...How many of us have weighted the years with groaning and weeping?..
I walk over the green hillsides, I lie down...
The grass cares nothing about me, it doesn't want anything from me, it rises to its own purpose, and sweetly, following the single holy dictum: To be itself, to let the sky be the sky, to let a young girl be a young girl freely-to let a middle-aged woman be, comfortably, a middle-aged woman.
Those bloody sharps and flats-those endless calamities of the personal past. Bah! I disown them from the rest of my life, in which I mean to rest.
I have been investigating a new field - interpersonal neurobiology. It is a way to look at our pasts so that we can rest in the potentially loving present. It is a multidisciplinary field that offers hope in the form of neuroplasticity. No matter our past, no matter our genetics, and no matter our perceived sense of our character flaws, as long as we can form attachments, we can heal. That hope is summarized in this poem.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense. - Rumi
I awake hopeful this morning, running with a middle-aged carefulness through such fields of dreams.
From what character generalizations of yourself of others would you like to rest today?
