To write, to live vividly, to love deeply —we have to risk being seen. Being known.

We have to walk through the fires of it all.

This is not always a pretty process. It’s more of a paint-splatters-on-your-jeans, callouses on your feet, morning breath, and messy-as-hell hair kinda thing.

Sometimes it feels like risking every damn thing to share a story or a truth. But the thought of keeping it locked inside is far worse.

Sometimes it feels like ripping off an old bandaid and exposing a new layer of soul skin to yourself and another.

Sometimes it feels like running toward change with all the boldness you can muster.

Sometimes it feels ecstatic, yes…like dancing under a blanket of stars as moonlight spills onto your naked body as liquid silver.

But sometimes it feels like, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “to be willing to be stone stupid, sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth.”

This is the kind of courage we are looking for.

The courage of being bare-ass vulnerable, when it’s nice and when it’s not so nice.

The courage to trust our voices and hearts and bodies like never before.

The courage to take leaps and bounds toward the lives we are longing for.

The courage to be sexy, imperfect, loving, wild, confused, angry, joyous…oh yes, darling, all those juicy things.

And while we’re at it, the courage to breathe fresh life into dreams we f*cking forgot to believe in. The dreams stolen from us by someone who was too scared to believe in themselves so, of course, they did not have the capacity to believe in us either.

Psst: those dreams are still there. They still whisper and sing and roar. Pull on their milky, pearl-like tendrils and let them take you somewhere new. Let them guide you back to the fire and passion inside that burns so brightly it surprises you. Because it never left.

And…without further ado…we’re looking for the courage to live vividly.

Not in shades of grey. Not in the shadows—no, we have been there long enough.

As womxn, we have been silent and muted in mud. We know the tender, colorless threads of invisibility. We have lived the worn-out tales of heartbreak, the creased pages of hiding beneath smokescreen smiles that hold the weight of our fear and grief.

Enough is enough.

This is the time to be seen, to be known, to be more real than ever.

It is not for shock value, but to unravel
To the bones of our souls
The bountiful depths we’re born with.

~