the golden field

I pedaled hard. I furiously rode. I rode my bike towards the edge of town. The town where I was raised, but I was still a child. I rode and rode and dropped my bike and abandoned it by the side of the field. I had not yet been to the edge of town alone. I had been warned against it. (James James, Morrison Morrison, Weatherby George Dupree, took great care of his Mother, though he was only three…)

I was not granted permission. I was disobedient. I abandoned my bike at the edge. I smelled the grass. I smelled the sweet, golden grass in the field at the edge of my home town. I burrowed through the tall grass like an animal. I made a path through it. The fragrant grass kissed me first, and then it whipped at me. I made a space where I could lie down in the field, like a deer, in the waning light surrounded by moths and swallows and snakes and bats. I saw the frenzied flying and crawling and slithering up close, and the field was alive. It was everything. It was birth and death, it was resurrection. It was hunter and prey, it was growth and decay. It was disintegrating and moving and fertile and I was of it, and it was of me. It enveloped me completely, and I became one with the field, safe and free.

Later, in another home town, in a different time, I came to the edge of another field. This field too was alive and it was natural, but it was inside of me. I abandoned part of myself by the edge of this field, the part of myself that recklessly and disobediently got me there. Then I ran, I strode, I drove, I pushed, I forced myself through the grass of it. I pushed until I knew for certain it was only me up against myself. And I surrendered again and returned full circle to the refuge of the field. I dissolved there, where all the kissing and the whipping and slithering and crawling, all but the hum was suspended.

I returned to my bike, my small bike, and it was still there, and I rode it home in the twilight. Rode it to the safety of my own home, my mother waiting with her pursed lips and her folded arms, bathed in a pool of warm light, upset but never conditional with her love. She waited for me and she took me in again. And I took myself in. And I came to the edge of my own field. I entered my own inner world, my own mother, and I came inside myself. And I was born again in the field, to my Self.

image with permission from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/