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?…..Jeanette LeBlanc

do we even know how to give over to our soul depths? to be courageous enough to go against the grain? and without fighting, walk the edge of fierce bliss? may we know our own inner callings….

Why is it that we are taught that living for ourselves is selfish? That choosing what is best for us is wrong. That taking a step away or a step back is cowardice. That embracing what fills us up is greedy. That choosing solitude is odd and isolating. That splurging on a personal retreat is irresponsible. That taking a spiritual course is not a priority. That quitting your ‘good’ job is ludicrous. Yet, every one of the suggested is nothing but good, good, good. Good for the soul. Good for the mind. Good for the body. Freeing of stress. Eliminating of ego. Building of esteem. Bridging of relationships. The concept of filling yourself up first is simple. Our fullness actually allows us to extend and give more, without regret, without resentment and without duty…….Sarah Voldeng

riding the wild soul

I’m tired of living in the cold unkempt shack of my mind.
It’s so lonely.
It’s so sad and cluttered and rushed.
It’s everything opposite of the life I’ve moved into.
There is a place, the spaciest of space,
The cleanliest of homes—
My heart.
I want to live in there.

It’s like walking on a freezing blind night in winter.
Walking past the houses all lit up.
The warmth from the lights,
The smiles on their faces, you know?
All the people standing inside toasting, or hugging,
Or sitting with their clinking silverware and pot roast.
They look so happy and untainted by the real weather and life outside.
The life everyone avoids– that’s what I’m standing in.
It’s the life everyone avoids because they should,
And they do, because we all have a house with a light on.
That’s where I want to be all the time, but I forget.
Some of us just forget about it.
We get comfortable in the discomfort.
We get used to not seeing,
to being cold and wet and miserable and dizzy.

I’m tired of the night.
I’m tired of the dark and the ugly.
The need to pay attention to every step I take,
For fear of the danger lurking in the step beyond,
The one I can’t see.
Every sound startling,
Every blemish, a contamination.
I don’t want that life anymore.
I don’t want it.

….. Rebecca Lammersen