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.  – Rumi

These words floated into my mind this morning, half as a dream, half as an ah-ha. I have a crush on a co-worker and this energy keeps tugging at me even though in one way it’s not appropriate, yet in another way it is necessary. I feel somehow Rumi’s words are the answer I’ve been looking for. Jung would call this same thing holding the tension. Somewhere between what we want to do and what is, we sit, holding those twitching opposites long enough until they create an unexpected answer, usually a solution we never saw coming. This happens on the field Rumi is talking about.

This is not a place that has to do with manipulation or judgement, right or wrong, perfection or mistakes. It’s the place beyond the lesson, where what is just is, without our projections about what it should or shouldn’t be. There is a place that lives inside of us that knows exactly what we want and need in order to be whole. It may sound easy to get there and delightful to be there, but a myriad of obstacles stand in the way, mostly us and our thinking which trips us up in a million different ways. We want to listen, we want to find all of those things, it’s just sometimes the price seems too high. We can be sure if we want ease and comfort we may never know this place, wanting more joy in our lives and being able to sustain it are two different things. This field requires us to be rooted in life, all of life, instead of meting out what we think is acceptable or profitable, and discarding the rest. It is the field deep inside of us that does not care about the particulars but is rather deeply passionate about expressing and imbibing the energy that moves us, that thrills us at being alive and makes us our most real self.

The how of arriving here is tricky. There is no one real answer but rather a series of inner adjustments and alignments with more of what is absolutely true for us. There is life-altering power in being aware of what these things are for us, but it is also morally unnerving because the regular rules we have accepted in this culture do not apply. What we need the most may look crazy to everyone else, they may not accept it, they may be broken-hearted by it. That’s why listening to the soul can be harrowing, nothing is off limits. This tends to be the opposite of how we generally live in our day to day lives. This field Rumi is hinting at is not either extreme but rather a place where we follow what we feel just as it is with no value judgement placed on it. But it does matter how we follow through, are we following the call of our soul or are we following someone else’s rules.

This field ought to have us thinking about what really matters to us and what we would miss if we didn’t pursue it. We don’t stop ourselves from what we  authentically feel, we follow that energy and wait for the right timing. That’s the difference, there is thought and reflection, awareness and broader perspective. We don’t judge or throw out what feels right because we think it’s unacceptable, we nourish the energy that nourishes us and see where it leads. This is the tenuous world of the in-between, where nothing is black and white, right and wrong, but a mixture of it all, and none of it as well.

I’ll meet you there.

kb