On a typical day in their typical lives, three women went to their mailboxes and found—amid junk mail and bills and shiny flyers for unshiny things—an invitation, sealed with a bold W pressed into sage-green wax.

They had been waiting for this invitation. They longed for it as much as they feared it. Because to break this seal was to release a behemoth of a question—a question so impossible that they had almost stopped asking it.

Each hesitated, looked around, and in respective order, thought, Sweet Jesus, What the hell, Here goes nothing, and slid her finger under the seal, revealing a thick handmade note card, pressed with silvery leaves.

Words winked up at them. Words that might, if given the chance, change everything.

They swallowed hard and pulled out the card. Inside, nestled with a wild bird feather, were the following words:

You are invited to

the rest of your life.

You know you can’t go on like this.

Not for one more day.

You need an interlude.

Imagine this:

You are in a farmhouse in Montana, wrapped in a soft blanket, sitting by a warm woodstove. There is a cup of tea in your hand, just the way you like it. There are women surrounding you who need this just as badly as you do.

We all have the same question.

The question is:

So now what?

Come to Montana and find out ...

Love,

Willa

(You don’t have to do this alone.)

Each woman held the invitation to her heart, drew in a deep breath before letting out an exhausted sigh that echoed from Connecticut to Wisconsin to California and back to Montana, and went inside to call a dear friend.

Letter to the Reader:

“You know … we’re all fluent in this language. In the language of community. And yet we so rarely speak it. It really is our mother tongue.”

Dear Reader,

I have learned something that might just be the most important lesson of my life, and I would like to share it with you. There is a language that we crave. A language of the heart that grows from our worry and our wonder and our stories, rooted in our experience of this beautiful and heartbreaking thing called life. Too many of us have trained ourselves out of speaking that language. We were all fluent in it when we were children. But somewhere along the way we were taught or conditioned to forget it. To not be honest when we are asked, “How are you?” And to not really listen to the answer when we ask others the same question.

So many of us have lost our authentic voices and reduced our conversations to grocery store talk and texts with an emoji at the end. The truth is, we long to be seen and heard and accepted, especially when we are in pain—yet out of fear of judgment or rejection, we too often draw in and become islands, rather than bridging to our family and friends. I know this because, at times, I’ve made that choice. And the fallout from that led me to devote a major piece of my life to bringing people together in safe, intimate circles of self-expression. Which led me to write this book.

I wrote “Willa’s Grove” to capture the power of people stepping out of the isolation and self-doubt that so many of us feel in times of transition, and instead, gathering together. These women show us that we don’t have to endure hardship alone, nor should we. We have choices. If, for whatever reason, connecting with our usual community is too fraught, we can instead create temporary circles, friend to friend to friend to friend, carving out small interludes from our daily lives in order to focus on what comes next. To have those conversations we need to be having but aren’t. To move boldly outside of gossip, small talk, pretending … and into the connection we so deeply need.

I hope that in reading this book, and in the spirit of Willa, Bliss, Harriet, and Jane … you will be inspired to reach out to your own dear friends, whether close by or far away. And that you will invite them to come together for short respites to support one another in the powerful way that people can when they give themselves permission to say yes to the profound invitations of their lives.

My mission is this: We will start a movement of weeklong interludes from the stresses and pain of our crossroads moments, and in radical and real communication, we will provide ourselves, and our kindreds, with a map for our next steps.

Our voices deserve to be honored and heard. No one has your voice. No one. However we speak, now is the time for truth.

And yes, we don’t have to do it alone.

Yours,

Laura