love you. Yes, I honor you. Yes, I forgive you. For all of it. You did what you had to do, and it was the best that you could. Now, let it rest. It is time to rest. The time for penance is over.
In the yes delivered clear, full-throated and honest. The holy yes that ushers in all that has been longed for and everything that has been waiting for you.
In the spaces where wholeness is chosen over goodness.
In the discovery that you already have all that you need and even more, all that you want.
In the demand. The requirement. The statement of this is what I need and I will not settle for any less. Not ever again.
In the burning and in the rising. The fire of initiation and the forging and the ashes and rubble and collateral damage. And in the painful forming and uncurling of wings, the stretching and tentative first attempts at flight. And then the soaring, high and free.
In the revolution. In the hand painted signs lifted over heads and the marching and the chanting and the solidarity and the spilling into the streets in righteous anger.
In the surrender. The acquiescence. The laying down the weapons and walking away from the battle. Because the fighting is over and it is now time for peace.
In the words. Always, always in the words. The words that flow like honey from lips or that scrawl messy on page or click rhythmic from fingers onto keyboards. Not just the pretty and purposeful words – no. The raw and the gritty. The dark and unholy. The words that drip like hot wax onto waiting skin.
The words that shape the stories you once thought untellable. The words that are received and held and known and lifted by people you once called stranger. The words that stack one on the next on the next until they begin to form themselves into the story that changes the course of all things. The words that don’t just unlock the door, or swing it wide open – the words that blast off the hinges and knock down the walls until your wild heart floods your entire being with light and energy and freedom.
In the end, it is always the words that bring me home. The words that unwind the chains and break open the locks. The words that return me to myself, to my wild heart, to the truth of my being.
Tell me, is this also true for you?
If it is, grab paper and pen. Find a quiet sliver of space. Sit down and get ready to write yourself free.
None of those who have loved me have trusted the white hot wolf in me.
Oh, they have claimed to.
Perhaps, in the beginning, they have wanted to believe that it was so. Wanted to think that that they were capable of such a love.
But always, in the end, they have tried to tame the wolf of me, to keep her small and safe and contained.
They have all, in the end, been afraid of the heat of her fire.
Know this: To tame a wild thing is never an act of love. It is an act of containment, of force. A call against nature and instinct and the primal force of the shadows.
Consider this your warning:
I am calling things forth now. I am claiming space and defining territory. I am defining my own agency and ownership of body. I am rooting in ritual and rising in power.
So if you come to me now – if you want to love me – you must first listen:
Do not try quiet my voice.
Do not attempt to soften my edges or tame my prowl.
I am inhabiting my wild.
I am encompassing the dance.
I am no longer burning down.
That time is over.
I am the white hot ignition.
I am starting the fire.
I am rising like flame.
You want to come with me? Then step closer to the heat. Meet me in the sliver of space between passion and truth where all is white hot and even the shadows are dancing.
Meet me there, the the heart of the wild, with your naked skin and and your own hallowed heat.
And know this: If you want to love a wolf – you’d best be ready to hear her howl.
A few years ago I launched a writing course that exceeded all my expectations. Not because it made me rich or famous — but because of what happened inside the space created for the participants. What happened when those wild hearted souls gathered together was nothing short of magic.
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”
You have to live your life according to your own light and you have to move wherever life leads, without any compromise.Osho
Darling, it has been such a long journey.
An epic quest. No such thing as stillness and complacency for you. There never has been, has there?
No. You’ve always been made for bigger things that that.
You know it’s true. You never were like the rest of them.
The ones whose peripheral vision never saw past the nearest horizon. The bloom where you’re planted, stay close to home, safety-first, keep the same friends and the same job and the same habits – forever and ever amen.
No, not you.
Your restless rose up early. Teased you every time you felt that far-away wind tangle through your hair.
You were always called elsewhere. A daydreamer. A wanderer. An explorer of worlds nobody else could see. Long before you could leave you learned the limitlessness of your own mind. No geographic boundaries or sensible borders for you. You were made to move.
You’ve always followed the pull of your wild heart. For you there is no other way.
Lost and found. Found and lost. Souls like you know that they are really just one and the same.
Over and under and around and through. Barefoot and dirty. Among strangers or in the center of the vast alone. Traversing foreign lands and barefoot dirt country roads or the farthest reaches of your brilliant mind.
You wild and beautiful vagabond. You’ve wandered and you’ve searched and you never stay still for long – no matter what the outside world has seen and believed. You are a universe unto yourself. You know no borders, swirl through the liminal spaces, live on the edges and dance in the margins and croon under the moon. You have no fear of the wild – for the wild is your second home.
This is how you were born, this is the way you’ve known and named your own self.
Because you were made for that restless wind. You were made for the trail into the shadows and the pathway straight into the blinding light. You were made for the cavernous depths of night and sunrise over the mountain and the crash of ocean against shore.
You know how to pack light. The second nature knowing of moving on and beginning again. No, you’ve never shied away from that.
And you are being called now, just as you are always called – into motion, into the wild, into the wind.
Into the truth and into the grit and the light and the wide-open world.
But this is different. Not like all the other times.
Sometimes you can search for so long that you lose track of the one place that matters the most.
Home.
It is time to go home.
Home to the earth that named you. Home to the ground that flows with that which brought you to life. Home to the root, to the heat, to the core of it all.
Home to yourself.
This is not about home on the map. Not about where you were born or raised. Not about where anyone lives or where the good jobs are or where you’re expected to turn up eventually. Not about the lover who weaves words into the heat of desire. Not about ties that bind or anything that feels like obligation or giving up or giving in.
It’s not about staying or leaving or anything in between.
It may not even be about movement at all, not the way most people think of it.
No. This time, you are called home to yourself. You are called to integration. To the point of intersection. To completion. To the center of the paradox and the white heat of your own knowing. You are called to a claiming of place and space and intention and desire.
And even if you don’t yet know who or where or what that home is, you will be guided on your journey and you will know, with absolute clarity, when you arrive.
This is just the way of things.
So look around you now – at all you’ve collected on your many journeys. Take stock, give thanks. These are the things that have brought you to who you are, that have delivered you here – to the greatest journey of all.
