Jen Turrell

“I’ve lost my wild heart once. Twice. Too many times to count.

I’ve lost her most often when I’ve forgotten myself, when I’ve denied my own truths, when I’ve pushed down the need to create for so long that my heart...she finds better things to do.

The funny thing is, that the losing and the finding are interwoven.

We must lose our wild hearts from time to time, I believe.

We must so that we know why we need them.

We must so that we remember that in order to be found we must go into the wilderness.
Sometimes, it is only in the getting lost that we can find our way back home.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc, Wild Heart Writing: A 30-Day Course to Rediscover Your Deepest Truths

“Poetry has a long, long memory. After our love is long gone, we will still be reading your poems. You will not be the only one whose heart this breaks. Know that we will stand , reading the words written about our love – and we will ache for you The body will remember the way you shifted and sighed as skin met skin and those words will pay tribute to the lines that were composed while we moved through this world together. Because of this, we will never truly forget you.

Let us remember.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“When it came down to it, she decided, she believed in a few important things.
In humanity before Dogma.
In religion of human kindness.
In Poetry. In Sex.
In being clear enough to ask for what she wanted,
and detaching from ego enough to hear the answer.
In the power of yoga.
In being embodied.
In owning her reality without apology.
In embracing it all, the fuck-ups and the bliss.
In the absolute necessity of dark chocolate to her continued existence.
In the power of a hard swallow of whiskey to make everything clear.
That most of the time we all do the very best we can.
But most of all, she believed that nothing is fixed and unchanging,
Not even the things she believed the most.
That belief, it turns out, is the one that felt the most like freedom.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“We don’t, not any of us, get to this point clean. No. We’re all dirty and ragged. Rough edges and sharp corners. Fault lines and demolition zones. We’ve got tear gas riot squads aiming straight for the protest lines of our weary souls. Landmines in our chests that we trip over every time we try to hide from the terrifying tremble of our own war torn hearts....But it is your history that delivered you this roadmap of scars. Those healed wounds and their jagged edges are proof of your infinite ability to survive, to knit broken back to wholeness, to refuse that the end is every really the end...
Make friends with your teardown. Do not run from your bar brawl for forgiveness. Sit with the times you’ve fucked up and the times you lost all and the days your redemption was delivered by the hand of the last person you ever expected to give anything but darkness. And through it all know that your walled up and torn down, graffiti-covered heart is still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc