When Naomi Newman's one-woman show Snake Talk: Urgent Messages from the Mother played in Berkeley, I saw it seven times. When Snake Talk plays again near me, I'll probably see it several times more than once. Lots of people have seen Snake Talk four or five times. There are some events that people who love them go to about once, and there are other events that some people who love them attend frequently if at all possible.

Why is that? I've got a guess. It's kind of harsh here on the old planet. People are hard on each other. The latest communication technology trumpets lies and terrors and recommendations of nasty behavior. Our soft hearts flinch inside and wonder if we're crazy for feeling it wouldn't be all that hard for things to be balanced and truthful and kind.

There are some events that for some people create the experience of what it would be like to live on a different, less vicious planet – what it is like for the length of the event. We go back to learn what it's like to live in our hearts. When I went to see Snake Talk, I felt like I'd regrown an arm that I'd forgotten was amputated. The missing part that came back in that room was my future.

What apparently happens in Snake Talk is that Naomi Newman becomes three women – a poet, maybe in her fifties; a yenta, maybe in her sixties; and a woman without a home, maybe in her seventies. These women speak to the audience like old friends comparing notes about life and discovering undiscovered selves of light and shadow. It reminds me of long conversations with friends where shields drop and we say things that will help us make it through hard times for a long time, for decades.

Something Snake Talk made real for me was who my spiritual teachers are. I used to think I was allergic to spiritual teachers who seemed to be straight guys in dresses acting like they don't have a sense of humor – the Pope, the guru, the Protestant minister in a robe. The wisdom in Snake Talk seemed very familiar and helpful and nothing like what the grumpy guys in drag say. It seemed like what me and my friends say to each other when we're really talking. When we're really talking to each other we're being each other's spiritual teachers. I knew that kind of talk was very valuable but I didn't know it could get much bigger than a kitchen table. I didn't know it could be lit and supported and take up a whole theatre. That implies it could take up even more space, that it could heal some of the places general reality and grumpy guys in charge are devastating. Does the wisdom of older women have to be invisible and inaudible and the wisdom of friendship small? Snake Talk implies no – it implies a world where I could live in a livelier way.