Gather up the few things worth keeping; the ones that speak the memories of the love that gave you life, the talismans that brought you knowledge of your power. The magic bits, the crystals, the torn love notes you wrote to your own goddess self. Tuck in only the things which nourish your soul. The rest is no longer needed.
You don’t need much to hold the most precious of your belongings.
Tie all those bits in a pack over your back. Use the silk scarf that held your hair in the sea breeze that day when you sat in the sand at the edge of the world and the sun shone warm on your shoulders and you saw all the way to infinity.
That day. Do you remember that day? When you were all the way broken and all the way lost and then somehow you found yourself there? You had that silk scarf tied around your head and your old black converse were full of sand and your heart had was in pieces and somehow you managed to save your own life. You found your way home that day. You will do it again.
You know what to do. You always have.
So heed the call. Set off on the path. Whistle that long slow whistle, the tune you’ve been hearing since birth – the one that always calls you home.
There will be choices to make along the way. It will not always feel safe or be easy. No – real journeys rarely do.
But the choices are all yours. This is the time of complete agency and ownership of self.
It always was, you see, you just were not ready to know it yet.
Here is one important truth.
Nothing is forbidden.
Someone taught me that once, and I read that line over and over the words became a steady drumbeat guiding me into my own life.
Do you hear me now – nothing is forbidden.
Stop right now and read those words aloud.
Now speak them again and again.
Nothing is forbidden. Nothing is forbidden. Nothing is forbidden.
Your life belongs to you. It always has, but it is so easy to forget. In the losing and the finding and the finding and the losing – sometimes we lose track of that one essential truth.
And in case you have, I will repeat it one more time.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing, is forbidden.
There is nobody walking with you on this leg of your journey – truly there can never be. The journey home is always a solitary one.
But solitary does not mean lonely, or even alone.
You know this, dear one, don’t you? You are never truly alone. Get quiet now. Pay attention. Can you feel your hand in mine? Can’t you feel the weight and warmth of it? Don’t you feel the touch of every loving soul and the light of all the wild things? The whole entire universe is lifting you up.
The fire keeps you company. And the spirit of the wolf. And the wild white mustang. And the essence all of those you met along the way. You carry them inside you and all around you.
You’ve become a part of their journey as well.
This is the way it always is with kindred souls. This is the way of the wild. This is the way of the pathway home.
Quickly now. It is time to leave. The full moon lights your way.
Your life belongs to you now. Your life and your story and your body and your precious wild heart. Every last bit of what makes you the miracle that you are. Regardless of what the rest of the world demands, here, there is no compromise. No settling. No making do.
This is reclamation. This is hallowed ground.
And it is entirely true.
Nothing is forbidden.
In the wild that is your home, nothing is ever forbidden. Not now, not ever again.
Welcome to your life, wild one.
Welcome all the way home.
“When did you know your life belonged to you?”
“When nothing was forbidden.” Isabel Abbott
Do you, like me, know you have a wild heart? And do you, like me, lose connection with it through the whirl and swirl of life?
If your answer is yes, please consider joining me on a journey back home as we step into sacred space together for 30 days of questions and prompts aimed at taking us back to that wild heart of us – which is our one true home.
The space is already filling with open minds and pounding hearts and sacred mystery.
And having you there, wild heart open and ready to write, would make it even more holy. The Summer Session begins on July 25th – as a gift of love to ourselves.
Please join us.
“I loved this course. It was the reason I woke up in the morning. No really, it was the most heart centered real, present space, so lovingly created, crafted and nurtured by Jeanette and a bunch of wild hearted writers from all over the globe – brought together with a love of the written word and expression. I highly recommend this course. It’s totally totally worth it!” ~Hanizan Abdul Hamid
Yesterday, I was reading about the recent anti-LGBTQ legislation passed in North Carolina. As an out, vocal and proud Queer woman – this news cuts me to my soul. As much as I would love to say I’ve reached a place where it can’t touch me, that would be a lie. Every time my love and my community are subject to legislation born of hate I am filled with hurt and fear. And it makes me angry – because this, like all the others, is legislation that only serves to hurt and marginalize me and mine. And it can be easy, from this space – to feel powerless, or oppressed, or worn down.
But then, I came across this article. And as I watched the video (please, please watch), of this beautiful, fiercely alive transwoman of color moving so free – to the beat of drums and the chants of the crowd and in the face of the line of guards in front of the Governors mansion – my body and soul started moving to the rhythm of the dancing and my voice rose with the chanting and I got to thinking big about resistance and revolution.
And I watched her dance, completely mesmerized and overcome with how this particular revolution moved through her body and translated into the crowd. How everything became one – the dance, the chants, the drums.
How everything and everyone was so fiercely alive, pulsing with movement and resistance. Everything and everyone except for those stationary guards doing their jobs. How did they feel, I wonder? Did they have to still the natural movement of their own body? Did they question the side of the line their jobs had put them on?
Did part of them just want to dance?
We make meaning of our stories and our struggles and our fight for visibility in so many ways. In every moment of resistance from the beginning of time. There are some things that carry across language and culture and country.
And dance – especially the dance of revolution – is one of them.
The last few years – we’ve heard a lot about revolution. We’ve called it uprising, resistance, revolt, or riot – depending on who we deem to be leading the charge and how we feel about their cause or whether we claim it as our own. We watch it from a distance and we take to the streets. And the personal becomes political and the political becomes personal.
And sometimes – at the end of it all, the facebook rantings and marching and shouting and campaigning- when voices are hoarse and spirits are united – no matter if everything has been won or all seems lost…
Sometimes – all there is to do, is to rise up and dance.
————————————————–
Revolution, my friends, looks like this.
Revolution sounds like the beat of drums and the rhythm of clapping and the sounds of wild cheering. It looks like dancing in front of a line of guards standing there to keep you out.
Because dance is always the way in.
Revolution is bodies – and voices – in motion.
Revolution looks like showing up for what you believe in. and standing ground against the things you don’t. It looks like staying – even when you’re weary of the fight. It looks like saying yes and saying no – and saying NOW. Not later. We have waited long enough.
Now.
Revolution says I am with you – and if this your struggle it is also my own.
Revolution looks like every protest sign I’ve ever held with my hands, and every single one I’ve lifted up in word.
Revolution is reclamation and visibility and the willingness to be seen.
It is fists raised up and bodies laid down.
Revolution says no matter how often you try to erase me, I will still be here.
Do you see me? I am still here.
Revolution is my birthright and my humanity and my responsibility.
Revolution is loud. It’s defiant. It’s the hard cackle of laughter that rings through the streets and the call and response and the demands for change. It’s the walk outs and the sit ins. And yes, it’s the huge risk it takes you to share that post on your social media, when you know there isn’t anyone who will understand or agree.
Because even small acts of resistance count toward the revolution. And even small acts of resistance can feel terrifying.
Revolution IS resistance. Resistance – even your own, will sometimes make you uncomfortable. Resistance asks – are you ready to be uncomfortable? It is time for you to be uncomfortable.
Resistance has no time for your comfort zones.
Revolution is the small things viewed large and the big things made even bigger.
Revolution is righteous and disobedient and inconvenient and yes – sometimes it’s angry.
Right now I am angry.
Revolution is the amplification of voices frequently made silent. It’s the appearance of faces often invisible. It is arms linked and bodies bared. And the rumble that starts low in your belly, and rises up through your lungs and out into this world.
It sounds like the marching of feet on pavement and chants in languages and accents and voices too numerous to count.
Revolution is a network you will never unravel.
Revolution is truth.
Revolution does not ask what is allowed – it says I exist.
Will you still try to stop me? Go ahead. Try to stop me.
Do you see me? I am here. And will not be going away this time.
Revolution is standing up and fighting back.
Revolution builds in the silence and the shadows left by oppression and privilege.
It is pride and desire and fierce determination – open bodies and unlocked doors and people spilling into the street.
The people will always, eventually, spill into the street.
And when they do, the drums will pound, and the voices will rise and the people…
the people will dance.
Eventually, the people will always dance.
Because sometimes, my friends. Resistance looks exactly like dancing.
And sometimes dancing is where revolution is born.
PS: Looking to give birth to your own revolution? I help passionate change-makers raise their voice and harness the power of story. Get in touch to learn how we can make your words dance.
“Being tame is what we’re taught: … put the crayons back, stay in line, don’t talk too loud, keep your knees together, nice girls don’t…As you might know, nice girls DO, and they like to feel wild and alive. Being tame feels safe, being wild, unsafe. Yet safety is an illusion anyway. We are not in control. No matter how dry and tame and nice we live, we will die. And we will suffer along the way. Living wild is its own reward.” SARK.
We start out on this earth wild. Unfettered. Free.
You did. I did. We all do.
We speak our needs. Cry our hurt. Kick and scream our anger. Sing our joy.
Do you remember it? Do you feel that tingle way down low when i remind you – does that rooted memory of your innate wild spirit whisper back – yes – i am still here?
Do you feel the stirrings of spaces inside you that have been shoved down, made quiet, pushed back?
Do you remember a time when you were free? When your heart beat steady with pulse of sun and moon and tide and you could dive under the waves and fly higher than the trees and always come back home. When you were one with dark rich earth and the green of all that is alive and the creatures that move unseen in the dark.
When you knew the truth. In your bones.
And you knew when it came down to it you were just like those wild things, you were kin to the storm and you rose with the sun and spun circles around the earth.
That when it came right down to it, you had no owner. No captor.
In all the ways that really mattered, no matter what they said, you belonged only to yourself.
Somewhere deep inside of us, we are always that.
Somewhere, deep inside of you, i know that you know this is true. No matter how distant or how separate or how impossible it feels right now. Because somehow, somewhere – you forgot. Or you were tricked, convinced otherwise by a culture that benefits from your compliance. Or you lost that wild heart of yours accidentally, without even noticing she was gone.
And so your wild heart, she went into hiding. Tucked away behind books, or in shoeboxes crammed with old memories and older pain. Hidden inside messages of too much and not enough. Painted behind layers of shame and doubt and loathing.
Your wild heart may be hidden inside the fractured shells of past lives.
Or deep within the echoed expectations of others.
Underneath that pile of unmet dreams.
In the silenced loud and in the stifled, not permitted and yet righteous anger. In the child trauma, where so much was taken from you.
In the silence of all the words you have been unable speak.
Within the covers of that tattered journal, where truth was finally spilled.
In the song that finds you, again and again and haunts you sweet and true.
Tucked between the ribs of old lovers and that ragged sigh of a space where teeth met bone.
Closed in boxes shoved to the back of closets or grown dusty in attics.
Between the lines of that letter, the one you read until the page was tattered. The one that will always be your undoing.
Hot and tender and raw in the unmet need for skin against skin and the want of your holy body.
At the junction between this life and that one, where past and present and future meet and the road forks and you made an impossible choice.
Slipped inside the line that lives between goodness and wholeness and the sliver where they become one.
And she is right here. Today. As close as your breath.
Yes, wherever your wild heart is hiding – she is still there. And she wants to be found.
I promise you, she wants to be found
Because you see, your wild heart is the truth of you. And you are the truth of your wild heart.
And if you don’t yet know it, let me remind you:
Forget what they told you. You are love child of a passionate affair between goddess and universe. You were born of a steamy forbidden heat and you were made for the cyclone of unadulterated wholeness. You are a daughter of delight. You are the unconstrained mother of all. A fierce warrior. A wicked priestess. Your roots twist into this earth. Your spirit rises in glorious asana. You let loose with the howl of the wilderness you’ve held tight all these years.
You are wild.
Do you hear me?
You are wild.
Your heart is wild. Your soul is wild. Your spirit is as wild as the howl that has been building in your chest, ready to open the locked door of your rib cage.
Your urge to run – fast and hard and long – to places where you are unknown and unseen – so that you can finally take up all the space you need. That is your wild.
Your craving for quiet. For candles and darkness and the presence of what is most holy to you. That is your wild.
The voice that tells you to leave, that your highest good can not be served here. The knowing that tells you to run to her – because her arms are the only home you’ve ever needed. The sound of the waves and the wind you feel tangling your hair when you are nowhere near the ocean and the air is entirely still. The sound of your laughter, pure unadulterated joy. The heat and longing and need of your skin and bones and center. The spiral and spark, deep in your belly that reminds you there is more. The way your knees hit the ground and your shoulders quake and you feel the loss of everything that has gone away. Your refusal to compromise what you know to be true.
Your resonant yes.
Your holy no.
Your sweet seduction
Your siren song.
Your agency. Your autonomy. Your surety of self.
Your movement through doubt and ache and fear.
This is your wild.
This is your home.
And no matter how many times you lose your way, your wild heart remains. Waiting, always, for you to return.
When you hear her whisper, that small rise within – she is calling to you. And if you listen, and answer her call, she will help you create a map to trace the path back.
You can dance your way or paint your way or fuck your way or yell or scream or sing or pray or run or dive or write.
There are a million true paths. All of them within your reach.
Take a deep breath now. Close your eyes. Get steady. Get real steady. Feel yourself rooted to the earth and rising to the heavens. Now go in and go out all at once. Become and disappear. Stretch out your hands, palms up and ready to receive.
Do you feel it? Right beneath your ribs? Do you feel it pulsing, red and ready?
Call it to you now, all the way home. Feel the heat and solidity. Feel the want and divinity. Feel the pull of the tides and the wild, wild moon. Hear your howl.
Now open your eyes.
It is time to begin again
Wild this time.
*******
Do you, like me, know you have a wild heart? And do you, like me, lose connection with it through the whirl and swirl of life?
If your answer is yes, please consider joining me on a journey back home as we step into sacred space together for 30 days of questions and prompts aimed at taking us back to that wild heart of us – which is our one true home.
The space is already filling with open minds and pounding hearts and sacred mystery.
And having you there, wild heart open and ready to write, would make it even more holy.
This is for the ones who sing the song of the wolves.
This is for those that hear and heed the call.
For the wild ones. The untamable. The unashamed.
This is for the truth seekers, the wisdom speakers. Those who can see.
This is for those who know their want as holy.
The ones who have learned to embody their own divinity and intimately know their connection to all things.
This is for the ones who speak straight and clear and true.
Who court the shadows and dance with the muse.
Who seduce, who stake claim, who look you straight in the eye without wavering.
The ones who know exactly what they are worth.
This is for the ones who speak their truth and write the terms of their own existence.
The ones who lay claim to the wilderness, who beg, who burn, who ache, who bleed.
This is for the ones who speak incantation and trust the gut wisdom and the red-hot blood that pounds in their veins.
This is for those who are called relentless. Who are labeled too much. Who are called the names they have called women like us since the beginning of time.
Witch. Enchantress. Sorceress.
Who are shunned who are shamed who are burned.
This is for those who have burned so many times they no longer fear the fire.
This is for those who have learned to rise.
This is for the ones who have survived.
This is for the ones who, when pushed against the wall, do not cower, but run – for the mountain, for the forest, for the sea.
This is for those who need freedom like most need air.
For the ones whose hearts sing far off train-whistle lonely. Who crave the edge and the burn of the needle, of the knife, of the sweet hit of what tastes like craving. Who like to dance at the edge where danger lives.
This is for those who honor their intuition and the ancestors and the wisdom that lives on the wind.
This is for those with appetite. Those who refuse to be satisfied with less than whole. The ones with cravings that lead them to hunt and prowl and ask and know.
This is for the insatiable.
This is for the ones who raise their young as warriors on a path of truth. Who are tied to tribal wisdom. Who honor the pack but do not bend to its will.
This is for those that hear the rhythm of the earth snare drum steady in their bones.
This is for those who light the candles, who call the ancients, who speak in wild whisper under the light of the blood red hunters moon.
This is for the ones who own their fierce and their bite and their hunger.
This is for the seduced becoming seductress, for hunted claiming her place as hunter.
For those that have fought long and hard for agency and ownership and who have refused all the rest.
For those who have crossed the killing fields to get to where they are.
For the ones that bring you to your knees with just a touch.
For those who know their power. Who honor their truth. Who give voice to their desire.
For those who cannot be contained. Who must live uncaged. Who will never be subdued.
{we live our lives in real time. an unceasing go-go-go and give-give-give. it can get messy, and tangled and so easy to forget ourselves in the midst of it all. but sometimes, right when it is needed the most, there will come a night when the universe gifts us with the path back home}
Tonight is a night for a hard pour of whiskey in a mason jar. It’s the way the ice cracks and the heart says ‘ Oh yes, I know exactly how that feels’.
It’s for sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor and cupping both hands around your glass and closing your eyes and breathing deep and raising it to your lips. It is soaking in the ritual this small act can be when when you allow yourself the gift of it.
It’s the way lips feel as they hit the cold mouth of the jar, and the perfect burn that remains after the glass is pulled away.
It’s blood red candles on salt-water stones and the burn down smell of matches and smoke.
It’s the amber oil carefully applied on touch points and then glided liberally on bare skin until you ground into the scent of yourself.
It’s hot pink knee socks and tangled hair and messy eyeliner. It’s that perfect black beanie and that loose weave black sweater that just covers the tops of thighs and shows the shadowed outline of everything underneath.
It’s for music that hurts, but only the exact right kind of ache that has an edge that mingles with its sweetness in such a way that they could never be untangled. That should never be untangled. Because there are some things for which the ache is a part of the beauty.
It’s the night you stop avoiding the words that never stop chasing you. Where you sink into the solitude and finally breath out all that air trapped in lungs, waiting for space to fully exhale.
It’s the knowing that at some point tonight there will be dancing. That you’ll follow the movements of your body on the wall, silhouette painted by the shadows of candlelight. That you’ll spin your hoop on your hips until something rises in you that has not risen in a long, long time.
It’s a night for coming home and gathering in and calling in the powers of the witch and the howl of the wolf. For laying out the stones and speaking mantra and sitting still inside the space of the holy that remains when the reverberation of sound ceases.
It’s the way when you tilt the glass all the way up and the candle light glows through and you know your face is illuminated in the most holy of ways. And the song that holds an inexpressible ache plays with every last bit of memory it holds and you are thankful, even for that. Especially for that.
It’s for broken seashells and wood that looks like bone, for cigar boxes and rusted locks and for running your fingers along all the things collected. For feeling the memories that live in each one travel from fingertips to center and hearing the whispers of all the stories you have not yet told.
It’s for knowing that some stories must remain untold in order for others to be born.
It’s for remembering last night – lying in bed. Listening to her fingers plucking guitar strings – inexplicably remembering just where to place each one in this pattern that I can’t sort out but that lives inside of her muscle memory. And listening as she plays words born inside of her that tell the story of her life and all the ways she remembers herself. And to give thanks for the vulnerable gift of that. Because when someone gives you their art you can only ever be humbled in the face of its truth.
And that moment is also to know the hope and the struggle and the stay still and the run away and the come here and the push back. And also what it is to say yes, to be present exactly where you are.
It’s for the space where the empty of missing and the gratitude for solitude meet in perfect center. Where you know that one brings fullness to the other and so give thanks for both.
It is a night for contemplating grace. Grace that looks like the orange wool blanket curled around legs and tastes like chocolate and peanut butter for dinner and sounds like this song that plays. The one that just over a year ago found you broken on this very floor. And now it greets you whole and strong in the not entirely unwelcome melancholy that we sometimes carry around once we’ve lived a certain amount of life full of truth and glory and loss and love.
It’s the way the candle looks as it burns down. The mellow that the whiskey spreads like hot wax melting into tight held bones. It’s the expansion into space. It’s the amber rising from wrists and temple and collarbones and belly and all that is carried inside of that scent.
It’s a night for calling the ghosts and welcoming the muse and sitting back while they dance, all liquid heat and yearning skin of lovers long separated.
It is a night for remembering. The words. The whiskey. The music. The candles. The amber. The loves long gone and the life that is here, right now.
It is a night for coming home.
To myself.
Blessed be.
[line]
{how do you remember yourself? what are the ways you come home to your heart? What is the path to returning to your center? Tell me now, pretty please. Comment here, send me a tweet or pour your soul into an email that will remain always just between you and me.}
“So yes I know how angry, or naive, or self-destructive, or messed up, or even deluded I sound weaving my way through these life stories at times. But beautiful things. Graceful things. Hopeful things can sometimes appear in dark places. Besides, I’m trying to tell you the truth of a woman like me.” ― Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water
[hr]
It’s the truth that sets you free, right? Coming clean, that’s what I preach.
I don’t always tell you everything. Did you think I did?
You want the truth of me right now? Tonight? Should I tell you that right now there is no compassionate mother in me. I am snarling and impatient and snappy. They pull me from this. And this is what compels me. I don’t want to mother. Not right now.
I’m not supposed to say that. It doesn’t fit within the selfless narrative I am called to embody.
Right now I want a shack by the beach and I want to create and I want to be fed green grapes and bittersweet chocolate by pretty girls with nothing better to do. And I want to toss back shots of whiskey at an old bar with men whose skin has been worn to leather from a life on the sea. I want to weave my way steady to the bow of a boat and let the spray encrust me with grit and the waves fill me with the sound of home. And then I want to return, to my weathered wood cottage, and turn the music up loud and light incense and candles and cigarettes and lap dance for the muse until she puts the fuck out for me every single time I ask. Because it’s hot, what I’m making, and even she – fickle as she can be – doesn’t want to miss a second of this flame.
I’m probably not supposed to say that either.
I want a bike with a basket big enough to get the food I need, and the chocolate and the whiskey and the wine and cigarettes. I want endless miles of coastline to ride along, until my legs ache from honest exertion. I want to let go of the handles and remember just how good my balance can be when I trust it.
I want a bonfire right outside my front door. Where the lovely girls and pretty man-boys cavort and dance and strip off all their clothing to tumble into the sea where the kisses always taste like salt. I want this every single night. Until even my skin is permeated with the burn-down-rise-up scent of wood smoke and sand and sea. I want to be singed with the heat of it. I want it, saturated, in my pores until my breath feels gritty and real again. Until the skin on skin gives off the heat of flame. Until even the words burn as they are birthed.
I know I’m not supposed to say all of that.
I’m not supposed to like this about myself. This selfish that lives inside. Supposed to keep it hidden. Soften it for you. Take the rough off my edges. Round out my sharp corners. I am told they are wrong. The wants. The excessive need for solitude. For life on my own terms. Not ladylike. Not generous. Not mother. That I’m not who you knew. Not who you know, even.
I don’t like it. But then I do. My wants speak to my needs which translate the terms of my survival. The compulsions of art that will drive me and put me at war and seduce me into the crucible at the center of pure creation. There’s alchemy in owning it all. Unabashed. Unapologetic. Without shame.
Oh, I know I’m not supposed to be shameless. This world, it’s got all kinds of words for women like me.
But there’s more to this than just me.
Because I have daughters. Because living on my own terms comes down to more than just my own survival.
My girls, they will know me as human. As creatrix as much as mother. As ugly and dirty and real as much as calm and patient and loving. See my struggle as well as my bliss. My unmet longing as counter to my grace. My deep rooted insecurity and my narcissism. My hard fall of tears as much the sweetness of my laugh. The way we all can storm and cry and flail and then fall into my big marshmallow bed, a tangle of limbs and heart and tears, and fall asleep intertwined, secure and at peace.
And they will know what it is for a woman like me to live in fullness with herself. To fight for it. To know she is within choice at each moment. To make contracts with self as the path to wholeness, even when this comes at great cost. To find the integrity within that space, even if that looks different than what the world would call true. To understand that even fullness can sometimes feel dark and bleak and empty.
That even regret and unmet hopes bring untold richness to what will be born. That it can be a raw and primal thing, this unceasing drive to make something from within one’s self. That great art is birthed of both great pain and great joy and sometimes directly as we navigate the tenuous space between the two. That we birth our art as we birth ourselves. Both, often, in the midst of struggle.
I think I’m probably not supposed to say that either. I’m supposed to make it gentle. Pretty it up a little for everyone.
But I want them to know well the selfish and the selfless that lives within each of us, and the delicate dance between the two. To experience the wilderness of reclamation and the surrender of relinquishment that is a part of every negotiation we will walk as women who burn and ask and risk. Who refuse to follow the rules given us by culture and upbringing and expectation.
I want them to know it’s okay to exist from the center of absolute unknowing. To live the ugly and the confused and the sad and the broken, honest and out loud. That it’s equally okay to dive into the bliss.
I want, by the very root of my life, to show them a narrative that diverges from the one this world would have them live.
A narrative that is bloody and powerful and full of heat and sweat and sex and a sweet, holy joy that is owned and chosen. And a grief and teardown that is owned just as fully. And an autonomy of self that rushes from within their goddess center, and a voice that rings true and tells the stories that will be key to their survival.
Stories that can be lived and written and told by no other voice but their own.
I cannot teach this from within a container of acceptable and predictable.
Because if they feel trapped or small or lost at 20 or 30 or 40, I hope they shall take the freedom to run for the sea and to heed her wild call. To hear the whisper through mountain top pines speaking ancient truth and knowing deep in their bones that the forest will hold their scared vows. I want them to burn sage and creosote and speak ancient incantation and call forth the goddess. I want them to splash paint on canvas under full pink moon while the coyote howl and the fire rages and to not fear the wild power that wells up from within on such a night. I want them to own their sex as holy. To know their desire as a divinity. To place a ring on their own ring finger and make promises that they will never speak to another. Unless they want to, and then I want them to do exactly that. To know it’s all in them, as it has been in all of us, all along.
And me. Their mother?
I am never more than a sliver of space from the center of the paradox. From the glorious reality of complete contradiction. Not unbalanced, no. The {im}perfect center. Point and counterpoint. I seek it others. And when I look deeply enough, I find it in myself.
I don’t want to be where I am, but I cannot be where I belong. I am always searching for home, always seeking the next idea, the next embodiment of what may be. I am broken, and I am whole.
And yes, there is an unrest there, an ceaseless searching. A wolf who comes calling, whispering, howling. She leads me to hunt and prowl and burn. And she guides me to that delicate sliver of space, right at the core, that is pure peace.
I am opened finally, to a relentless sort of hope. For that forever love that the movies try to prove to me is real. And I believe. God damn, after all this time and all this ache, I actually believe.
But I also want to be pressed hard against a rough wall by someone who has the right not to give a fuck who I am or was or ever will be. I want a family of kids and grandkids and chosen souls and a 40-year partner in crime to surround me until the end of my days. And I want to be left the hell alone – to get old and grow gray and soft with the company of books and seagulls and worn wooden floors and chipped pottery that holds my morning tea. To take lovers when I want and discard them when I don’t.
I’m probably not supposed to speak that, am I? Not supposed to honor the way they swirl together, am I? That contradiction between the safe and the wild that lives in all of us. We are to choose one or the other and not look back. If we feel a pull to that which we’ve left behind or that which we have not yet found, we are to ignore and suppress and forget. There are truths that are easier for others to bear if we commit to never speaking them aloud.
Once upon a time I silently agreed to do just that.
I cannot. Not any longer.
Tonight I feel the glow of the candles on my face and the cool of air on my back and the peace of the rain that falls and falls and falls outside. It quenches the packed, dry earth of desert and something in me as well. Taking what was hard and making it soft. Liquid. Inevitable. The way water flows. Just like it was the last time my body met another body and current met current and it all flowed into mystery. The way I move when I stop fighting my nature.
Until it’s all liquid alchemy. Wet heat. The way home.
I don’t care anymore what I’m supposed to say. This is my story. You can listen if you want. You can join me if you will.
Because these words and this life are my own. Even when I contradict itself. Even when I make every sense and no sense at all. Even when it changes from minute to minute. Whether they ring true or untrue. These things are nobody’s but mine.
And I’ve got a story to tell. And so I begin and begin and begin. Again.
What are you doing right now? Stop it. Sit down. Exhale. Let it go. You don’t need to clean the kitchen. You don’t need to finish that email. You don’t need to do anything but give yourself over to the night.
How could you best love yourself right now? What could you offer your sacred soul?
Do that.
Exactly that.
Do you need to dance? Feel the burn of whiskey? Climb into your bed and slow your breath? Light a cigarette and sit on your patio breathing in the darkness in solitude? Give yourself over to grief? Let the flicker of joy flame into fullness?
Steal out into the darkest night and find a crowd to get lost in? Slide your bare skin against the one who loves you and offer yourself in wholeness? Let your heart remember what was good and true?
Offer reverence for the ordinary extraordinary of this day? Light a candle and give blessing? Turn up the music and lose yourself in the beat? Open your journal and let the scrawl of words release what you’ve been holding too tight?
Run to your car and set a straight course for the ocean that calls you home? Let go? Hold fierce and fast? Ask for what you need? Claim it for yourself?
What do you need lover? What you do you want?
Stop quieting that inner voice that whispers in the night. Trust in the integrity of your own knowing. Let your hope teach you.
Let the longing of your holy body lead you home.
Claim this as your own. Give yourself to it fully. There is nothing else more worthy in this exact moment. Everything else will wait.
This time is for you.
Do you need permission? I am giving it to you now.
This moment. This night. This darkness. It is yours.
Do with it what you will – but do it with all of you.
It is what the universe demands. Your life will accept no less. I will accept no less.
Of course you don’t want to face it. Not now. Not ever, really. But let’s go there. It’s time.
You want different than what you have. You don’t love him, not anymore. You’re not fit for this glass-walled corner office and the perpetually tepid coffee from the staffroom. You hunger for graffitied concrete, crumbling brick, and a hard shot of whiskey that burns all the way down.
You want dogs, not children. You actually like olives on your pizza. That thing you did, in the dark corners of a secret room, it’s eating you alive. And no, that longing for her, it’s not ever going to go away.
Come clean, now. Chin up, love. No, it’s not going to be easy, or even gentle. Truth telling rarely is.
But you can do it. Indeed, you must.
It has been so long since you have given voice to what lives at core of you that you’ve forgotten exactly what was true to begin with. The lines between reality and justification blur until the agony of all that has been stifled drives you to the earth. The silenced wail held tight in your chest slashes through your center and tightens its noose until even breathing seems impossible.
Exhale now. Let it go. No matter what darling, you’ve still got to breathe.
Come clean, love. Lay down the burden of life only partway lived, of half-truths, of circumvented clarity.
It’s been so heavy. The weight of all you are not saying is holding you tethered to an existence far too small for the immensity of you. Shred the explanations, the excuses, the masks, and the veils. Drop all the tired layers that obscure your heart from the world.
Lay it all out. Leave your inside voice behind. Scream till your voice threatens to leave, and then wail some more. Let it loose – get primal and raw and messy. Cry all the tears you’ve sealed deep inside. Every secret passage scrawled in your journal and kept under lock and key. Every smothered bit of knowing you’ve kept locked down deep in your bones.
Let it go.
There is nothing to be gained by holding on any longer.
Life calls for one thing and one thing only, that you live from the clear and present center of yourself.
That you live your life as a blazing testament to your truth, whatever that may be. Wherever it might take you. Whoever you lose or leave along the way.
It’s true. Sometimes truth is a vicious wrecking ball. But amidst the rubble lie the embers that will spark your emancipation. Your truth, spoken clear and true, is the light that will illuminate spirit and wisdom and a path that is all yours. Your voice fans the flames that will sustain you on the journey you were meant to take.
Do you hear that?
It’s your voice. Your mother tongue. The language of your soul. The one you were born knowing but forgot how to speak. It has returned to you now. It will never leave. It comes from the deep-rooted center of you, and rises unadulterated and whole. Echoes into the world and lights your way.
Fierce and gentle. Strong and mighty. Pure and clear and true.
Do you hear it? I do.
It sounds exactly like freedom.
~~~~
Listen to the Truth Telling Soundtrack . Know more songs for coming clean? Share them in comments!
I invite you to stoke the embers of your inner fire. Coax the flames from your center to the edges of all you reach. Make peace with the parts within you that crave that burn. Let the flames get high. Burn bright. The world needs your light.
__________
Download Girl On Fire as a magazine style PDF – print and read it when you need a reminder of who you are and the power of your light. Subscribe and download by clicking on the link above.
***
she is wise
and wary of flames
but still, she knows
she will survive the fire
life scorches sometimes.
she has been a phoenix before
and every time
she burns to ashes
she knows
exactly how to rise
again.
she carries
destruction grief
carved river deep in her bones
specializes in
wrecking ball
knows how to bring
the whole thing down
surveys the broken
claims it as wholeness
and names it all good
she knows well
the holy necessity
of beginning again.
she has gone mad
for beauty
found rapture in shadows
calls poetry her religion
she seduces uncertainty
like a dominatrix
bows to no god
names herself goddess
builds alters
to the divinity
of heat and sweat and sex
and claims righteous ownership of
the body she has been given.
she once held her truth
in bone marrow,
locked deep.
but she was always
prone to fracture
learned that words flowed best
at the broken spots
she wrote splinter point novellas
told shatter stories
knit words into worlds
and worlds into heat
and heat into breath
and breath into medicine
and she learned her voice
had the power to heal.
she lives transparent now
welcomes the feel
of air on bare skin
throws arms wide
holds out her heart
and says here
take this
all of it
she figured early
that far too much energy
is invested in veiling
truth
in hiding bodies
in cloaking love
she refuses
to cultivate shame
she saves her effort
for vital things.
she knows that
love is expensive
and always worth
the price
she knows home is not
where she lives
but something
inside held
and sometimes
only found by leaving
she knows that walls
are imaginary
and that open doors
are everywhere
and that eventually
we will all
make our way
back to the sea
back to the crashing waves
back to salt water truth
she does not believe in one day
no happily ever after
or black and white
hard truths
her forever is now
she finds her rapture in the fullness
of this moment
humanity is her only dogma
kindness her communion
and church a mountain top
in the center of the desert
while the city pulses below
she speaks amen
in every holy fragment of existence.
she always knew she’d have daughters
knew she would mother them well.
she teaches them the value of their
outside voice
their no voice
their yes voice
their my entire being is a temple voice
she teaches them that their spirit
is truth
and their truth
is strength
and their strength
is vulnerability
and their vulnerability is a gift.
she knows too many girls
are broken before they
become
she has done battle in the name of rebirth
carries her scars with fierce grace
she finds beauty in the breakdown
and wholeness in the shatter
strength in the fault lines
and goodness in everything.
she is not afraid to name her gifts
knows the magic in her words
knows the spiral in her hips
she has a vital spark
at the center of her longing
she has secrets behind her eyes
and will share them
with anyone
who asks
but she only wants those
who commit
to asking.
she knows that compromise
is for vocations
and that spirit
is non-negotiable
she accepts no labels or limits
build her a box
and she will dismantle it carefully
use the pieces
to create a stage
and sing her own wild song
knows there is a power
in the melody we carry in our
bones.
She knows the lotus blooms
in mud
she knows the phoenix
goes down in flames
she knows the rapture of lust
and the escape of captivity
she knows the center of the paradox
is where the truth is found.
she is full of sky
full of starshine
full of goddess flame
bleeds words
speaks truth
welcomes it all
howls at the moon
she is a girl on fire
she is stoking the flames
she is lighting the world
she is burning to ashes
And always she is rising
And rising
And rising again.
__________________________________
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Why are you so determined to keep your wild silently inside you? Let it breathe. Give it a voice. Let it roll out of you on the wide open waves. Set it free.
Get up now. Come on. On your feet. Out of the corner. Don’t look back, there’s nothing behind you but the past.
We’ve got a wild ride ahead.
Let’s agree on some ground rules right now. The rules are that there are no rules. And that you make all the rules. Make them and break them and change them at will. Actually, the only rule is that YOU are the rule. The ground is still the ground. The sky is still the sky. But the limits have been lifted.
You are free.
No more playing small, lover. Stop tucking away your brilliance into the pockets of that oversized cloak. You’re no shrinking violet. I know it and you know it. If they all stopped for long enough to look below your surface the world would know it. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. They might try; it’s easier for them if we don’t do this.
We’re not interested in easy.
That slow fade into nothingness? Pale pastels and safe choices? Quiet corners and predictable lives? Stagnant comfortable sameness? Your life story written by those who have a vested interest in keeping you small? Not now. Not you. Not tonight.
