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about me

My name is Jen Lemen. I live in Silver Spring, Maryland, one mile from the border of Washington DC.

I’m a land artist, a writer, a mom, a neighbor, a beloved, a mentor, a friend, but who I am doesn’t really matter as much as how you feel when you look at these pages and where you can tell you’re open or closed, leaning in or leaning back. That is always in my experience, the most important thing.

I believe in what you learn and what you have to unlearn in order to listen like that.

For the people who feel really open to it, I think my work is to be honest about what it means to have a broken heart, about what it feels like to be loved, really loved and why it’s impossible to feel the things we need to feel when we are trying to do it all on our own.

My work is also to be clear that in many ways none of this is new and none of it belongs to me. I’m in a long line of seekers and strugglers who discovered a single breath can be a powerful thing and that being outside does something that can feel like magic when your heart is confused and empty and nothing makes sense at all.

Nature and meditation are important to me, because it’s what keeps me on the planet during the darkest days and what gives me irrational joy when there are no reasonable explanations. I know there is nothing special about this. And also that this is everything.

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I’m also part of a long tradition of people who thought the answer was somewhere out there and who went on a quest to find it, only to have everything fall apart and then have a horrible time trying to gather up all the pieces to put them together again.

As if that can be done.

I found out what’s better is being honest, if you can, about what that experience is like and to give in to the kind of grief that puts you back in your body, that makes pleasure important and touch and togetherness essential. Even if everything stays kind of a mess for a long, long time.

If I have had any chance at all of retrieving the most important pieces, it’s because people stayed with me and loved me which gave me the courage to stay with myself and to have the capacity to stay with other people and love them, too. I think all the other solutions are subpar and a special kind of bullshit served up by whiteness and the patriarchy and capitalism. I’m not into it.

I think when you’re suffering, it matters. And that there’s no such thing as one person suffering alone, but that it’s a sign that something horrible is missing from the collective. That it’s our job to find it, to make it, to weave it, to become it. And not just for the suffering person but for all of us. Otherwise whatever is happening is just another form of our unconscious suffering, too.

That’s why Lyft drivers and bartenders and hair people and restaurant servers and lovers and old people and housecleaners and strangers on the street and little kids and people you never met on Facebook but are still somehow your friends matter, because those are the people who do God’s work when the people who are supposed to stay and love you just can’t do it. They are the ones who stand in the gap and make up the difference when no else shows up. I love those people the most sometimes. There is so much essential work that they do.