Let us play in the field where we once toiled.
Where golden light illuminates consciousness,
yet the feet still touch the ground.
And even as our separate selves fall away,
the earth still cradles us gently.
For we are both fully divine and fully human.
Bright Golden Field is the literal meaning of my full name.
No, my parents were not hippies. Quite the opposite. I was born into a world of fences and signposts and handed a rigid roadmap to career success.
My soul took its last stand for freedom when I was nine.
This was the year I discovered my first true bible, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. My heart followed Henry David Thoreau into a nature hermitage. My spirit braved the Western frontier with the American pioneers. And I embraced the Native Americans’ fluid relationship with time by ditching my watch.
My soul cried out then curled up into a ball. The following year, as a mature ten-year old with two digits in her age, I decided to become an engineer.
Only after I had followed the script did my soul make another peep: a bolt of insight struck me to read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. I understood that it was pointing to something profound, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Still, I took the words to be a way of life unlike the one I’d been leading. Moving in harmony with nature. Living in the moment … by partying like a rock star.
Thus, another identity was born in the perpetual teenage identity crisis that was my adult life. Shockingly, partying hard did not lead to enlightenment.
But in the wake of the losses that it left behind, I began peeling away at the layers of identity I’d piled on over the years. “Who am I really?” I kept asking myself. No matter how many layers had been stripped away, I could not stop asking, “No, but who am I really?”
Until all that remained was the bright golden field.