“Write that down! Write that down! No really, write it down right now,” our brave teacher says, her prone, mermaid-like position on the floor filling me with delight. Her hearty laughter, triggered by Susan’s story of pocketed, dirty underwear, and other holy, mundane things, is the music that plays in the background of my heaven. Heaven sits in the way my bean bag lounging seat-mate briefly grabs my forearm and looks at me with her excited “OMG, me too!” smile.
God did make a heaven on earth. It is here, in Montana, in a place tucked away between towering mountain peaks, a frozen lake where a beaver I haven’t seen yet makes his home and the calming Southern drawls of of my classmates. “I like simple poems. Poems that cut to the heart,” I hear and I whip my head around to see if Laura is shooting a laser beam of ESP into my temple. Does she know I think my poems are too simple, too plain, too dumb for other people to enjoy?
“I love that part where you…” Lisa continues in a soft, kind tone that adds to the symphony of other women’s voices in the room. We all nod and smile and nod, everyone in a melodic unison of recognition, leaving the courageous reader with hopefully very little doubt…we get it, we love it, please, rip our hearts out. Make us feel fiercely alive again. Do that thing you are already doing. Give us more!
I am in heaven here. This place. These women. These women gathered together by a gently desperate but increasingly bolder longing to know that what they have to say is something I want to hear, that the world wants to hear. To know it matters. That their passion is worth pursuing in this particular form of art. To know that they are loved for who they are. I sit deep in this super comfy chair buzzing with recognition. “This is where you belong,” I hear an angel’s voice. It must be an angel, because this must be heaven.
But it’s more than that. “Don’t worry if you start to tank at some point,” Laura gestures. My heaven is in the way her hands can’t help moving to show us the deep dive down to the Hell of our emotions that we are about to take. Maybe she’s already noticed them on my contorted face, clawing their way up and freeing themselves from the tight, necrotic place in my heart where I have Saran-wrapped them. I offer her a small smile, hear her words, and wait, ready for another dive.
I’ve been in heaven before. Places where you feel the love so fast and furiously from a group of strangers you begin to wonder what the Fuck you are doing trying so hard in the middle of your magic-less life with people who are barely awake. Who don’t get it. Who need to be right. I think to myself, “Maybe heaven is only meant for special occasions, like vacations and death.” I’ve been talking myself out of that gloom for twenty years.
I am in heaven here. Standing outside on Bobbi’s farm with a crazy, hippie-high smile on my face, listening to the speckled, cackling guinea hens pecking their way around my feet, I ask her quietly, “Can I help you get the horses?” I feel three when I ask, deciding to be brave anyway. “Yes” she replies quickly handing me the purple bridle and two green pellet treats before I could dwell in that familiar place of expected rejection. I hold these things she has given me like Olympic medals, and stare at them a little too long. I imagine biting them to see if they are real, pinching myself, but instead am interrupted by a warm blow of breath from the fuzzy brown nose that is about to be my heaven for the next two hours.
My heaven sat in the delightfully quick, doubt-melting trust of Bobbi’s yes and in her bright, hazel eyes as she effortlessly offered to really see me to my soul. Her warm, been through more crap than you, cowgirl way welcomed me in. She loved me with those eyes, this stranger standing beside her, with some kind of crazy horse love, knowing we shared it, knowing it was our common medicine.
My heaven sat in the hat and gloves cold, fresh air and in every step of the beautiful, snowy, dung-filled field where I stepped purposefully into each pile with that big-ass smile on my face. “Come over this way,” I heard her gently directing me from a hundred yards up the field, her distance from me the trust I needed, had been begging for, for so long.
“Now if you would like, you can each tell me something about yourselves” Bobbi says in the truck on our way to heaven. She had just finished telling her own raw story, making us fall in love with her more than we already did. “My dad took off when I was 12,” “I just got out of a mental hospital a couple months ago,” “I am allergic to squash and avocado…and my dad used to smoke pot in the car with the windows rolled up so my sister and I would come home from our weekends with him high.” The lack of hesitation to pour our souls out was a breathtaking bit of fresh air in that truck filled with kindred spirits.
I am in heaven here at Haven. I have permission to say it like it is. When I mine my life for the gold I realize the treasure is in the too raw, too real, too emotional, too ugly moments that make up my life. These women beg, “Show me your ugly!” They demand I tear the bandage off my wounds to air them out. They help me know why I must be me. They save me from drowning.
Laura’s encouraged us to be to be the perfectly obsessed, Target-shopping, messes that we are. Dirty underwear in our pockets, grief strewn across our swords and hospital gowns, we are warriors. Bring it on. Bring on your stories. Please, for Goddess’ sake, make me feel human. Make me feel alive. Make me feel loved, for me. Sprinkle me with the pink and purple glitter of your genuine, cut to the chase, heart-felt, raw, naked, bloody, sobbing, painful to the point you don’t know if you will be able to speak it through the gripping ache in your chest stuff. Yeah. That stuff.
I am in heaven here. The invitation to speak taunts Martha, my fear voice, the one I named after reading a thoughtful book about love and happiness that my fearless mentor wrote. Martha squirms, uncomfortable with the idea of this party. “Nobody wants to hear your stuff,” “You will sound like you are bragging,” “You aren’t good enough.” The heaven sits in the way I wake up and shut that shit down faster today, not willing to pass up this glorious opportunity for expression and acceptance. Not willing to be the wall flower at my own party one more fucking time.
This heaven forces me to feel my life, to question it. To ask the big-ass questions. “This project doesn’t seem viable. Your first book, I got that, I supported that, but this…this is a hobby, I just don’t see how this is worth your time.” The words from my husband about my poetry chisel their way in to my well armored heart and stab away. Ping, ping, ping, ping. I feel the jabs, the shriveling. I am nothing. I am not good enough. I remember to live in the big questions instead, alive and awake to this noise that litters my playground. I get back on the swing and pump my legs until I am out of breath, until I feel the wind wash out my heart and clean up the mess my mind left.
This place. These women. This art. This magic…was meant for me. This matters. My stories matter. This heaven is a carrot that has been dangling in front of my face my whole life, waiting for me to sink my teeth into it’s crunchy, flavorful, nourishing, love-filled flesh. Waiting for me to eat it up and lick my lips and reach in for another bite.
“Oh, honey, I am so happy to hear your voice” my mom sighs with a relief so palpable she can’t help but slather some on me. “Oh, yes, the Facebook post about my fall on the ice. Oh mom, I am fine! Really, I’m good,” I say purposefully forgetting to mention the 48 hour headache I have had since.
My mom calls, like she usually does, exactly when I am so full to the brim that just hearing her voice makes me cry. What is that mysterious power she wields over me? Can she feel my pain from across the country, in that voodoo mommy energy that you read about in books that talk about angels and chakras and crystals and shit? What did I do to deserve a mom that loves me more than she loves herself? “I love you” she says, “I was worried about you,” she reminds me of her mission on the planet. I wonder if it would be possible to count how many times her I love you’s have softened my pain, acknowledged my heart and made me feel worthy.
This time I cry so hard that I make her wonder if someone we love has died. I can hear the slight automatic panic in her voice, “Oh honey, it’s okay. You are okay. You will be okay.” Before my choking sobs carry her to places only a mom-mind can conjure up, I force myself to cry-talk out the words, “I am in heaven here.” “These women have softened my pain, acknowledged my heart and made me feel worthy.” This is where I belong.
Laura Probert, MPT is the owner of Bodyworks Physical Therapy and Soul Camp, LLC. She is the author of Living, Healing and Taekwondo and Warrior Love, A Journal To Inspire Your Fiercely Alive Whole Self. Laura writes to Feng Shui her soul and to clear a space deep and wide enough to allow for the flow of words and ideas that inspire others to live a kick-ass life. You can read some of her poetry at www.bewarriorlove.com and www.facebook.com/warriorlove
