Renée

“Could it that the impossible is compelling because we have just enough God within us to know the impossible to be achievable, and just enough of ourselves within us to know that we have to rely on Him to do it?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“We were in Julie’s room one night, my eldest daughter and I, maybe a decade ago now. I wanted to show her how the canvas painting she had carefully labored over for her little sister's Christmas gift was framed and hung on the wall.

I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”.

Bella looked at me quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world.

“Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real”

And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student.

Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be.

~~~~~

art is always real.
all of it.
even the stuff you don’t understand.
even the stuff you don’t like.
even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend

that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder?

still art.

the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critiqued to death?

it’s art.

the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world?

definitely art.

the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows?

art. art. art.

the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light.

the dress you want to sew.

the song you want to sing.

the clay you’ve not yet molded.

everything you have made

or will one day make

or imagine making in your wildest dreams.

it’s all real, every last bit.
because there is no such thing
as art that is not real.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Do you ever feel like you are giving far fewer fucks and yet still caring so much it sometimes feels like there is only the most tissue-thin layer separating your soul from this world?
Like your heart may be broken but your spirit is still rising?

Are you refusing to conform and somehow still fitting just right? Able to look people right in the eye without apology and also like you’re a teenager again, bashful and blushing and off-kilter, like that moment when lips unexpectedly pressed against your head and face buried in your hair fingers trailed down y our arm, the way your stomach can flip-flop like that, even now.

Do you ever walk on purpose even when you have nowhere to go? Do you notice things deeply, like dark red lipstick prints on pristine white coffee mugs? Like the way whiskey burns and cool white sheets feel against your skin at the end of the day?

Are you claiming your identity, clear and strong and true, and also sinking into the vast unknowable mystery of your all? Do your days feel like longing and acquiescence and learning to stop grasping at things that are ready to leave or that choose not to come closer?

Are you making a home of your own skin and inviting the world inside? Are you learning that cultivating solid boundaries and driving into a wide open horizon both feel like freedom, like the harsh desert mountains and the soft ocean wisdom and the road to healing that joins the two?

Does it all feels like solidity, like truth, like forgiveness and recklessness and heat and sexy and holy, all rolled up together? Do you crave the burn of heat from another and the for nothing to be louder than sound of your own heartbeat, all at once?

Do you finally know that you can choose a love and a life that does not break you? That you can claim a softer beauty and a kinder want. That even your animal hunger can soften its rough edges and say a full-throated yes to what is good and kind and holy. Do you remember that insanity is not a prerequisite for passion and that there is another pathway to your art, one that does not demand your pain as payment for its own becoming?

Are you learning to show up? To take up space? To feel the power? Is it full of contradiction, does it feel like fire underwater, are you rising to sing?”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“You can choose a love and a life that does not break you. You can claim a softer beauty and a kinder want. Even your animal hunger can soften its rough edges and say a full-throated yes to what is good and kind and holy. Know that insanity is not a prerequisite for passion and that there is another pathway to your art, one that does not demand your pain as payment for its own becoming. Love, it doesn't have to hurt anymore.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc