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.

Music for the pathway home:

The post A night for remembering || the pathway home appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I remember. I remember.  I remember.

~~~

It is true, perhaps, that we have always known. But even remembering is a process.

It is possible to miss what you have never known. For the strange to feel familiar and for the untouched lover to call you home. There are moments in life, fragments and slivers of time or touch or experience, when everything spirals into itself. All else fades. There is only what there is, and nothing more.

In those moments, our memory is returned to us, and we are awakened to what we have always known.

Perhaps it is simply this: That all of life is not a learning, but a remembering. Remembering that knowledge built into our bones, the wisdom spliced into our genes. Recognizing lovers from past lives, rediscovering truths long ago experienced, recalling lessons learned and learned and learned.

If we were born with the collective wisdom of the cosmos implanted in our being, our task is only this: to live and seek and love until we’ve removed barriers that unlock it all.

The most painful of this remembering is in the moment of unlearning.  Rejecting false truth.  Releasing embedded dogma. Clearing the things that do not serve.  It’s a harsh awakening to reject limitations long accepted as certainty. But only then can we hold to the light what we have deeply, always known.  Only then can we inhale this knowing deep into our consciousness. Only then can we call home what has always been ours.

Only then can we remember.

~~~

She knew then. As if she had always known. Although everything in her life until then had told her otherwise. Although the path ahead would be difficult and pain was inevitable.  But there it was in front of her. The memory of her own divinity. Her one true thing. She knew it as if she had always known.  As if her entire purpose in life had been to find her way back to this space. There was fire ahead. A burning down and a rising from the ashes. There would be collateral damage, guaranteed.  But she was ready. She remembered how to spread her wings. She had rediscovered a long missing part of her heart.  She answered the call of her memory. Nothing could ever be the same again.

~~~

We live by accumulation. Stockpiling lessons and truths and relationships and labels. We gather them tightly and hold them possessively, give them the responsibility for our continued safe passage. As if what has already been can guarantee safety and stability for what is to come. As if protection is found in what is owned and completed and understood. We ground ourselves in limitations and say thank you to all that keeps us locked in our patterns of forgetting the truths of our birth and our beings.

How often we are wrong.

How often we only meet ourselves in the midst of a great storm. When the wind has ripped us from the moorings of all that has been. When we are stumbling and ungraceful and foolishly unknowing.  It’s in the center of the worst that we come to the root of what is. To the place where things can become. To the spaces and people who can deliver us back to our memories.

It takes a long, hard fall to find the solid ground that will support our inevitable rise.

But rising requires memory, and it is memory we find when all else is stripped away. It is memory that exists when the logical mind has been silenced. It is memory to which we are delivered most often when life has brought us to our knees.

Listen. Do you hear that? It is the song of your spirit. It is the howl of your wild. It is the truth of your bones, wisdom born in you. It is the words that have been waiting to be spoken aloud. It is the fire burning in your gut. It is the lover you have not yet met, but have always somehow known, calling you home.

It is your memory. It has been with you always, and will never leave. You carry it nestled deep, safe at the very molten core of you.

Be still now, love. Find a quiet place, and let the universe blanket you with peace. Turn your palms up in welcome, raise your face to the sun. Say thank you to all that has brought you to this place.

It is time to remember.

~~~~~
And then, finally, we were together.  And in the space of that first meeting lived the energy of a thousand years and lives and loves too numerous to count. This memory pulsed in the air between us; a living, breathing entity that demanded reverence. It floated in the air, tingled on the surface of our skin, burned low in the center of our longing. If you had been there, a silent witness to this moment, you would have seen not just two people. Instead, you would have seen how such a love had cracked open a collective memory, and released the love of a thousands souls who had gone before, and a thousand more who had yet to become. And in our first kiss we were flooded with all of this, and with a holy gratitude.  

We had remembered.

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