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In this week, seven years ago, I posted an entry called Happiness: Finding the Way. Yesterday, I wrote in an offering from Write Around the World for Amherst Writers & Artists. There are sessions going on until May 31. I was given a writing prompt that caused me to revisit my earlier blog post. The prompt: Imagine walking through a door that leads to your heart. Describe what you experience there. I was given fifteen minutes to respond. Here is what I wrote.

I imagine a pathway of steppingstones, white stones in brown earth, leading to a small rounded wooden door. It’s a hobbit door, an Alice-in-Wonderland door, a door almost-but-not-quite covered in dark green ivy leaves. I brush the leaves aside.

The knob turns easily, and the door opens inward to a dark passageway. Once through the dark, I enter a huge atrium filled with white natural light. I have a choice of four chambers to enter, one for each of the ancient elements: earth, water, fire, and air.

Earth

I enter the earth chamber first, into a pleasant earthy smell, what I used to smell when I dug in the earth as a child, when each fingernail had a line of black earth. It was a difficult task for my mother to get my hands pink and wrinkly again after soaking in water.

Water

I enter water, the second chamber. There is a roaring waterfall in this chamber. The sound is loud and the cold spray of water on my face is bracing. I feel inexplicably happy, giddy, filled with laughter. The waterfall has given me back my voice, the one I silenced so long for fear of the harm my words could do to others.

I was wrong. Others needed to hear the truth, the truth told skillfully and kindly. It’s taken most of my lifetime to learn these skills, but I take them as a gift, a gift given by a fairy-tale grandmother, the crone I met in the fire chamber.

Fire and Air

When I entered the third chamber, she was sitting on a log in the heart of a dense forest. Woodsmoke smell, sparks flying up into the air, a crackling sound. The woman was sitting still, wrapped in a dark shawl, her eyes glittering with the reflected fire.

I bowed my goodbye to her and walked back through the bright atrium to the fourth chamber, air. This room was filled with a rush of wind, cleansing wind blowing away all the dust and cobwebs that used to line this chamber. I move my hands, palms together, up to my chest in prayer position, in a position of gratitude. Thank you, I say.

And my fifteen minutes was up. This was the first time in seven years that I’d returned to this visualization of what’s in my heart, and I was encouraged to know that, emotionally and spiritually, my heart is healthier now than it was then.