Monica LaSalle, Peak to Peak. I first met Heather while visiting her store, AnthroMystic Emporium, over the holidays in 2018. I remember walking into the store and being amazed at all the tastefully displayed, worldly items designed to help us enhance the spaces we all occupy daily, minute by minute, with a spiritual uplift in mind. In speaking with her for the first time, I quickly realized that all the items were a direct reflection of a woman who is thoughtful, caring and generous to her circle, her community, to humanity as a whole. After spending a lengthy time visiting with her and hearing her explanations as to how and why she had acquired the treasures she was currently selling in her store, I left with the feeling that I had to find a way to know more about the fascinating person that is Heather Gray.

Many chaotic months later, I finally got my opportunity. As I walked into her new office space, I looked around and saw that many of the items previously displayed in her gallery were gracing the space where she is currently focusing on her new venture. Having just returned from her latest doctor visit, she led me to a chair and we sat down like two old friends about to catch up. She tells me that the last year has been a life of upheaval and drastic change for her, dealing with breast cancer, a lost business she thought was a step in a new direction, and lost relationships.

Today in fact, is the one year anniversary of her being diagnosed with breast cancer, and while she describes her reaction to the discovery, I find myself completely absorbed in what has turned out to be a tumultuous journey of a person being forced to purge toxicity from her life. Starting with the shocking phone call where she spoke with a nurse, receiving news that should have come from her doctor but he was out of town for a couple of weeks. She was asked “Do you have a surgeon in mind?” I thought, “Who keeps a list of surgeons should just such a situation come to pass?” She confirmed my thought with the same statement, and described a path of puzzling out how her life led her to this moment and a realization that she had been “bereft of culture in a place she had put so much energy into building,” a lightning bolt of awareness as to the environment in which she had allowed herself to function. Simultaneously given a deadline for moving her gallery, she was forced to look into the future and recreate. 

The Emporium was a real passion for Heather, as she got to travel the world and bring back unique and cultural yet spiritually meaningful items to enhance a living space. She had also planned to offer classes to the same effect. She muses that it all came out of the experience of her father having The Shaman Gallery, a collection of Native American art and artifacts very similar to the store she had opened. She describes having a very close relationship with her father that still carries on to this day, as they are in the habit of talking every day. A few years ago, Heather went to Mexico in search of rest, clarity and a new start. She found a little town where she began spending time getting to know people. There she was surprised to find a rolfer, something she had expected to only find in her native home town of Boulder, Colorado. Interest piqued, she decided to meet her and found her to be a very interesting shaman woman offering a shamanic training the following week. She proceeded to attend these training sessions on and off for the next three years. Toward the end, she began talking to a friend in town who made metaphysical jewelry, they decided his work would be a perfect fit in Nederland. They discussed opening an art gallery; anthromystic.com came to her mind so she opened the dot com on her own and eventually opened the shop. 

Having moved to Boulder in 1970 when she was just three, Heather has been in Nederland and the Gilpin area since 1995 and started out in real estate in 1998. First, she was with Fowler Real Estate, then Better Homes and Gardens which morphed into GMAC Better Homes and Gardens, and finally ended up with Remax for 15 years. During that time, she married and raised a family. She has two sons, Jake 24, and Jaden 21, who were raised in Nederland and now live in Denver and Durango respectively. Married 15 years, she describes her efforts to fit into a mold of a traditional mother and wife, but realized she wasn’t living up to her true self. They divorced, but lived next door to each other to continue raising their children together. Her son Jake now follows his passion as a musician playing in his long time heavy metal band, Imminent Terror. While Jaden is studying adventure education, a passion he acquired from years of summer time program participation with Teen’s Inc., as well as Wild Bear.  

Heather describes herself as a recently emerging introvert, something that has evolved out of her recent battle with cancer as well as the other dramatic changes she has endured over the past year. She says that functioning on this different level is a direct result of emerging from her recent trials a stronger person with lessons learned. She has two things on her bucket list in life: opening her own gallery and moving to another country. She has accomplished one, if only for a little while, and is working on the other. She had found the small town she wants to move to, but for some reason things fell through when she went to buy and she has found herself following life’s curve balls to remain in Nederland for a while longer, something Heather takes as a sign that she is not yet done here. She has recently found herself involved with town politics for the first time, participating in a group that is challenging the recent proposed changes to the STRs. Having left Remax in December, she and three other colleagues started their own real estate agency that they have tailored to the emerging changes in the market calling for “peacemealing it out so people have more control,” she says. Feeling a need to build a business where she has some back up and financial security, she has also entered into partnership with Kevin Kafka and Veronica Santos to create Nederland Property Axis, a property management company that will eventually also offer a cleaning service and transportation needs. She tells me how one day she had been sitting with a friend brainstorming and she had come up with just such an idea for a new business. Twenty minutes later, she got a call from the couple who proposed to her the same exact idea. Sounds like synchronicity or some serious manifestation at work to me… her new partners have roots in Mexico, something she can only describe as part of what is turning out to be a super ironic experience. 

By the way, today being the one year anniversary of Heather being diagnosed with breast cancer, she has been told she is 100 percent cancer free. How’s that for rolling with the punches?

(Interested in being covered in the Mountain Folk Tales column? Know someone you’d like to recommend? Email your ideas to mountainfolktales@gmail.com.)

(Originally published in the June 6, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)