I have always written straight from my heart, ever since Mrs. Bergstrom first began scattering the letters to us in my first grade classroom of Washington Elementary. I looked around at the others hunched over in their desks. Didn’t they see it? The gift that she was giving us??? I just couldn’t imagine my good fortune. She wasn’t just giving me a language, she was giving me my voice. 

I began writing poems for my mother. Poems for baby dolls. I penciled them in my Big Chief notebook. I painted them on scraps of material. On my pants. As the need arose to go deeper, I found my brother’s wood burning kit hidden in the back of the garage. I plugged it in by the open door. The dust that had gathered began to smoke. I watched the trail of it go down the driveway, then I burned the words slowly into the plywood. I traced the words that said go deeper, still.

All of my suspicions were confirmed when I went to college. In my first creative writing class, I hinted at my heart. Did I dare? The paper came back with a response — “You can never be too personal.” All gates and garage doors to my heart were open wide. 

I’m not saying that it’s always easy. Sometimes it’s terrifying to expose your heart. But that’s what courage means. The actual root comes from the Latin word meaning heart. To have courage meant to share the stories of your heart. The act of being vulnerable. This, by definition, is what it means to have courage. Somewhere along the line it got mixed up with wielding weapons, or soaring great heights. It became entangled with go higher, go faster, go further…when all it meant to say was go deeper. 

I suppose it’s much bigger now, this classroom I wander, but still, I look around, wondering, “Do you see it? The gifts we have been given?”