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 “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. I swore never to become an adult who was too busy with “matters of consequence” to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. In school I was captivated by the freedom of Henry David Thoreau’s nature hermitage, the American pioneers’ braving the Western frontier, and the Native Americans’ fluid relationship with time. I even ditched my watch—time, I decided, was not something that would rule me.

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 roadmap—and found the destination hollow—did my soul dare 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 dismantling the fences and signposts I’d spent a lifetime adding to the ones I’d been given. “Who am I really?” I kept asking myself. No matter how many identities, attachments, and beliefs crumbled to the ground, I could not stop asking, “No, but who am I really?”

Until all that remained was the bright golden field.