We’ve got places to go.
Take a deep breath. Feel that fire burning deep within you? You’d almost forgotten it was there, hadn’t you, love? You’ve been holding it down all this time, stuffing out the flame.
Tonight we stir things up. Rekindle the dying embers until the sparks catch and your belly warms. Let the light spread outward until your toes tingle and hips twitch. Feel that smirk start to curve your lips? Sense that new strut in your step? Good, you’re almost ready.
Now ground your feet to the earth, raise your arms to the heavens and release that goddess fire in a roar that brings down walls and shatters glass. Let’s get messy.
There’s no need to keep things tidy tonight.
Hop in the car with me. I’ve already got the top down for you. The music is blaring. Some deep voiced seductress is signing your freedom song. There’s no speed limit where we’re headed. Our hair can tangle medusa crazy in the wind. Tonight we’re going off the beaten track. And you are in the driver’s seat.
No, I’m not talking about some out-there wilderness. We don’t need the inhospitable desert or the mountain switchbacks or the backwoods country roads. Fuck the map and the GPS. You know the way. You always have. Tonight we’re heading straight into the uncharted terrain of you.
Into The Wild.
Forget what they told you. You are love child of a passionate affair between goddess and universe. You were born of a steamy forbidden heat and you were made for the cyclone of unadulterated wholeness. You are a daughter of delight. You are the unconstrained mother of all. A fierce warrior. A wicked priestess. Your roots twist into this earth. Your spirit rises in glorious asana. You let loose with the howl of the wilderness you’ve held tight all these years.
You are wild. Untethered. Gloriously free.
See that little dive bar up ahead? It’s got a neon sign that flashes ‘Open. Open. Open’ – keeping exact time with blood’s rough pulse through your veins. Pull off the road. Hear the hard crunch of gravel beneath the wheels. Feel the pounding of the bass in your chest. Throw open the door. There’s a dance floor straight ahead and a disco ball spinning light in all directions. The room awaits your spiral hips. Your electric pulse. Your restless, uninhibited limbs.
It has always waited for you.
Make a quick stop at the bar. Feel the whisky burn a path down your throat and heat you from the inside out. Slam down your glass on the weathered wood and laugh out loud. Let the beat of the music call forth the rhythm of your soul. Know you are being observed. Closely. Watched by the voyeurs and the vicarious and those who have already entered their own wilderness. All eyes are on you.
Taste the freedom. Revel in the attention. Gather it all to you and welcome it home. Feel the lust and the respect and the waves of divinity connecting you to everyone here. Lay claim to sex and sensuality. Experience deeply your duality and autonomy. Find the ecstasy that lies at the intersection of all that has been and all that will be. All of this exists on that dance floor, just as it does the space between your ribs that your heart calls home.
Right in the wild of you.
You’ll dance the way you’ve always danced when the audience was gone. For hours. Under the staccato lights and the pounding beat and the primal drive of reckless heat. You are rhythm rediscovered. You are sweat’s salt sheen. You are tangled hair and smeared eyeliner. You’ve stopped caring what anyone thinks. You’ve gotten a little louder. A little more brazen. A whole lot more of who you’ve always known you were.
When you’re done here, you’ll know you’re done. And you’ll go. Straight cut, easy exit. In the wild nobody will try to convince you to stay. Here, when your heart says leave you answer it by leaving. In the wild of you there is only one voice, and she speaks in the tune of you.
You are fully ready now. Embrace the disorderly conductivity that flows like lifeblood through the heart and root and white hot heat of you. Forget the car. We’ll do the rest on foot. The terrain has gotten deeper. Darker. Less hospitable to those looking for an easy pass to the next destination. There are no roads. The only path is the one you create.
The journey is everything.
But do not fear. You won’t need a map. Your heart is your compass. The stars light your way. You have the key to every door. You will be tired and raw and ache with the depth of discovered truth. You will be irrevocably changed. You may not recognize yourself by morning, but you will always be granted safe passage.
There are deep, gaping chasms. Intimidating tangles of bramble and brush. The unknown eyes of other wild creatures glowing at you from beyond the darkest dark. You’ll go in circles here, guaranteed. Looping into and out of yourself. You will come to know the sweet spiral of surrender, the lushness of the yield.
You will discover when to push forward, and when to stop completely. You will greet with delight the multitudes within you. The ones with pretty, acceptable faces and the ones you keep hidden from judgmental stares. You will be seduced by each one and make peace with them all.
Every last one of your wild souls.
The terrain is climbing now. Huge boulders lay before you. You’ll need to use your entire body and mind to continue. But you will and you must and you do. You climb at precarious angles and across narrow peaks where your hold is so precarious that only the tenacity of your drive will keep you from falling. Climb until every muscle screams defeat and your gremlin mind calls persuasively for quitting.
And then you’ll be there. At the summit. Where it all lays, spread out before you. Your life. Your stories. Your pretty, safe disguises. The most frightening places within. Your million breathtaking truths. The lies and the failtures and the shame. Your triumphs and dreams. The wild, unconstrained wholeness of you.
By the light of a glorious full moon you will see that all the walls you ever built were imaginary. Made of nothing but air. And you can soar over them all right now if you choose. Here in the wild your power is infinite.
Always, your power is infinite.
One more time now, from the top of your world. Arms to heavens, head thrown back. Let your eyes reflect the light of the cosmos. Let your wild spirit free. Howl from the depth and root and heat of you. Roar with the desire and desperation and power of you. Scream the demons and the passion and the very core of wild magic within. Let it all go and call it all home.
I will leave you now. Don’t worry, you didn’t ever really need me. I am but a guide. I can be called back at anytime, because I am in you. Because I am you. Because you are the wild. Because the wild is you. Because you had the courage to take this journey.
Into the wild.
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Get Your Free Preview of YOU ARE NOT TOO MUCH | Love Notes On Heartache, Redemption, & Reclamation
This book is a love letter.
A love letter to those in the midst of the breakdown or a reckoning or a rise. A love letter to the wild ones, to the lost souls, to the free. To the seekers and the lovers of leaving and those intent on finding themselves amidst the rubble.
