Poem: It’s Not So Easy To Be a Field

When I was born,
the air said to water,
Let’s go meet the earth.
So they slid down a rainbow
into the field of poppies
where my mother slept
in my fathers arms.
“Fire, what are you doing here?”
Water asked (always wary of that one).
“Catalyzing, what else?”
Fire shrugged and kept blazing
hot and bright.
Showing itself as the light
in my mothers eyes.
When she opened them
I looked out, too.

When I was a child
I greeted earth like an old friend.
Lost in the sensual pleasures
of the woods behind the house:
fresh air as breath,
the stream as saliva,
dirt between my toes,
fire in my belly.
Playing in the paradox
of being both a body
moving through space,
and also the space itself.
I felt free, but not seen.
A field is invisible,
but a body is here.
So I became that
in order to survive.

When I became a body
unclear boundaries led to confusion:
What’s mine is yours and
what’s yours is mine?
Even that anger, that sadness, that rage?
I’ll take it into the field that I am
which is Love.
The body became heavy.
I tried to shake it.
I starved and shaped it.
I carved and maligned it.
I put it in dangerous situations
and hoped it would be destroyed.
Over time I realized
it’s not so easy to be a field
in a world of form.

When I became a woman
I felt for the first time
the numbing relief
of being chased and caught.
My self defined by the captivity
of their projections,
of their desires,
of their needs.
Lover, mother, wife.
Finally: a form.
But they were roles.
The elements rebelled
to be cast so narrowly;
to be contained
in broken vessels.
I shattered.
It was for the best.

When I finally realized
my nature is Nature,
my body is Earth,
my breath is Wind,
my tears are Rain,
my heart is Fire,
I felt again the pleasure
of being alive as a field.
So, I began to move as one:
Shapeshifting
not to meet expectations,
but to release us from them.
What magic lives as the body
is an antidote to the ignorance
of matter without spirit;
a secular certainty,
and the illusion
that emptiness whether inside us or out,
is actually empty.

Every day I meet the world as a field
of possibility and sensing;
elemental like weather,
impossible to grasp,
sidestepping the insistence
that I take shape.
That can be disorienting
for those clinging to form.
That can be uncomfortable
for those determined to control.
As it turns out, the greatest gift
of being a field
is the way you can hold
everything (even that).
Until it transforms
into what it was meant to be.